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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:

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Virtually without exception, the American judiciary has refused to allow any victims of America's War on Terror abuses -- whether foreign national or American citizen -- to even have their claims heard in court. Federal courts have repeatedly shielded government officials from any accountability for these abuses, not by ruling in their favor on the merits, but by ruling that they need not answer for their actions at all. Courts have accomplished this whitewashing by accepting the Bush and Obama DOJ's arguments that government actions undertaken as part of the War on Terror are completely shielded from judicial review -- i.e., from the rule of law -- by both secrecy doctrines (it's too secret to risk having a court examine) and immunity prerogatives (government officials cannot be sued even for egregious wrongdoing committed while in office). Here are just a few illustrative examples:

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I'm in Boise today to deliver the keynote address to the annual Bill of Rights dinner of the ACLU in Idaho, and will be traveling back home tomorrow, so posting will be light to nonexistent over the next couple days. In the meantime, C-SPAN this weekend is broadcasting the book event I did last November in Boston with Noam Chomsky, and the one-hour discussion can be viewed online here.

And here is Cenk Uygur on his CurrentTV program this week discussing the poll showing liberal support for President Obama's drones and due-process-free citizen assassinations as well as the continued use of Guantanamo:

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During the Bush years, Guantanamo was the core symbol of right-wing radicalism and what was back then referred to as the "assault on American values and the shredding of our Constitution": so much so then when Barack Obama ran for President, he featured these issues not as a secondary but as a central plank in his campaign. But now that there is a Democrat in office presiding over Guantanamo and these other polices -- rather than a big, bad, scary Republican -- all of that has changed, as a new Washington Post/ABC News poll today demonstrates:

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Fox News, September 10, 2010:

The government has failed to anticipate the danger from homegrown terrorists, some of whom immigrated to the United States, and now faces the most complex set of threats since the Sept. 11 attacks, analysts on an organization headed by the two 9/11 Commission co-chairmen warned Friday. . . .

"The United States has failed to fundamentally understand and prepare for these threats," group member Bruce Hoffman said. "Terrorists may have found our Achilles' heel. We have no strategy to deal with this growing problem and emerging threat."

NPR, September 10, 2010:

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The New York Times' Scott Shane reported this morning on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism study I wrote about yesterday, detailing that the U.S. drone program, as the NYT put it, "repeatedly targeted rescuers who responded to the scene of a strike, as well as mourners at subsequent funerals." Shane's article contains this paragraph:

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

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On December 30 of last year, ABC News reported on a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Khan, who was killed with his 12-year-old cousin when a car in which he was riding was hit with a missile fired by a U.S. drone. As I noted at the time, the report contained this extraordinary passage buried in the middle:

Asked for documentation of Tariq and Waheed's deaths, Akbar did not provide pictures of the missile strike scene. Virtually none exist, since drones often target people who show up at the scene of an attack.

What made that sentence so amazing was that it basically amounts to a report that the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.

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The Washington Post's David Ignatius yesterday reported that Leon Pantta believes there is "a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June," while the Face of American Meritocracy, NBC News' Luke Russert, today said that "NBC can report Sec of Defense Panetta says there's a greater than 50% chance Israel will attack Iran in the coming months." If that does happen, many Americans will undoubtedly be entirely supportive because they know (at least the ones who read American newspapers and listen to their government officials) that Iran is the Evil-est since Saddam's Iraq:

Wall Street Journal, today:

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The ACLU yesterday filed a lawsuit against various agencies of the Obama administration -- the Justice and Defense Departments and the CIA -- over their refusal to disclose any information about the assassination of American citizens. In October, the ACLU filed a FOIA request demanding disclosure of the most basic information about the CIA's killing of 3 American citizens in Yemen: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan, killed by missiles fired by a U.S. drone in September, and Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, killed by another drone attack two weeks later.

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One of the most significant foreign policy controversies of the 2008 presidential election centered around Barack Obama's pledge "to meet separately, without precondition" with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. That seemingly off-the-cuff vow in response to a questioner at a July, 2007, Democratic primary debate was used first by Hillary Clinton, and then by John McCain, to depict Obama as naive, irresponsible, radical and -- most ominously -- overly sympathetic to America's enemies (some liberal pundits echoed some of the same criticisms, while Mitt Romney is still trying to exploit that statement for those ends).

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I've written several times about the coordinated smear campaign to brand writers at the Center for American Progress as "anti-Semites" in order to punish them for defying mandated orthodoxies on Israel and to deter others from doing so. While that smear campaign, having done its job, is now winding down, the predictable effects of it are only beginning: CAP is now censoring those targeted writers, and those who defended them are now being similarly smeared.

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Doctors Without Borders is halting work in detention centers in the Libyan city of Misrata because detainees are "tortured and denied urgent medical care," the international aid agency said Thursday.

The agency known by its French acronym MSF said it has treated 115 people with torture-related wounds from interrogation sessions.

Some of the patients treated were tortured again after they were returned to detention centers, according to the agency.

"Some officials have sought to exploit and obstruct MSF's medical work," said Christopher Stokes, the agency general director.

"Patients were brought to us for medical care between interrogation sessions, so that they would be fit for further interrogation. This is unacceptable. Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions". . . .

Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, voiced similar concerns about torture in Libya.

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Developments in three legal cases, just from the last 24 hours, potently illuminate the Rules of American Justice. First, the Justice Department yesterday charged a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, with four felony counts for having allegedly disclosed classified information to reporters about the CIA's interrogation program. Included among those charges are two counts under the Espionage Act of 1917, based on the allegation that he disclosed information which he "had reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of any foreign nation." Kiriakou made news in 2007 when he told ABC News that he led the team that captured accused Terrorist Abu Zubaydah and that the techniques to which Zubaydah was subjected, including waterboarding, clearly constituted "torture," though he claimed they were effective and arguably justifiable. He's also accused of being the source for a 2008 New York Times article that disclosed the name of one of Zubaydah's CIA interrogators.

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