''Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?''

[Octafish]

22. The U.S. National Security State

excerpted from the book

Brave New World Order

by Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer
Orbis Books, 1992, paper

EXCERPT...

The role of the media is another apparent difference between the National Security States of El Salvador and the United States. The Salvadoran state uses violence and terror to intimidate or silence major progressive information outlets such as El Diario or the presses at the Catholic University. The mainline media in the United States, like the church, are instruments of conformity within the dominating society. This conformity isn't achieved through terror and intimidation, as in El Salvador, but there is conformity nonetheless. This can be illustrated by a look at coverage of the Gulf War.

The war in the Gulf was probably the most censored and media-managed war in U.S. history. The Pentagon launched the war to coincide with the evening news, forced reporters into escorted press pools, banned coverage on U.S. soldiers returning in coffins, blacked out the first forty-eight hours of the ground war, provided selective footage of "smart bombs" hitting their targets with precision, exercised the right of approval over final copy and footage, and flew local reporters in to cover selected "hometown troops." "I've never seen anything to compare to it," said New York Times war correspondent Malcolm Browne, "in the degree of surveillance and control the military has over the correspondents."

Heavy-handed government censorship was only part of the problem confronting U.S. citizens wanting to make informed judgments about the war. They also faced biases in the U.S. media. According to Colman McCarthy, twenty-five of twenty-six major U.S. newspapers supported the Gulf War. The print and other media uncritically adopted Pentagon phrases such as "collateral damage" and "smart bombs." After the war it was reported that only 6,520 of 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait were "smart," and even these often hit targets that were important to the civilian population. The media ,) throughout the war helped to sanitize civilian casualties and reduced the war to a glorified video game. A report by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) describes the conflict of interest of major TV news channels that are owned by major corporations tied to military weapons production and oil:

Most of the corporate-owned media have close relationships to the military and industry: The chair of Capital / Cities/ABC . . . is on the board of Texaco, and CBS's board includes directors from Honeywell and the Rand Corporation. But no news outlet is as potentially compromised as NBC, wholly owned by General Electric.... In 1989 alone GE received nearly $2 billion in U.S. military contracts for systems employed in the Gulf War effort ... NBC's potential conflicts go beyond weaponry. The government of Kuwait is believed to be a major GE stockholder, having owned 2.1 percent of GE stock in 1982, the last year for which figures are available.... Having profited from weapons systems used in the Gulf, and anticipating lucrative deals for restocking U.S. arsenals, GE is also poised to profit from the rebuilding of Kuwait. GE told the man Street Journal (3/21/91) it expects to win contracts worth "hundreds of millions of dollars."

Conflict of interest may help explain the results of a FAIR survey of sources for ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news. The survey "found that of 878 on-air sources, only one was a representative of a national peace organization." This, FAIR noted, contrasted with the fact that "seven players from the Super Bowl were brought on to comment on the War.''

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_World_Order/US_Nat_Secur_State_BNWO.html

That's Gulf War I, another war for profit launched by Poppy Bush under false pretenses in 1991.