[CIMC-work] CIMC needs to set up an emergency mechanism

[donald goldhamer]

This context suggests what CIMC may have to deal with as it relays
information from the middle east in the next month(s).
--Don
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Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 11:33:33 EST

Richard Perle, Ann Coulter and America's Savage Regression

BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Maureen Farrell

Thirty-five years ago, Walter Cronkite returned from a visit to Vietnam and 
challenged President Lyndon Johnson's promises about American victories. 
"We've been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, 
both in Vietnam and Washington," he said, "to have faith any longer in the 
silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. For it seems now more certain 
than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."

'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country,' Johnson later remarked.

These days, we won't be sending our Walter Cronkites to Iraq, as the Pentagon 
is warning it will shoot down satellite uplink positions of independent 
journalists stationed there. According to the BBC's Kate Adie,
news coverage will be grossly censored and the U.S. government is 
"threatening freedom of information" even before the war starts. "[W]hat 
actually appalls me is the difference between twelve years ago and now,"
she said in an interview with Irish radio. "I've seen a complete erosion of 
any kind of acknowledgment that reporters should be able to report as they 
witness. The Americans, and I've been talking to the Pentagon, take
the attitude which is entirely hostile to the free spread of information.
. . On top of everything else, there is now a blackout. . .   ordered by one 
Mr. Dick Cheney, who is in charge of this." 
  http://www.gulufuture.com/news/kate_adie030310.htm

To make matters worse, we're not only unable to learn what's happening over 
there, but our airways are becoming poisoned over here. Michael Savage, for 
example, is using his MSNBC platform to ask if it's "time to arrest the 
leaders of the anti-war movement, once we go to war" and call for the 
reinstatement of the 1918 Sedition Act.

The Sedition Act, for those who thought we had transcended such nonsense, 
would make speaking out against government a punishable offense. "Whoever,
when the United States is at war," the document reads, "shall willfully make 
or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the 
operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or 
to promote the success of its enemies, or shall willfully make or convey 
false reports, or false statements, . . . or incite insubordination, 
disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of 
the United States, or shall willfully obstruct . . . the recruiting or 
enlistment service of the United States, or . . .  shall willfully utter, 
print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive 
language about the form of government of the United States, or the 
Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the 
United States . . . or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, 
or shall willfully . . . urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of 
production . . . or advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of 
the acts or things in this section enumerated and whoever shall by word or 
act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is 
at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall 
be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more 
than twenty years, or both."

In such a world, would folks be clamoring for Walter Cronkite's imprisonment 
after his Vietnam War "disloyalty"?  Maybe so. Because a day after Savage's 
televised appeal to criminalize activism, Richard Perle
called journalist Seymour Hersh a terrorist. Appearing on CNN's Late Edition 
with Wolf Blitzer, Perle said, "Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American 
journalism has to a terrorist, frankly," leading Blitzer to ask, "But I don't 
understand. Why do you accuse him of being a terrorist? Using language that 
could easily apply to the Sedition Act, Perle replied, "Because he sets out 
to do damage and he will do it by whatever innuendo,
whatever distortion he can . . ."