the propaganda was very well planned as well

We all know that we're in a conflict with a very large propaganda component.

So in an extremely pivotal event like the killing of bin Laden, of course they will have thought out the best way to control the information and control the messaging.

I'm not outraged at this reality, I've come to accept it at some level. My attitude is basically I don't like the government lying to us, but what are you gonna do?

But what I definitely do NOT want to do is to play along like everything they tell us is true and get all excited or upset about some detail they've just put out.

It looks like they're going to put out video of the bin Laden raid. I dread what's going to happen. It's going to be unacceptable to question that video. It's going to be unacceptable to remind people of the video of the Jessica Lynch "raid". We're supposed to just sit there and watch the video like we've had some kind of lobotomy and can't think about it, just watch it and take in the truth they're giving us. Why on earth would anyone do that?

x happened, they tell us y happened

give different accounts or pass along bad info. But do you dispute that OBL was killed in Pakistan by the US during a raid?

also, people LIE, as we've discussed many times on DU, but which suddenly is a controversial observation.

Their preconceived opinions are lies.

I bet you trust the government when they release facts which back up your opinions.

I don't want to be a hypocrite.

And it is also well known in the PR industry that no matter how many times the first story is corrected, that is the one people remember.

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Lobotmized?
hardly.

in this country and it is becoming more and more difficult to do that.

The government lies, that is a fact. The trick is figuring out when they are lying and when they are not.

This whole WOT is rife with lies, going back to the very beginning.

Of Bush introduced us to the various words we can expect to see when a lie is uncovered, like the Mushrooms heading our way, the WMDs. They didn't 'lie' we are expected to believe, they 'misspoke' or they had 'faulty intelligence', they made 'errors' etc. And we had to decide whether they were the most incompetent people to be in positions of power in the history of the world, or if they were lying.s

I decided they were probably both. Since many of the same people are still around in our government, I take anything to do with the Great War On Terror with a grain of salt, depending on who it is coming from.

...which fancies itself an "Underground" of some sort. Many prefer their Undergrounds to be unquestioning monoliths.

what was it about my post that deserved such a nasty response?

You think the government will lie and doctor videos to prove its point but will take at face value the words and videos of people with an anti-government agenda.

in fact you KNOW the government does that.

"Government lies" is so broad as to be meaningless.

And enemies of the US government would call it a hoax.

I do, and you probably do too, or did at one time, and just about everyone on DU used to.

Based on prejudice.

You have yet to say what exact detail you're skeptical of other than your preconceived notion being "government lies."

and I have not read ANY of that regarding bin Laden's death, and I definitely haven't expressed any myself. I haven't heard a single conspiracy theory, although maybe I missed them.

It makes you an active citizen. Ask Jessica Lynch or Mary Tillman.

nt

belief?

Is the correct explanation.

And skepticism is not in tension with that in any way. Plus, it's a mistake not to bring your experience to bear. And this is part of ours:

Nieman Watchdog
Pentagon PR spending soars
ASK THIS | February 23, 2009

Reporters need to examine where the line is between public relations and propaganda, or if there is a line at all. This year the cost of 'winning hearts and minds' at home and abroad is expected to be at least $4.7 billion. Can we expect change in an Obama administration?

By Diane Farsetta
diane@prwatch.org

It is well known by now that a secret Pentagon program recruited dozens of former military leaders as "message force multipliers." The Pentagon, starting in 2002, fed them talking points, took them on tightly-managed trips to Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and carefully monitored their media appearances.

This pundits program, it appears, was only a small part of Pentagon attempts to get out its message in favorable terms. In the past five years, Defense Department spending on "winning hearts and minds" internationally and at home has soared – up 63 percent and expected to be at least $4.7 billion this year, including on public relations efforts in the United States. In December, the Pentagon's Inspector General found that the department's public affairs and propaganda operations might have been "inappropriately" merged. That seems to be putting it mildly.

These and other instances recently led Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley to call for new "rules of engagement between the military and the media." Given the new administration, he argued, "Now is the time to resist the propaganda the Pentagon produces and live up to our obligation to question authority and thereby help protect our democracy."

The Defense Department says that, in order to combat violent extremists, it must aggressively – and often covertly – engage in what it calls strategic communications. In doing so, is the Pentagon crossing ethical or legal lines? While the Bush administration encouraged such practices, President Obama has yet to comment on them – and, without external pressure, the Defense Department can’t be expected to change. How should reporters cover these important issues? The following questions suggest some angles and flag upcoming events relevant to the ongoing propaganda debate.

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Ask_this.view&askthisid=400

Nothing can be ever known.

that you are positing.

I don't have any. Sorry.

We don't know much, so it's hard to know which details we might or might not be skeptical about.

For example, when I hear that there was porn in the compound, I just laugh, because that seems so irrelevant and so familiar, almost like there is recipe, with the same ingredients that hasn't been updated in years and gets hauled out, which is now almost laughably predictable, on occasions like this. It diminishes the seriousness of the story for that reason.

We'll probably never know what really happened. So most people won't spend too much time thinking about it, in fact most people I know seem to have forgotten about it already.

and sure enough, right in this thread, the "enemy of the state" calumny gets raised.

The thread itself proves how right he is.

to not be the case with Democrats.

And the more this happens, as we discovered during the Bush years, the more necessary it is to fight it, to speak one's mind and not to allow anyone to take away that right.

So, good for the OP ~ ironic to see the cheering for Bin Laden's death, while at the same handing him victory, immortalizing him. I'd rather be cheering for his failure to achieve what we are told were his goals, than cheering for his physical departure. As long as he succeeded in silencing Americans, he is NOT dead. As someone said, you can kill a man but you cannot kill an idea. And here we are acknowledging, inadvertently I suppose, that his ideas were powerful. I guess I never agreed with that.

at face value?

because she was in the custody of the Pakistani authorities when she made those statements. So it's not just the U.S. i'm talking about, and what you said about me is wrong.

Check it out. ;)

It coincided with Trump firing one of his apprentice.


Don't know if it was planned that way but it was funny that it happened not 24 hours after Obama grilled him.

for that ridiculous story about bin Laden using his wife as a human shield while firing back at SEALs. The "fog of war" excuse serves to shift the error onto the SEAL team as if they had no idea what they were seeing during the operation and were still confused as to what happened much later after the mission was over when they were being debriefed. It's not only ridiculous but unfair to the SEALs who did their duty but are unable to correct this propaganda with their true story. This was the Democratic Party's Jessica Lynch propaganda piece. But will rank and file Democratic Party members acknowledge this?

...that people still accept anything at face value, when the government has been shown repeatedly to be lying. There is the Jessica Lynch BS, and the Pat Tillman coverup, and any number of other proven government lies. It's not just our government, it is most if not all governments. They lie because they want to manipulate public opinion, they lie to cover their own asses, they lie to mislead our enemies (real or imagined), they lie because they can. Eventually, it's just habit. The elites get to the point where they don't bother telling the truth to the proles, because they really don't need to know the real story anyway.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around that mindset, but I have come to believe that is where they are at, and they lie more easily than tell the truth when it comes to public pronouncements. That's why we should never, ever, take anything they say at face value. To believe them without question is simply to be a patsy. And that is what the public is these days, a patsy for whoever is best at manipulating them.

We find that everyone agrees on who is public enemy #1. It was bin Laden for the longest time. It was also Ahmedinejad, Saddam Hussein, Noriega; or whole countries like Iran. It's whoever the elites choose to gin up as the latest, greatest threat to "the American way" which in reality means to American big business interests, which nowadays aren't even all that American.

Meanwhile the global corporate takeover continues apace.