Have big PR firms been hired to "sell" torture to the American people?

I'm not a very good journalist, but a quick google reveals:

" Increasingly, torture states are hiring PR firms, just as the Argentine torturers hired the Madison Avenue giant Burston Marsteller." http://www.newint.org/issue327/deny.htm
__________________________

"Today on Fox News Sunday, former CIA director Michael Hayden blasted President Obama's decision to release the Bush-era torture memos. Hayden claimed that he and other former CIA directors opposed making the documents public because it would compromise future interrogations of detainees by letting them know the "outer limits" of what the United States does"

- Apparently, General Hayden now works for The Chertoff Group, in alliance with Burson-Marsteller.

http://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/ 2009/ 04/ state-of-risk-management-consulting.html

______________________________________________________________________


Now, I started getting curious about this as I was seeing the same wording on talking points in a number of different blog postings, check this google for "Ask Daniel Pearl's widow" (or google yourself if the link doesn't work):

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Ask+Daniel+Pearl%27s+widow%22&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=w1k&num=100&filter=0


_______________________________________________________________________

Then, last night on the WaPo site I posted something like this, and it shut down the pro-torture comments for a while:

'Hey - Those being paid big bucks by PR firms to sell torture to the American people in this forum,

BE FORE-WARNED!!!

ADVOCATING FOR WAR CRIMES AND TORTURE MAY BE PROSECUTABLE UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW!

Did they tell you that?"

________________________________________________________________________


Anyway, I smell a prime-mover back there bigger than just Hannity and Limbaugh....

ADVOCATING FOR WAR CRIMES AND TORTURE MAY BE PROSECUTABLE UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW.

They make me moist. ;-)

And the "torture" battlefield is just where this battle should be brought into the light and fought out loud. For peace's sake.


What were all those studies and laws about after WWII to find the causes of and prevent future happenings of authoritarian fascist manipulation of the population?

Like SERE training techniques now being used to produce torturers, has the psychology and propaganda techniques the government studied now been turned onto its own population, with improvements?

Including supercomputers and the scientific study of social networks. Back in WWII they didn't really know who to round up. That's all different nowadays.

Just imagine how much more efficient things would go today, what with all the spying on everyone and the massive databases on social networks. They could round up one tenth of one percent of the population (Halliburton has already built the detention centers for such a roundup) and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.

Without the ability to organize, there could be no resistance. I live in a town of about 30,000 people. If they rounded up thirty local citizens no one would do anything about it. Who could we call to complain to? And if the local police were executing legitimate federal terrorist warrants, who's going to go storm the police station? Who would we all point our pitchforks at?

If you don't know what the heck I'm ranting about, google {social networks phd} for a real eye opener.

would certainly raise eyebrows, IMO...

or maybe not - remember the Japanese and GERMAN citizens rounded up during WWII and almost NO ONE complained, NO ONE and no one knows that GERMAN Americans were rounded up, too...not as many as Japanese Americans, but a lot more than "just a few"...

One tenth of one percent.

I think my ciphering is correct.

In any event, the concentration camps have already been furnished for such a roundup.

the kind of response that people with a "PR" problem do first...

Just like with the Iraq war, there are people out there trying to "propagandize" the masses again and try to tell convince us that something that we (most of us) know to be wrong and a lie is actually o.k. :eyes: :puke:

I don't care what Jack Bauer or anybody else has to say about it but torture.is.ALWAYS.wrong no matter who does it and for what reasons- and it should be fairly obvious to anybody with half a brain when an interrogator has gone too far with a prisoner. END OF DISCUSSION. Anybody who participated in it and/or authorized it needs to be held accountable somehow. Otherwise, we might has well shred the Geneva conventions and every other law we have on the books about human rights and torture.
:mad:

I can remember,ramping up the gore,now we got torture"horror" movies.
The plot is gone it's all about shocking people out of their sensitivity with video sadism.I have written about this before.


Softening the natural aversion to torture

by Underground Panther in the Sky, Jan. 15, 2005

Fear Factor to me looks like a show designed to paint torture as "entertainment". I myself cannot watch that show. It's too sick, sad and abusive. It makes me sick inside.

I look at all the torture in movies, in "comedy," video games. All this dehumanizing, embarrassing, shaming "secretly taped" videos, of people making fools of themselves, drunk, sick, stumbling, and a nation laughing at their misfortunes... This is abuse set up as "humor" and I myself really don't have to wonder anymore why people are numb to the horrible suffering, immorality, and blowback implications of torture at Abu Ghraib. What you find funny or 'entertaining' these days says a lot about your character and dis/ability to empathize with people in pain. Rome had "fear factor" too, it was in the Coliseum.

Fear Factor and shows like that desensitize people psychologically to seeing people being tortured. It's a step-by-step desensitization process that has gone on for decades.

First it was horror movies: look at old horror movies, they were so ... innocent, and look at Hellraiser. Can you see a difference? There are crime shows, Dragnet vs Forsenic Files on Court TV. See a difference?

Now it's becoming torture live, done to "volunteers." Shows like Scare Tactics make sophisticated psychological gas lighting into just a prank. Remember the "bum fights" tapes, where assholes bribed desperate homeless people to beat each other up on camera for food? Is Fear Factor all that different? No-one considers the bad effects on a person's emotions of seeing people dehumanized, terrified, sick, sexually abused, and in pain as we go pretending it can't change us, fascinated by it as if it was "entertainment." If you asked if people thought torture was OK in the 1960s, how many would have been as gung ho, so brazenly for it as people are today?

Look at all the jokes about pedophiles these days. Funny how the kids are always couched as if they should lay down take it, or that they were just having fun, or should be blamed for it, while the pedo is presented in almost a positive light. When did pedophilia become funny? I don't think it's funny at all. What about comedians talking about how they got the shit beat out of them as kids, as if that is funny? It's sad to me.

When did child abuse, torture, rape and trauma become grist for TV comics? When did America become so callous to suffering and abuse of others? How did it happen?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1537109#1537403
http://web.pitas.com/page6/upits101102.html
http://upits.pitas.com/082302.html

And it has been going on for some time now.
It is the theme of almost every cop show on your TV...the cop breaks the law and is cruel and sadistic but he gets the bad guy, so it is ok and we should forgive him...and even see him as a hero.
And now we have a show like 24 that drops all the pretense and flat out glorifies torture...what a sad state of affairs that is.

But it has not always been so...I can remember in the 60s watching a military training film where they said that the difference between the US and the communists was that they believed that the end justifies the means and that we did not. Well that is all gone now and they proudly proclaim that the end does justifies the means. And what a sorry state of affairs that has brought us.

You may want to check out our film, which is a direct repudiation of this...

I told him, "If there really is a ticking time bomb and you caught a guy that knows where it is, and you need to torture him to find out where and how to disarm it, then you've already lost. The counter-terrorism folks are supposed to stop the bomb before that point is ever reached. If you torture him, and he provides information, and then the bomb squad shows up to locate the bomb, and it's not there, it blows up anyway in the place where it really is."

Torture should only be used by psychopaths that just like to see people suffer. That's all it's good for.

It wouldn't surprise me at all. You should start a journal here on DU if you are interested in doing more analysis like this. Then you could save all of your research in one place.

would love nothing better than to continue to usurp the power that belongs to the citizenry.

:thumbsup:

I smell the oil rich, as usual.

http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1147.cfm

genocidal war in Iraq. They spent millions on that PR. I'm sure the same groups, the Rendon Group eg, and several others, would be available to sell torture as a means of 'keeping America safe'. I also have noticed a similarity in the talking points as the pressure to prosecute, especially in other countries, increases. Cheney, eg, only appears to be as evil as he is because he cares so much about this country. And Bybee 'regrets' the results of his innocently written legal memos.

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair06122007.html

Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.

The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy.

Rendon calls himself 'an information warrior'.

So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."

The article lists many of the propaganda events staged for our consumtion over the past eight years, Jessica Lynch eg, the little US flags the Iraqis were holding 'where did you think they got those flags, said Rendon, grinning?'

The embedded press was also a PR stunt, intended to force the press into personal relationships with the troops on whom their lives often depended.

And they didn't just orchestrate propaganda, they actively worked to shut down any TV programs, such as the popular Donahue Show, that might in any way cause people to question their war games:

The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

So, it would probably be more remarkable if they did NOT hire some PR teams to promote torture.

Good post. I like that someone commented on it, that is probably the only way to make people think as we know the press will never tell because of their own role in helping to 'catapult the propaganda'.

administration's motives."

And look how EASILY and QUICKLY they TURN ON A DIME now that a DEMOCRAT is in office - dissent is now "Patriotic" and even ASKING QUESTIONS of the former REPUKES is somehow not only "in bad taste", it's a "WITCHHUNT" and "WILL LEAVE US UNSAFE"...

it's always about PROTECTING THE REPUKES AT ALL COST...

They do a lot of business for the Bushler family.

They get a lot of bushler business too.

I doubt it's only some "big" PR firms, justifying the unjustifiable.
Seems more like an organized effort to upgrade the image to being a "hidden hero".
TORRINGTON CT— April 26, 2009
"The city’s library has obtained a grant that will allow it to host a program
on Connecticut born Revolutionary War hero and master of espionage Nathan Hale this September."
www.registercitizen.com/articles/2009/04/26/news/doc49f3e3bd472e5085752915.txt

"Torture: As American As Cherry Pie"(with apologies afore-hand to H. Rap Brown).

gotta keep you're cliches straight...

said, "Violence is as American as CHERRY pie."

Now one could argue that Brown should have said "apple," but he didn't and it's too late to correct him. And, truth to tell, I've always preferred Brown's "cherry" (with its perhaps-unconscious allusion to G. Washington's Oedipal fling with a cherry tree) to the traditional "apple."

Great post. Very informative. Keep 'em coming!