The answer I suggested was determining who owned the main stream media.  And Alan Sabrosky the onetime director of studies at the National War College has concurred.  His answer:

“But if we could “freeze frame” the CEOs of the largest US Media companies in mid 2002, we would find that ten Jewish American men ran the vast majority of US television networks and other media companies including movies, radio, and publishing at that time. Not much has changed today.”

That may very well be, but there are cracks or should I say the disembodied brains in the vats do have another source of information today.  Nevertheless, I am in agreement with Sabrosky that the concentration of media into relatively few hands will not foster democracy, but rather dangerous conformity.  With that in mind, who were the individuals feeding us news or disinformation around 2002 before our invasion of Iraq?

At the time Summer Redstone controlled CBS.  ABC was owned by Disney-Capitol Cities whose CEO was Michael Eisner, and Neil Shapiro headed up NBC.  Redstone was actually born Murray Rothstein but changed his moniker and is Jewish as well as Eisner and Shapiro.  Leslie Moonves, the President of CBS, is the great nephew of David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel.   The New York Times, a paper of record, is published by Arthur Sulzberger also Jewish.  The New York Times was responsible for producing some of the most egregious editing of copy in the run up to the war by Judith Miller, who had close ties to Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Irv Libby.  Miller and Libby are also Jewish.   The Washington Post as well was originally owned by Eugene Isaac Meyer and passed to his daughter Katharine Graham in 1963.  Katharine once gave a revealing speech about the Washington Post in 1988 at CIA headquarters in Langley Virginia.  “We live in a dirty and dangerous world,” said Graham, “there are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” 

Was this an admission the Washington Post, the so called paper of record, was on the payroll of the CIA?  Unfortunately, Graham’s position is the exact opposite of democracy, but does tilt towards fascism—the abridgement of discourse.  If there is an erstwhile American style newspaper, it ironically exists in Israel.  Haaretz has not shied away from stating the obvious, the impact of  Jews upon American political life, and views that are only uttered in whispers in the United States.   The above is consistent with Sabrosky’s assertion of Jewish domination of the media to say nothing of politics and AIPAC.  And we know the media obtained a good part of their information concerning Iraq from the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, overseen by Douglas Feith whose father was a member of Betar,  a Polish Zionist organization.

My sense is that all these individuals run in similar circles, have Jewish friends, hang out at similar country clubs and the like.  The problem in Jewish media concentration is that they will have a mechanical conscience collective when it comes to the issue of Israel.  They will be as narrow in their world outlook as the Muslim fundamentalists they seek to counter.  In short, they will and have played the news of the Middle East along predictably an Israeli horizon without giving it a second thought.  There is no need for these individuals to have to get together to see the world in this manner anymore than post World War I Germans had to get together to see the world as they did.   Americans broke up standard oil to preserve competition in the energy markets, the same thing would be advisable in the marketplace of ideas and views.  From that standpoint America is not a robust democracy, but a very compromised democracy in need of change if it is to make it into the 22nd century.

I caught an episode of Democracy Now the other day.  Amy Goodman the host of the show was querying Daniel Ellsberg about our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Ellsberg provided the obligatory acknowledgement for the left that Obama had no intention of leaving Iraq, and that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable.  Basically, the same prognosis Ellsberg provided for the Vietnam War.  Did release of the Pentagon Papers by Ellsberg bring the war to a conclusion in the early 1970s?

I don’t think so.  What brought the war to an end was the tenacity of Vietnamese communists—that might be a stretch—I should say peasants on the battlefield.  I doubt seriously whether many of them understood marxist doctrine, but they did know the rapaciousness of landlords in the Mekong Delta.  The American invasion of Indochine was a war of national liberation the Vietnamese had fought often over the course of their history, having repelled Mongol and Chinese incursions for centuries.  Americans ignored that history, and had to eat a lot of humble pie by listening to the likes of Walt Rostow, and his half baked ideas of development, known as modernization theory. 

The other determining factor was the massive corruption of the South Vietnamese government.  Bernard Brodie tags this cancer for our defeat in his book War and Politics.  Brodie was of course a Randphile and colleague of Ellsberg.  In Afghanistan, the Americans have again repeated their mistakes.  They have ignored the long history of Afghans to repel invaders, and the fact that the Hamid Karzai government is nothing more than an opium dispensary.  In the process, not only are the Kabul smack pushers corrupt, but the American military will inevitably become corrupt and involved in the drug trade.  This is only heightened by our “private contractors,” actually mercenaries that are no better than glorified criminals working for the U.S. government.  But of course, the Obama administration also appears to be corrupt from what we are learning about the bankster bailouts.  It is all consistent with criminality at all levels of government and now the military.

No, the significance of Ellsberg’s act was the truth.  And that the truth once mattered.  Like the fact we had little intention of helping the Vietnamese people and in the end were fighting to maintain the illusion of our own prestige.  Ellsberg had the courage to tell it like it was and to use Yogi Berra’s pithy saying, “it’s deja vu all over ag’in.”  What leftists like Goodman have forgotten is that avoiding the truth undermines democracy just as certainly as the Straussian noble lies spun by the neocons.  The point of Ellsberg is if you wish to save democracy in this country you better confront the truth that underpins our involvement in the Caucasus and Middle East. 

That truth is that the events of September 11, 2001 are a big lie, similar to the concocted attack upon an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.   On the night the U.S.S. Maddox was attacked in seas off Vietnam, navy pilot James Stockdale had a bird’s eye view of the events. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," said Stockdale, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets — there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."   Indeed the singular event that launched escalation in Vietnam and the deaths of 50,000 Americans was a staged hoax by Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Yet throughout Goodman’s interview with Ellsberg she could not bring herself to broach the subject of 9/11 with a guy who had in part exposed that reality, and the lengths the U.S. government would go to maintain the illusion of that reality to the American people.  I understand Goodman is Jewish, perhaps this explains her reticence to take on 9/11 and the very strong likelihood Israeli intelligence may have played a role . . . a big role at that in the murder of some 2800 Americans.  But if you cannot ask these pertinent question you should darn well change the name of your radio show from Democracy Now to Democracy Denied.  Do the right thing Goodman, and these fruitless wars can be brought to a conclusion.  I’m sure Ellsberg thinks so.