One of the better news sources out there is Consortium News, which gives an informed but dissenting view on current affairs, primarily focusing on foreign policy. The reporters know their stuff. When I read their pieces, I call to mind the few voices that dissented from the Iraq invasion that were allowed on traditional media; mostly to have their sanity questioned. Nowadays, the voices of dissent are just ignored.
The first amendment is alive and well in the United States, though the present Supreme Court has twisted it to accommodate the political preferences of the right wing judges (I can’t bring myself to call them “justices”, as that gives them too much credit), but the First Amendment does not confer any right to command an audience, nor should it. So it’s fairly easy for the corporate media to squelch dissenting views, or at least to prevent them from invading the DC bubble and contaminating the prevailing received wisdom, which, oddly enough to, is inevitably proven wrong.
Two recent cases in point from Consortium News, both of which involve topics that should be open to debate generally, but which will never be debated in the corporate media.
First, in an article written by Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst, we learn that ISIS, at the mere mention of which we are all supposed to shake with fear, may very well be in decline. He points out that there are phases to successful insurgencies, the first being organization; the second involving terrorism and guerrilla warfare, and the third conventional warfare. He points out that ISIS attempted to compress the process; has already attempted conventional warfare; and after some initial successes is already being driven back. It is now reverting to the terrorist phase, a sign of desperation and decline:
As ISIS declines, it is likely to resort increasingly to international terrorism. It will do so for the same general reasons that other movements that have been pushed backward along the Maoist timeline have focused on terrorism. If one is not succeeding in large conventional operations, one relies more on smaller asymmetric ones.
In the case of ISIS, increased reliance on international terrorism should be all the more apparent in that it represents a departure from the group’s earlier focus — much different from the strategy of Al Qaeda — of concentrating on building and expanding its so-called caliphate. The terrorism will serve the purpose of demonstrating continued vitality of the group and keeping it on the mental maps of potential recruits.
We will need to recognize such a change in emphasis for what it is, as well as recognizing the reasons for it. There will be a tendency to equate more ISIS international terrorism with greater overall ISIS strength. Bowing to that tendency will be an error in analysis, and it will play into the hands of the group.
The decline of ISIS will be violent. The violence should be taken seriously and must be dealt with, but when a decline is occurring we nonetheless should understand that it is in fact a decline.
via Consortium News
In yet another article, reporter Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories, notes that Hillary Clinton appears to believe that she can score points with the American electorate by claiming that Bernie Sanders “isn’t adequately committed to the positions of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his American neocon acolytes.” He questions whether Clinton has made the right call. Inside the Beltway it is a given that the Israeli tail must wag the American dog, but he argues that it is not at all clear that the American people share that point of view.
You can take issue with the conclusions of either reporter, but the fact is that there are good reasons to believe that both Pillar and Parry are essentially right. The sad fact is that while you can find this stuff if you search long enough on the Internet, the arguments they are making will never penetrate into the corporate media, and thus will never penetrate into the corridors of power, or even into our political debate at election time (for, after all, who gets to ask questions at those debates). Besides the Iraq debacle, it reminds me of the debacle in a country that starts with “V”. The idea that the Vietnamese were mainly fighting against colonialism and that a country historically fearful of China would never voluntarily submit to Chinese domination (a prerequisite to becoming a member of the monolithic Communist menace) was given no credence during that long and fruitless war. In retrospect, of course, we know the dissenters were right.
The sad fact is that on too many issues, only one side is allowed to express itself in the corporate media or the corridors of power. Sometimes dissenting views break through. The Occupy Movement is often deemed a failure, but inequality remains an issue that the corporate media can’t avoid, even though they would prefer to do so. Of course, they certainly don’t want anything done to reverse the wholesale appropriation of the people’s wealth by the plutocrats; hence the certainty that attacks on Bernie Sanders will multiply beyond measure if he beats Clinton in Iowa. A man who is almost indistinguishable from the typical Democratic politician of the 60s will be branded a rabid radical, and were it to come down to a Sanders vs. Trump contest, we will be amazed to see how quickly our overlords get comfortable with the idea of a President Trump.
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