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"Is Disinformation Office Really Closing?
Remember the Pentagon's new we-can-hoodwink-the-world propaganda office? It seems to be toast:
"The Pentagon may eliminate a new office intended to influence public opinion and policy makers overseas, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today," the New York Times reports. "Proposals from the new agency, the Office of Strategic Influence, have caused an uproar in Congress and elsewhere in the government.
"Its director, Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, has proposed that the office coordinate activities ranging from public press releases to secret 'information warfare' in friendly as well as unfriendly countries, military officials said. In the past, such secret operations included the spreading of inaccurate or misleading information.
"Mr. Rumsfeld . . . said today that the disclosures about the office's potential activities may have doomed its credibility."
Maybe this is the ultimate disinformation plot – to say you're closing the office and then secretly keep it open?"
via media notes
savoy shuffle
"The discovery could rank as one of the most important from the sea. If plans proceed for an excavation of the site, archival and field research by the explorers suggests, the remains of the Sussex could yield the richest treasure wreck of modern times and illuminate a lost chapter in world history."
youre so money
william greider interviews sen. jon corzine in nation.
afghan gorillas
"To a greater extent than any other armed conflict on the planet, Afghanistan's unfinished 24-year war has been shaped by rival foreign intelligence agencies: The Soviet Union's KGB, America's CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department and Iran's multiple clandestine services. They primed various Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, financed propaganda and manipulated political conventions."
smoking gums
"U.S. Tobacco Companies
Accused of Terrorist Ties And Iraqi Sanctions-Busting"
power play
"His story exemplifies a decade of post-ideological drift and spitball politics in Washington: a cynical, highly pragmatic struggle over power more than ideas that opened with the Thomas-Hill confrontation of 1991, reached its climax with the impeachment drive and now seems to have been interred with so much else in the rubble of Sept. 11. It was a time of take-no-prisoners mudslinging, in which the Republican right, with no Communists to unmask, found a new kind of enemy within that it tried to bring down by means of a disingenuously holier-than-thou moral crusade fueled by a gossip machine of which Brock was an early and influential cog. The hottest partisan battles revolved around Long Dong Silver and Paula Jones, not Stalin."
anti-trust me
"Twenty years ago, writing about antitrust crimes in the Michigan Law Review, Easterbrook and Fischel, then both professors at the University of Chicago, wrote that managers not only may, but should, violate the rules when it is profitable to do so. And it is clear that they believedthat this rule should apply beyond just antitrust."
stealing seins
the seinfeld zeitgeist
puffed out
"Combs is a Renaissance man, but only by the standards of a P.T. Barnum world. Rarely has someone become so famous by being so mediocre at so many things—a boy wonder without any wonder. Puffy is a famous rapper who can't rap, and he's becoming a movie actor who can't act. He's a restaurateur who serves ho-hum food; a magazine publisher whose magazine was immediately forgettable (Notorious—see, you've forgotten it already); a music producer whose only talents are stealing old songs and recycling the work of his dead friend the Notorious B.I.G."
group pug
"The McLaughlin Group is about to "celebrate" its twentieth anniversary. We might as well "celebrate" the discovery of anthrax."