In the case of Guatemala, Abrams and the Reagan administration were approving the shipment of weapons, money, intelligence and the provision of polit… - Allan Nairn

The military at that time was doing a campaign of assassination against student leaders... I was twenty-four. And I was just stunned by this. I had read about it, but to see people just gunned down like this every day was very depressing and made me very angry. So I decided to do something about it by making it an issue in the United States, by investigating the role the U.S. had. I interviewed U.S. corporate executives there. They endorsed the death squads. I wanted to make an issue of this kind of death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador. Later I went to Asia and East Timor.

Some commentators have said, “Well, Abrams is not a Trump guy. He represents traditional, established U.S. foreign policy.” And that’s true. The problem is that that U.S. policy has been to abet genocide when the U.S. feels it’s necessary.

Because, well, partly those who set the rhythm of repetition, the rhythm of what facts get repeated day to day, in the highest profile media outlets, and the rhythm of repetition is basically everything in politics. Because under the American system, there’s no centralized state censorship, unlike the old Soviet system. So, almost everything, almost every atrocity committed in the U.S. system is on the public record somewhere, it’s somewhere in a library, it’s somewhere in a posting on the Internet, somebody has done a good investigative piece on it. It’s all out there somewhere .But unless it’s repeated, hammered away, day after day, on the big media outlets, it may be on the public record but it’s not in the public consciousness. And that’s all that matters in politics: What is in the public consciousness? And those that set the rhythm of repetition that determine the public consciousness — in this case, the media outlets like MSNBC and CNN, which today play an absolutely central role... have seized on this Russia scandal as their theme... they devote vast portions of their airtime to speculation about this Russiagate scandal, to the exclusion of hammering away on all these other themes about the outright decimation and crushing and theft of the American working class.... about what he’s doing to the health of Americans, to the environment, to the basic rights of Americans.