Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Investigative journalist Michael Hastings recently broke a story on BuzzFeed about an amendment that is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill. The amendment would “legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences.” Hasting reported that the amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon. He says the “tweak” to the bill would “neutralize” two other acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—which were passed in order “to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.” Rep. Mark Thornberry (R, Texas) and Rep. Adam Smith (D, Washington) are co-sponsors of the bipartisan amendment.
Hastings says that “the new law would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push television, radio, newspaper, and social media onto the U.S. public.” One Pentagon official who is concerned about the amendment told Hastings, “It removes the protection for Americans. It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.” The official added that there are “senior public affairs” officers in the Department of Defense who would like to “get rid” of the Smith-Mundt Act “and other restrictions because it prevents information activities designed to prop up unpopular policies—like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In a Mediaite piece last week, Josh Feldman wrote of how the US military has been looking for new ways to spread U.S. propaganda “on social media websites for a while now.” Feldman also made reference to an article that was published in Wired last July. In the article, Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine, Adam Rawnsley told of how the DoD “has been working on ways to monitor and engage in ‘countermessaging’ on social media sites like Twitter.”
According to Hastings, the Pentagon already spends about $4 billion dollars annually to “sway public opinion.”
Here’s something to chill you to the bone: Hastings reported that USA Today had recently published an article about the DoD having spent “$202 million on information operations in Iraq and Afghanistan last year.” Well, it appears that the reporters who worked on the USA Today article were targeted by “Pentagon contractors, who created fake Facebook pages and Twitter accounts in an attempt to discredit them.” (Read about that story here.)
One of Hastings sources on the Hill told him, “I just don’t want to see something this significant – whatever the pros and cons – go through without anyone noticing.” The source added that the law would allow “U.S. propaganda intended to influence foreign audiences to be used on the domestic population.”
Michael Hastings:
The evaporation of Smith-Mundt and other provisions to safeguard U.S. citizens against government propaganda campaigns is part of a larger trend within the diplomatic and military establishment.
In December, the Pentagon used software to monitor the Twitter debate over Bradley Manning’s pre-trial hearing; another program being developed by the Pentagon would design software to create “sock puppets” on social media outlets; and, last year, General William Caldwell, deployed an information operations team under his command that had been trained in psychological operations to influence visiting American politicians to Kabul.
The upshot, at times, is the Department of Defense using the same tools on U.S. citizens as on a hostile, foreign, population.
Is this how we want our tax dollars being spent—to produce propaganda aimed at us Americans to sway public opinion?
SOURCES
Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban (BuzzFeed)
Congress May Reverse Ban On Domestic Distribution Of Propaganda Material (Mediaite)
Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine (Wired)
Misinformation campaign targets USA TODAY reporter, editor (USA Today)
BrooklynBridge,
In all fairness, I must admit that you characterize MikeS in a manner that effectively calls into question his message. And I note you make your position to using our franchise as aaying it useless in soving our present dilmeen or more accurately put our being sold out by politician. A long preface to asking
What can a marginal or even a large reduction of voiing lead to as to improving our situation?
You say you deny the farce legitimmacy. And how does that advance our position. The government does not care whether we do or not. Only massive, very
massive, passive resistance has a reasonable chance of
success to at least forcing them into unfamiliar territory, But to get to the kernel: Show me either a successful use of non-participation; or an American scenariio leading o success, and define what you mean by success.
And where is President Barack Obama’s ringing denunciation of the bill authorizing the State Department and War Department to propagandize the American people? Where is the new-found LIBERAL champion of gay marriage- brought into the light of justice and equality for all by his kindly daughters? Are we to believe that his rediscovered LIBERALISM is only a one-issue LIBERALISM to take our eyes off the civil liberties stuff again? Is the “lesser of two evils” still lurking beneath the thin veneer of “former Professor of Constitutional Law”? Excuse my cynicism, but haven’t we been down this road before?
Isn’t it time to examine what Obama has actually done in the civil liberties area in the 3 1/2 years of his Presidency before we give him 4 more years? My grade of this “Professor of Constitutional Law” is “F”.
I give you a recent cartoon by Mr. Fish, who expressed his anger better than I can do.
http://www.clowncrack.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/I_Believe.jpg
Nonsense, Mike Spindel, my point of view is hardly unique and is in fact too mundane to support the bombastic tempest of self importance you describe with such telling familiarity.
When a politician, or a generation of politicians, fail utterly to do what they promised to do, a perfectly valid option is to stop voting for them. That is simple-common-sense and doesn’t require adherents or disciples to buttress the logic. It becomes even more obvious after two and a half generations where the very selection of who you get to vote for becomes an obvious farce. Refusing to vote for such a politician is refusing to play in a rigged system, it denies the farce legitimacy and as such is a time tested political strategy that has been used for ages.
Emerson walked into the Concord jail one day to find his friend Thoreau behind bars for not paying a tax. He asked Thoreau, “What are you doing in there?” to which Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?” Thoreau was denying not only the legitimacy of the tax, but of the whole rigged system. Who is really in prison?
When someone like you comes up with a wall of verbosity to describe a convoluted system of holding patterns, and waiting strategies, that have dangerous enemies — meaning anyone who doesn’t “get it” like you do — and you try the old Republican switcheroo of calling them the ones who brand anyone who disagrees, and you come galloping up to “put them in their place”, it is obvious there isn’t much room for difference of opinion.
“It must be so comforting to have absolute certainty of belief. To sit on your pedestal and look down at the unwashed masses needing your cogent analysis of everything. To feel yourself as one of the few people existing who has integrity.”
BB,
Thank you for so perfectly making my point above. I appreciate your understanding of the irony implied and admire the obtuseness of your reading comprehension.
“Refusing to vote for such a politician is refusing to play in a rigged system, it denies the farce legitimacy and as such is a time tested political strategy that has been used for ages.”
A “time-tested political strategy” towards what end? How can you on one hand give cogent analysis of the current political situation which you do and on the other not understand that not voting is exactly a preferred outcome for our Corporate Masters? Now if let’s say only 5% of the citizenry didn’t vote then maybe you might catch the attention of our Corporate Overlords in that the sham of democracy might be apparent. However, that would require the mass movement of which I speak. That is an impossible goal for this particular election because the groundwork hasn’t even begun to be laid amongst the citizenry. Typically today only 50% to 60% of eligible voters actually vote. It hasn’t made any impression on almost anyone and it has been the norm for four decades. Indeed the Conservative strategy of making up a “voter fraud problem” is intended to disenfranchise voters. There is no “mass movement” to encourage the people to not vote in this election, save for the Republican strategy, so in effect there is no strategy to rid us of the corporatists.
Now your position may in effect be that you personally refuse to vote in a “sham” election. While I understand that to be a valid position, it is hardly a strategy, merely a personal choice on your part. My position, often stated here, is that we are under Corporatist/M.I. Complex Rule and have been for more than 60 years. The fact that we can even write what we write on this blog, is both an example of Corporate confidence in their control and the lack of theoretical heterodoxy among the elite. The elite’s clear cut issue lies between those who would fully impose draconian rule upon the society and those who would ameliorate some of the awful conditions lived in by most people, included the shrinking middle classes. This roughly divides out between the two corporate parties with the former being the Republican’s and the latter being the Democrats.
Since no one has put together more than stirrings of a grass root movement to oppose this, OWS is still in its infancy, my “strategic” choice is to vote for those of less draconian policy to stave off the total crackdown that will come with a Republican victory. If there is a crackdown, which by their own words is
more than probable, building any movement further will not be possible and
Fascist Feudalism will be complete. It may not work but that is at least a “strategy”, what is it you offer in counterpoint except your non-participation?
idealist707,
re: Madsen. His European heritage is Danish. Madsen is a common surname there, as in “son of Mads”. Doing genealogical research there is a bit difficult.
re: Madsen, Obama Yes. He has written about Obama’s sexual activities. Rahm Emmanual’s as well. He spent several days in Indonesia investigating his childhood there. It seems that Obama needed to be an Indonesian citizen in order to attend the school he went to. Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship. It’s not clear that Obama renounced his Indonesian citizenship in order to regain his US citizenship. He has also written articles on Obama’s familial ties to the CIA – mother, father, step-father, grandparents.
Madsen’s blog has two sections, the public contains links to various articles culled from all sorts of news sites; the subscriber portion has one or two articles per day written by him and two separate forums for subscribers’ comments. The articles in the subscriber section have a 24 hour hold on them after which time subscribers are free to disseminate.
I don’t readily accept everything I read (no fool am I) but I do find Madsen credible. He has been a year or two ahead of MSM on a number of stories.
Sweet, so glad Dan Rather is going down fighting. Good for him. A real American hero.
Dan Rather: Corporate Media ‘Is In Bed With’ Washington (VIDEO)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/20/dan-rather-cbs-news-corporate-media_n_1531121.html
Dan Rather slammed corporate media on Friday night, alleging that news coverage is guided by political interests and profits.
The former CBS News anchor has recently returned to the spotlight, speaking out about his former employer and defending the controversial Bush National Guard story that ended his storied career at the network.
On Friday, Rather appeared on Bill Maher’s show to discuss his new book “Rather Outspoken.” He spoke out about the controversy again, and stood by his story (his comments start at the 1:50 mark in the video above). He said that he was fired because CBS News caved into the Bush administration’s demands.
“The powers that be and the corporate structure were very uncomfortable with the story,” Rather said. “They got pressured by the Bush administration and others in Washington, and it cost a lot of people their jobs, including myself.”
He went on to warn that everyone should be “concerned” about “the constant consolidation of media,” saying that “no more than six” companies currently control 80% of the distribution of news.
“These large corporations, they have things they need from the power structure in Washington, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, and of course the people in Washington have things they want the news to be reported,” he said. “To put it bluntly, very big business is in bed with very big government in Washington, and has more to do with what the average person sees, hears, and reads than most people know.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/may/20/welcome-nato-chicago-police-state?CMP=twt_fd
These fine purchases worth millions of dollars are on display today in Chicago.
The police are in the process of handing out ear plugs in order to see how the public likes the brand new (one of two- or both?) $20,000 LRad noise cannon works.
Occupy is plugging up too.
MikeS,
Dare I say that whatever you did at the “swim” has re-energized you. Taking for example your words to BB, I found in myself a wonder if he(?) and Jill were not related. But appearances can deceive.
When i read Jill’s snarty diatribe (short as it was) I could only assume she was kidding. Serious, no way possible.
My evaluation of Elaine is that she is the sharpest person here in picking out the intestines from this nation’s bloated corpse.
And not meaning she is a vulture, but doing a coroner’s job for us.
U.S. media takes the lead on Iran
The propaganda over The Grave Persian Threat is as cartoonish as it was when directed at Iraq in 2002 VIDEO
By Glenn Greenwald
2/14/12
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/14/us_media_takes_the_lead_on_iran/singleton/
Excerpt;
Many have compared the coordinated propaganda campaign now being disseminated about The Iranian Threat to that which preceded the Iraq War, but there is one notable difference. Whereas the American media in 2002 followed the lead of the U.S. government in beating the war drums against Saddam, they now seem even more eager for war against Iran than the U.S. government itself, which actually appears somewhat reluctant. Consider this highly illustrative, one-minute report yesterday from the nightly broadcast of NBC News with Brian Williams, by the network’s Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim “Mik” Miklaszewski, which packs multiple misleading narratives into one short package:
We’re told that if the U.S. ends up in a war with Iran, then “the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet would be the world’s first line of defense“: because Iran is threatening the entire world, and the U.S. would be defending “the world” from this grave Persian menace. Then there’s the ominous claim that “Iranian leaders have threatened all-out war”: but that’s “if Israel launches air strikes against Iran’s nuclear program,” which would already itself be “all-out war.” The NBC story — which begins with video shots of Iranians in lab coats lurking around complex, James-Bond-villain-like nuclear-ish machines — ends with twenty seconds of scary video footage of Iranian missiles being launched, accompanied with this narration: “U.S. officials warn that Iran’s massive stockpile of ballistic missiles is the more serious threat”; after all, “within just the past few days, Iranian leaders [cue video of a scary, ranting Ahmedinijad] have threatened that if attacked, they would launch those missiles at U.S. targets.”
It’s just remarkable to watch the American media depict Iran as the threatening, aggressive party here. Literally on a daily basis, political and media figures in both the U.S. and Israel openly threaten to attack Iran and debate how the attack should happen with a casualness that most people use to contemplate what to have for lunch. The U.S. has orchestrated devastating and always-escalating sanctions which, by design, are wrecking the Iranian economy, collapsing its currency, and generating serious hardship for its 75 million citizens. The U.S. military has that country almost completely encircled. The U.S. military behemoth, and Israel’s massive nuclear stockpile and sophisticated weaponry, make the Iranian military by comparison look almost as laughable as Saddam’s. Iran’s scientists have been serially murdered on its own soil, their facilities bombarded with sophisticated cyber attacks, and dissident groups devoted to the overthrow of their government (ones even the U.S. designates as Terrorists) have been armed, trained and funded by Israel while leading American politicians openly shill for them in exchange for substantial payments.
Yet the Manichean narrative driving this NBC report is par for the media course: Iran’s aggression must be contained, and it is leaving the U.S. and Israel with no choice but to pre-emptively attack it. Most telling is how Iran is continuously depicted as though they are the ones issuing threats of aggression even though all of their threats are retaliatory: if you attack us, we will attack back. Here, for instance, was how The Washington Post – under the headline “Iran, perceiving threat from West, willing to attack on U.S. soil, U.S. intelligence report finds” — described the recent warnings about The Iranian Danger from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper:
That plot “shows that some Iranian officials — probably including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived U.S. actions that threaten the regime,” Clapper said in the testimony, which was submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of a threat assessment hearing Tuesday. “We are also concerned about Iranian plotting against U.S. or allied interests overseas.”
The following article is a bit dated–but It probably still applies today.
U.S. Capitalists Spread China’s Communist Propaganda
NewsMax.com Wires
Wednesday, May 2, 2002
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/5/1/180312.shtml
Excerpt:
The business press has painted a picture of a thriving, home-grown Chinese market for portals and search engines – mirroring such companies as AOL, Google and Excite – with names such as Sohu, Netease, and Sina fighting for the top spots. Chinese Yahoo!, the American outrider, trails in fifth place.
A top Yahoo! representative spoke to me on the condition that I would not use his name or give identifying details other than that he had recently left the company. He admitted that Yahoo! was actually the most popular portal in China by a mile.
As a Chinese Internet research company confirmed, Yahoo! played a clever game. For every major survey it split into several sites so it would not appear to be No. 1. Management fudged the hit rate, because “we were viewed as extremely aggressive. We were seen as too foreign.”
Yahoo! Helps Catch Thought Crimes
Chinese xenophobia has led many other U.S. companies to play similar games, but Yahoo! was particularly eager to please.
All Chinese chat rooms or discussion groups have a “big mama,” a supervisor for a team of censors who wipe out politically incorrect comments in real time. Yahoo! handles things differently.
If in the midst of a discussion you type, “We should have nationwide multiparty elections in China!!” no one else will react to your comment. How could they? It appears on your screen, but only you and Yahoo!’s big mama actually see your thought crime.
After intercepting it and preventing its transmission, Mother Yahoo! then solicitously generates a friendly e-mail suggesting that you cool your – censorship, but with a New Age nod to self-esteem.
The former Yahoo! rep also admitted that the search phrase “Taiwan independence” on Chinese Yahoo! would yield no results, because Yahoo! has disabled searches for select keywords, such as “Falun Gong” and “China democracy.” Search for VIP Reference, a major overseas Chinese dissident site, and you will get a single hit, a government site ripping it to shreds.
How did Yahoo! come up with these policies? He replied: “It was a precautionary measure. The State Information Bureau was in charge of watching and making sure that we complied. The game is to make sure that they don’t complain.”
By this logic, when Yahoo! rejected an attempt by Voice of America to buy ad space, it was just helping the Internet function smoothly.
Defending Censorship
The former rep defended such censorship. “We are not a content creator, just a medium, a selective medium.”
But it is a critical medium. The Chinese government uses it to wage political campaigns against Taiwan, Tibet and America. And of course the great promise of the Internet in China was supposed to be that it was unfettered, not selective.
The Yahoo! rep again: “You adjust. The crackdowns come in waves; it’s just the issue du jour. It’s normal.”
Microsoft Fights
Here’s an interesting article from 2010 that I just found:
The Autocrat’s Algorithm
Is Google News helping to spread propaganda?
BY JOSHUA E. KEATING |NOVEMBER 19, 2010
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/19/the_autocrat_s_algorithm?hidecomments=yes
Excerpt:
On Nov. 18, I used the enormously popular news aggregator Google News to search for information about the Russian alleged arms dealer Viktor Bout, recently extradited from Thailand to the United States. The top story was a dispatch from the state-controlled newswire RIA-Novosti, which essentially transcribed a statement from the Russian foreign minister demanding that Bout receive a fair trial. The other top results were a mixed bag, including Western sources like CBS News and Agence France-Presse as well as other Russian state-funded sources like ITAR-TASS and the television network Russia Today. (Typical U.S. headline: “Alleged ‘Merchant of Death’ Pleads Not Guilty.” Typical Russian headline: “Bout was psychologically pressured during flight to U.S.”)
Two weeks earlier, a search for “Myanmar Election” would have returned dispatches from U.S. sources like UPI and the Los Angeles Times, describing Burma’s just-concluded poll as a highly rigged sham, but also an opinion piece from the Global Times, an internationally focused publication produced by China’s People’s Daily titled “Myanmar’s Election a Step Forward.”
Of course, offering news from different international perspectives is the whole point of Google News. The service was developed by Google’s Krishna Bharat shortly after the 9/11 attacks with the goal, as he later put it, of “helping people understand multiple points of view, and hence becoming wiser for it — whether they agree with it or not.” But those points of view are often coming from state-sponsored news sources in countries, like Russia and China, where independent journalists are either harassed and persecuted or outright banned. Could Google News’s level playing field be enabling authoritarian regimes to more easily get out their message?
“The web gives us the possibility to reach an audience who cannot watch us on TV, and who are more used to getting news online,” Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of television network Russia Today, told me in an email. RT, as it’s more commonly known, was founded five years ago, partly by RIA-Novosti, and is widely seen as an effort to improve Russia’s image around the world, though it denies having a pro-Kremlin bias.
Nonetheless, others detect a strong pro-Russian slant in the network’s coverage of international events. During the 2008 Georgia-Russia war, RT accused the Georgian forces of “genocide,” but reportedly instructed its reporters not to report from ethnically Georgian villages that had been attacked by Russian troops. The network has also been criticized for giving airtime to fringe anti-American political figures and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Some mainstream Washington analysts — including this author, once — do appear on the network’s broadcasts, but sometimes find it difficult to get their views across.
“It’s a little hard to go back on a TV show that has ‘mechanical difficulties’ every time you’re supposed to speak,” says Council on Foreign Relations Russia analyst Stephen Sestanovich.
Judging by the results for Russia-related queries, however, RT’s website seems to be succeeding in spite of its editorial slant.
Google doesn’t disclose the complex algorithm by which it ranks search results, though that doesn’t stop news outlets (including this one) from trying to figure it out. “Search engine optimization,” or SEO, has become an obsession for media outlets looking to gain an edge on the competition in the new journalism landscape created by Google.
In an extreme example of this trend, some new online news outlets such as Associated Content and Demand Media generate content purely based on Google search queries rather than any sort of journalistic value, and newspapers are beginning to experiment with the formula.
Simonyan wouldn’t speak on how her network seems to perform so well on Google News, saying, “Only Google can explain how it works.”
According to Google spokesman Chris Gaither, some criteria include the “freshness” and “localness” of the story. The site also judges the reliability of different sources by a number of criteria, including the number of repeat visits from users.
One reason state-sponsored media often rank so high in response to specific queries might be that they’re often the main source of original information from the countries they cover. Informal studies have observed that Google tends to prioritize original reporting over re-reported content. With either shrinking news budgets or government restrictions preventing Western news agencies from covering events in countries like Iran and Russia, that gives state-sponsored outlets a clear edge. A search for the latest news on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is likely to turn up so many stories from loyal state-sponsored outlets like PressTV and Fars News because they spend a lot more time covering him and have much better access.
But some analysts wonder about the unintended consequences of this preference. “If no one’s covering the story but a news wire, a bunch of sources copying the newswire, and a state broadcaster who’s basically there to refute the news wire, is Google News doing the right thing for us by prioritizing that state broadcaster?” asks Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and co-founder of the international blog aggregator Global Voices.
For example, are RT and RIA-Novosti really trustworthy sources on the brutal beating of reporter Oleg Kashin, who was nearly killed last month, likely for engaging in just the sort of journalism that these sources fail to provide? Their stories mention the frequent attacks on journalists in Russia, but fail to note, as the New York Times and AP did, that these recent crimes have nearly all gone unsolved by the authorities.
Mike S.,
“I think Jill’s connotation is that you are somewhat naive, but I think that the reverse is the truth, you are hardly naive or unknowing.”
I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday!
😉
BettyKath,
I roll down from your WMR excerpt to ask about Madsen.
Is it true that he said he had evidence showing that Obama was into being orally sexed by white men? This has been circulated by among others a person residing
in Indonesia who picked me up on the net to fill me with stuff including that he was expecting a visit in a couple of days from Madsen, etc etc.. He lost patience with me when I would not bite, and disappeared after leaving full info including name, photo of himself with Indonesian wife, etc etc.
In short, how much are we to believe coming from Madsen.
yea, Darren, that whole story of Manning confessing to Lamos was so phoney/lame I had a hard time believing any of it.
I wish they had not tortured him.
Another difference between the democrats and republicans is union support. Republicans want to turn every state into a right to work state like Scott Walker is attempting to do. If a voter wants unions to prosper and exist, one does not vote republican.
wow Mike, well said. Same as it ever was…..
Shano. I’ll head down tomorrow and get some of the hemp and coconut oils and give them as shot. I’ve heard about the Omegas and will see how it works.
For the wikileaks issue with regard to the US Government, I almost wondered if the leak was either intended, or at least allowed to happen. I don’t know if any military secrets were released but to me I thought some greater good came out of it. I thought it might be an interesting notion to consider the gov’t wanting to shake out a few things and finds a way to put this information into the public forum in the form of a leak so the US Gov’t isn’t viewed as the one who let the cat out of the bag, and can then save face/or CYA. Probably this is not likely but it made for some interesting reflection.
I just kind of have a measure of sympathy for the soldier who got thrown in the brig over this whole affair.
“I wondered if you connected it to the present in a certain way or if you feel there’s not much continuity to the present situation.”
Elaine,
Jill is merely trying to “educate” you to the greater truths she has learned. In that process she has ignored your entire body of work here, with this implication that you might be unaware of the implications of what you post. As Gene expressed in his blog that is complementary to this one, propaganda comes in all forms and one thing to look for is connotation. I think Jill’s connotation is that you are somewhat naive, but I think that the reverse is the truth, you are hardly naive or unknowing.
Mike,
again, thank you for your address. I don’t feel any personal insult as to people disparaging LEO’s here or anywhere. I know what I stand for so it’s like water on a duck. I will say however and my blog posts generally reflect this, when a LEO makes a mockery of himself he deserves the wrath he receives as does any public servant. I see, with some certain exceptions, over time things are improving. It was still the case within my parents’ lifetimes long ago where the police were largely in the pocketbook of the political powers to be. It is self evident especially in regard to strike-breakers and union activities where the police served indirectly as the Schutzstaffel of the political machine. Thankfully we have moved past this but we do have much ahead.
A tried to impress upon young officers that crooks come in many forms, those who break the rules and sometimes those who create them. The easiest way for a new officer who in facing an impasse on how to proceed I tell them to reflect back to their training, put yourself into the other’s shoes, and expect the cameras to be rolling. Treat the lowest member of your society the same as the highest. Enforcement is based upon their acts or omissions not who they are. Don’t let anyone bully you.
Civil rights and LE are not mutually exclusive and should actually be the same. Crooks stealing property violates the rights of the victim just as putting someone in jail without PC does. Personally I believe also the police should be a faceless institution based upon law, not upon the aspirations of individuals with possibly their own agendas. Ideally while it is most necessary for transparency and oversight, it should not be answerable to individual politicians. But, we are not there yet. I personally agree with the notion of Jury Nullification as being the last defense in the CJ system to prevent a citizen from being railroaded, but it has an evil twin such as all white juries acquiting KKK afiliated murderers.
Wow, that certainly went off topic of me Nevertheless thank you Mike, I’m glad to participate here.