Some people would call it simply an effort to please the audience. Well, pleasing the audience during a national news broadcast isn’t the objective, unless ratings and viewer numbers and ad revenues and distraction from facts is actually the plan…and of course it is.
Just now, I forced myself to watch a rebroadcast of Wednesday night’s NBC News with the golden boy, Brian Williams.
But Brian wasn’t golden, he was blue, which happens to be people’s favorite color in multiple surveys. Restful calming blue.
Here is what I saw in the first five minutes. I couldn’t handle more. (I urge you to go to NBC and look for yourself.)
Brian was wearing a blue suit. All the backgrounds for captions were blue. Small screens behind Brian were blue. Brian’s desk panels were blue. The surface of the desk reflected vague blue tints.
The lead story, the CIA torture report, featured blue in the CIA seal. Andrea Mitchell, who was covering the report’s release, was wearing a dark blue outfit. Behind her, the Capitol dome sat in a blue sky. A psychologist named Mitchell, an architect of the torture program, was interviewed. His shirt was partly blue. He was wearing blue jeans. The NBC reporter interviewing him was wearing a light blue shirt. A map of the world appeared onscreen, sitting in a field of blue. Behind Andrea, the background was filled with objects of different blues. Reporter Dana Priest was interviewed for the story. A piece of the background behind her was blue. Michael Hayden was interviewed. He was wearing a blue suit.
I watched the beginning of the next story: the NFL’s new policy on player discipline. Commissioner Roger Goodell stood in front of a blue background. He was wearing a blue suit.
Again, I emphasize—all this was in the first five minutes of the newscast.
You could say the news itself was merely an occasion for the transmission of blue.
“Let’s have dinner in front of the TV and watch the news. I like the blue.”
“Which channel?”
“NBC. Their blue is better than the CBS blue.”
“You’re right. It makes me feel restful. The CIA torture couldn’t have been that bad. It’s blue. I’m reassured.”
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.
A new Senate report on the CIA’s extensive use of torture to extract information from Muslim patsies in Guantanamo Bay and sundry other agency ‘black sites’ reveals Washington’s sheer sadism.
Russia Today’s summary of the damning Senate investigation highlights the CIA’s systemic use of torturous brutality on prisoners held in agency-run jails across the globe.
The Senate’s report acknowledges that the CIA caused an Afghan man, Gul Rahman, to essentially freeze to death in a prison cell at one of their torture centers north of Kabul. RT writes that, “Sometime that November [in 2001], a low-level CIA officer at COBALT ordered that Rahman be stripped naked, except for a sweatshirt, and ‘shackled to the wall of his cell in a position that required the detainee to rest on the bare concrete floor,’ according to the Senate committee.”
A particularly cringe-worthy revelation is that the CIA practiced “rectal feeding” where prisoners on hunger strikes were force-fed through their rectum in order to keep them alive. The RT commentary cited above writes that, “At least five CIA detainees were subjected to ‘rectal rehydration,’ or rectal feeding, the Senate report reads, in order to keep prisoners alive who allegedly otherwise refused to eat.”
The CIA also played upon prisoners’ fears to induce them to talk. According to the Senate report, a Saudi man named Abu Zubaydah who had severe entomophobia was put into a confinement box, which was then filled with insects. “In order to try and break them down during interrogations,” the RT summary further explained, CIA officers would threaten to harm prisoners’ family members, often telling them rape and death is what awaited their loved ones if they didn’t start talking. Sleep deprivation was a common tactic as well as prolonged standing, water boarding, ice water baths, suspending prisoners from the wall or ceiling by their limbs, and other inhumane methods.
Despite repeated and incessant violations, CIA officers who participated in the torture program were never reprimanded or punished by the agency, revealing that agency higher-ups were not only negligent but also complicit on every level. “There was no accountability,” the Senate report conceded.
In a display of demented hubris, former President George W. Bush defended the CIA torturers outed in the report, describing them as “patriots.” Former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled malevolence rivals that of Josef Stalin, damned the new report as “full of crap” and said that the CIA’s torture program was “perfectly justified.” “I’d do it again in a minute,” he told CNN.
Land Destroyer December 16, 2014 (Tony Cartalucci – LD) Taliban militants stormed an army public school in the northern city of Peshawar, killing over 100, including many young students. It is believed up to 10 militants took part in the attack, dressed as soldiers to first infiltrate the school’s grounds before beginning the attack. While the details of the attack are forthcoming, the background of the Taliban and the persistent threat it represents is well established, though often spun across the Western media. Who Put the Taliban into Power? Who is Funding them Now? In the 1980’s the United States, Saudi Arabia, and elements within the then Pakistani government funneled millions of dollars, weapons, equipment, and even foreign fighters into Afghanistan in a bid to oust Soviet occupiers. Representatives of this armed proxy front would even visit the White House, meeting President Ronald Reagan personally. The “Mujaheddin” would successfully expel the Soviet Union and among the many armed groups propped up by the West and its allies, the Taliban would establish primacy over Kabul. While Western media would have the general public believe the US rejected the Taliban, never intending them to come to power, it should be noted that the Afghans who visited Reagan in the 1980’s would not be the last to visit the US and cut deals with powerful American corporate-financier interests.
Obama’s executive amnesty will hit America hard, but what about Canada? Can we expect a flux of Americans to cross the American-Canadian border when the US becomes overrun with Mexicans? Hard to say, but in this video Dan Dicks breaks down why it’s crucial to reinforce the notion that Mexico, the United States and Canada are not the same country; we are not part of a larger union.
(Warning…RANT AHEAD…) See also “Five Facts About the Crony Interest in Food Stamps” now up on our website to go along with this video: http://truthstreammedia.com/five-fact…
Wow, we didn’t realize we can call up our very own food stamp outreach coordinator to help us not only find out if we qualify for food stamps, but help us fill out the application AND help us again when it’s time to reapply for more food stamps, too! Why, they’ll just about do everything but buy the groceries and deliver them to our house for us!
But wait a minute! With a record number of Americans on food stamps (it’s what, 47 million people now and counting?), why are they advertising and pushing food stamps so hard and making it so easy to get them and making sure as many people as possible do?
HM… (Yes. That would be the sarcastic “hm” of people who ask a rhetorical question they obviously already know the answer to.)
What in the hell is this??? (You know, besides yet another blazing neon eyeball-melting signal of the decline of America.)
Six people have been confirmed dead after a plane crashed into a house in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Three were on board the small aircraft, while the other three were inside of the house, local emergency services said.
Near the time of the crash, Montgomery County Fire and Rescue spokesman Pete Piringer couldn’t immediately say whether anyone else was on board the plane that seats between four and six people, but it has since been confirmed that only three were onboard. Piringer said the jet crashed into one home, setting it and two others on fire. He added that crews have the fire under control and are conducting a search and rescue operation to find anyone in the homes and plane.
A mother and her three children are residents of the home that was hit ‒ and that suffered the heaviest damage. According to WNEW, the two children and the mother were found dead inside, while the third child was at school and has been accounted for.
“We have a lot of work to do, a lot of damage,” Piringer said. “But we do have one plane confirmed down, into a house.”
The Washington-led coalition’s bombing campaign against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq could take years. That was the message from US Secretary of State John Kerry, who hosted an anti-terror meeting of high-level officials of more than 60 countries at the NATO headquarters in Brussels. On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Obama administration is considering opening a new front in the war against the violent insurgency. To discuss the US strategy in more detail, political commentator John Wight, joins RT.
RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios. RT is the first news channel to break the 1 billion YouTube views benchmark.
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