tagged w/ Pentagon propaganda
-
=================================================================
John Wheeler III, a defense consultant and former Pentagon official who was seen stumbling around Wilmington, Del., and acting strangely days before his body was found in a landfill, was beaten to death, the state medical examiner's office says.
Wheeler "died as a result of blunt force trauma after being assaulted," the Delaware medical examiner's office announced Friday. Police said the case remains under investigation.
Wheeler, 66, worked for three U.S. presidents and was an expert on chemical and biological weapons. His body was found in a load of garbage picked up in Newark that was dumped at a Wilmington landfill on New Year's Eve, and his death quickly was ruled a homicide. Authorities, however, refrained from releasing a cause of death until this week's announcement, saying they were awaiting the results of toxicology reports.
Although the finding clarifies the cause of his death, there are still many unanswered questions.
"We're still attempting to determine how he made his way to Newark and who is responsible for his murder," Newark police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall told the Wilmington News Journal. "How he got the injuries, I just don't know."
The sanitation truck unloading the garbage containing Wheeler's body had picked up the trash from metal bins in Newark, which is why Newark police are leading the investigation. The FBI and other agencies are also assisting.
Wheeler lived in New Castle, Del. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and served as an adviser to presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Wheeler, who served in Vietnam, also was chair of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Fund that led the effort to build the memorial wall in Washington.
Most recently, he worked as a part-time consultant for the MITRE Corp., a not-for-profit organization that provides information technology services to the federal government.
According to Newark police, Wheeler was on a train from Washington, D.C., to Wilmington on Dec. 28. Police say he was last seen in Wilmington on Dec. 30, when surveillance video shows him at a downtown building where he asked for train fare at a law firm. The last image of him showed Wheeler walking toward a high-crime neighborhood.
Witnesses described him as acting strangely and appearing disoriented in the previous days. A Wilmington parking lot attendant said that on Dec. 29, he stumbled into her garage.
"It striked me as being odd because he had one shoe in his hand and no coat on," the attendant, Iman Goldsborough, told CNN.
A neighbor who had seen him on Christmas Eve said Wheeler's condition on the surveillance tape was out of character and shocking.
"I have never seen him like that in my life," Robert Dill told CBS News earlier this month. "I have no idea. At this point, I couldn't even give you a theory."=================================================================
John Wheeler III, a... more
-
-
*************THIS IS A GOOD ARTICLE ABOUT MEDIA SLANDER AND BIAS*************
In Early Struggles of Soldier Charged in Leak Case, the New York Times published a portrait of Private Bradley Manning reminiscent of the type of character assassination J.Edgar Hoover planted in newspapers in the hey day of the communist witch hunts. The government agencies routinely planted such misinformation to discredit civil rights activists and others they considered a threat to our national security. Whistleblowers like Private Manning and Daniel Ellsberg before him are considered extremely dangerous and in the words of the then sitting (during the Pentagon Papers incident) president Richard M. Nixon ''need to be taken out'. President Nixon famously said that he did not need to wait and see if the courts would convict Ellsberg because he would destroy him in the court of public opinion. He then ordered the break in to the offices of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Here we are again, four decades later convicting in the court of public opinion Private Bradley Manning.
The NYT article(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/us/09manning.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all) is subtle in its venom but no less deadly. In Manufacturing Consent, Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky propose a mass media propaganda model for a modern western liberal democracy such as our own, in which mechanisms for the maintenance of the status quo are less obvious, but no less effective, than in systems such as totalitarian dictatorships. Private Manning and WikiLeaks threw a hand grenade at the status quo and now these mechanisms are working overtime to repair the damage. The fact that the NYT collaborated with WikiLeaks is in keeping with the model of the cultural mechanisms at play.
I have no doubt that Private Manning, a sensitive youth, was struggling to fit into a world that did not accept his sexual orientation, nor that he fell in love with a young man who in the words of the NYT is a "self described drag queen." And to that, I say so what.
The spin of the article is that because he was an outsider, his motivation for divulging the classified information and releasing the documents was to fit in with his new friends, a "politically motivated group of hackers to whom he increasingly turned to for moral support."
The article continues:
And now, some of those friends say they wonder whether his desperation for acceptance -- or delusions of grandeur -- may have led him to disclose the largest trove of government secrets since the Pentagon Papers.
There is no evidence that Private Manning was either desperate or had delusions of grandeur. The only named sources in the article was a former neighbor Mrs. Radford, a former classmate and a former employer, all who say nothing to lead us to that conclusion.
The only named source that paints the portrait of the desperate and delusional Private Manning is the cyber informant Adrian Lamo. I find it extremely disturbing that the NYT chose not to elucidate us in this article about the well known and well documented character and controversy surrounding Adrian Lamo. Adrian Lamo was prosecuted and convicted of hacking into the very NYT and so they more than anyone know about his history of heavy drug abuse(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/hacker_pr.html) and psychological problems.
One glance at his Facebook page(http://www.facebook.com/felon?ref=ts) (which has no privacy settings so you do not need to friend him to navigate) will confirm that Lamo, if not exhibiting delusions of grandeur, at minimum is prone to self-aggrandizement and self promotion. When asked why hack, by a San Francisco Weekly reporter, he answers: "This is what I do, this is the role I was born to play." He goes on to quote a long passage about how greatness can destroy a man from the Frank Herbert science-fiction epic Dune later made into a David Lynch film, which tells the story of a young man who becomes a messiah.
He is also an avowed drug abuser. Do not take my word for it, but please watch this video from the BBC at about 3 minutes 25 seconds and you will witness the most bizarre behavior you have ever seen on prime time.
The NYT does not find it worthy of mention that the man who turned in Private Manning and the only named source in the article that eludes to Manning's motivation for the release of the documents is a total mess.
He tells a San Francisco weekly reporter that his convulsions are a result of an amphetamine overdose he suffered the year before. He goes on to say about his drug use(http://www.sfweekly.com/2003-04-16/news/a-duty-to-hack/):
I've resisted including this in news reports because I think it would make me intolerable to the government if I was advocating both intrusion and drug use, but substances that disassociate you from your senses have played a big part in my life.
Lamo goes on to explain to Wired Magazine's Khan that after his amphetamine overdoes he now takes only depressives and dissociatives.
The dissociatives are amazing... You can look at your face in the mirror and completely not recognize it.
The court issued a restraining order against Lamo, due to a complaint in which his then-girlfriend described an ongoing pattern of harassment and abuse. She explains: "He carried a stun gun, which he used on me. He was very controlling. He wanted to know where I was costansantly." There are many articles that reference the taser he carries with him, sometimes used to "hack" vending machines.
We are to believe that Adrian Lamo just happened to be chatting with the total stranger Private Manning and divulged not only what he would be doing and had done but also his motivation. Adrian Lamo is the oldest trick in the book and has the footprint of the government all over it. A homeless, drug addicted convicted felon with a suspended sentence who still owes the government over $65,000 in fines is not exactly my idea of a credible witness, but rather your typical informant who says and does as he is told.
The named source in the Wired Magazine article quoted in the NYT, Private Manning's boyfriend, Mr. Watkins, states that after WikiLeaks released the video allegedly provided by Manning of the shootings of the AP journalists that "one of his {Private Manning's} major concerns once he'd done this was, was it really going to make a difference?" This concern would lead one to conclude that Private Manning's motivation, as much as one can impute motivation, was to have an impact on public opinion and perhaps on the course of the war, in the tradition of Ellsberg. If Manning wanted to influence the course of the war and deliberately broke the law and knowingly risked prosecution, he follows in the footsteps of the greats: Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta (arrested 22 times and counting), Dr King and Daniel Ellsberg. There is no credible evidence, only government spin repackaged by the NYT, that this is not the case.*************THIS IS A GOOD ARTICLE ABOUT MEDIA SLANDER AND BIAS*************
In... more
-
-
The Pentagon plans to step up efforts to influence media coverage in Iraq -- as well as here at home.The Pentagon plans to step up efforts to influence media coverage in Iraq -- as well... more
-
-
According to news outlet Raw Story, the Defense Department's powerful Defense Science Board recommended creation of Office of Strategic Deception in a little noticed report last month. The Science Board recommends engaging in strategic tricks even before it wages war against another country.According to news outlet Raw Story, the Defense Department's powerful Defense... more
-
