Independent writer Jeff Cohen offers up an Excellent Deconstruction of the WASHINGTON POST's latest lying, cowardly SHILLING FOR THE RIGHT-WING TAKEOVER of America and the US government: Mr. Cohen details how the POST is now hiring former *top bush speechwriter* MICHAEL GERSON to BANG THE DRUMS FOR UNLIMITED WAR(s), UNLIMITED POLICE STATE POWERS (Heinrich Himmler powers as "Reichsprotector," of wartime Germany, Himmler answerable to no one but Hitler in his efforts to "cleanse" Germany of terrorists and "enemies of the state"), and aggressive international postures that can only be described at threatening, aggressive, and warlike.
Clearly, Mr. Gerson is intended, at the Washington Post, to take up where WILLIAM SAFIRE at the New York Times left off: Mr. Safire was a relentless brown-shirt Right-Wing Republican THUG in high media (and, ergo, corporate) offices of the NEW YORK TIMES, where Safire relentlessly railed against the Clintons and the Democratic White House. In one infamous column, Safire promised "INDICTMENTS WILL BE HANDED DOWN THIS WEEK!" In another equally infamous editorial, the cowardly lying editors of the TIMES even HEADLINED a Safire editorial, "Hillary is a CONGENITAL LIAR."
(Technically, a "congenital" defect is a genetic defect; thus Safire, for smear-mob effect, was calling Hillary Clinton was a born- and genetically predetermined liar. As is so often the case with Righty thugs and bullies, it was Mr. Safire, hiding behind the respectability of his NEW YORK TIMES desk, who was chronically LYING in most of his editorials, yet there was almost no one in American media-land calling the Times or Safire on their relentless lies, fabrications, smears and grossly misreported reporting.)
Well, in a macabre, sinister way, our hat is off to the TIMES and Mr. Safire - as with Joseph Goebbels and the rise of Adolf Hitler, the TIMES, in the late 1990s has proven that LIES and SMEAR-ATTACKS *work* at determining who wins power in America. Indeed, long before KARL ROVE put Mr. Bush within grabbing distance of the White Housee, the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST were both tilling the ground for Rove's masterpiece 2001 smear-job:
"Clinton staffers TRASHED the White House!"
Of which the NY TIMES and Washington POST were complicit enablers, RUNNING SCREAMING, ACCUSATORY HEADLINES "Departing Clinton Officials TRASHED THE WHITE HOUSE!" (destruction of federal property is a felony)
*** WITHOUT ONE PHOTOGRAPH OF EVIDENCE.*****
The TIMES and POST laid the ground for Mr. Bush's stolen 2000 election by relentlessly hyping and exaggerating anti-Clinton Republican propaganda, including the wholly made-up "Lincoln Bedroom," "Travel-gate" and "Whitewater" stories - Ken Starr spent MILLIONS investigating Whitewater, and besides the hapless Jim McDougal the best conviction Starr could get was - Web Hubbell "OVERBILLING" clients and his own law firm... WITH THE APPROVAL of those clients and law partners???!
Contrast the Times', Post's and KEN STARR's VIGILANCE at prosecuting the hapless Webster Hubbel for "overbilling" clients and partners for a few hours of legal work (in effect, bonus money).... with the BILLIONS in missing Iraq reconstruction funds; or the BILLION DOLLAR Halliburton contracts with NO OVERSIGHT or SUPERVISION, a company that Mr. Cheney STILL HOLDS STOCK IN, and that he benefits from as Halliburton's stock price RISES as he channels billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his former corporation! (Speaking of which, the cowering Dems. and corrupt "major media" have YET to try and hold Mr. Cheney accountable for SELLING OIL TECHNOLOGY EQUIPMENT to Saddam Hussein's IRAQ... WHILE the United States was enforcing an international embargo on Iraq in the late 1990s! IF anyone with links to a Democrat administration had tried such a corrupt scheme, the right-wing press would be foaming-at-the-mouth and shouting "TREASON!" to this day.)
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In the entire US media, Mr. Safire was THE MOST animated, extreme, and visible Clinton critic - even the "Vince Foster was murdered by Clintons!" and "Bill Clinton sold missile technology to China!" conspiracy theorists had to take a back seat to Mr. Safire, who included the "China spying!" allegations in his rants - and his NEW YORK TIMES column was perhaps the most widely syndicated in America.
And let us not forget FALLUJAH: After four US mercenaries entered Fallujah ahead of the US military (with their illegal shoot-to-kill-on-sight, no-questions-asked-or-answered paramilitary powers) and were surprised, killed and had their bodies strung up from a bridge by insurgents, WILLIAM SAFIRE and the NEW YORK TIMES were THE FIRST, and MOST VISIBLE voices in calling for RETRIBUTION AGAINST THE ENTIRE TOWN of Fallujah.
INSERT photographs, Fallujah BEFORE THE SAFIRE/NEW YORK TIMES TREATMENT, and Fallujah AFTER THE SAFIRE/NEW YORK TIMES/Rumsfeld/Bush/Cheney/Rove treatment HERE.
Talk about HEAD-HUNTING and SCALP-COLLECTING.... the New York Times entrance foyer and editorial offices should have framed photographs of a bombed and burned Fallujah on the walls, "Look what we can do.. our very own Lidice/Guernica!" (The US Army relied heavily on their "shake and bake" artillery tactics in blasting apart Fallujah: heavy concentrated artillery fire and bombs to weaken shelters and blast standing structures to bits, and then "Willie Pete" white phosphorous shells working as a poison-gas attack on those who survived the high-exposive munitions.)
So, the NEW YORK TIMES and William Safire have quite the credit between them; Safire, THE FORMER NIXON SPEECH WRITER, authoritarian, and antihuman rights military powers advocate, using his TIMES editorial desk to LEAD "mainstream media" antagonists against the Clinton White House, and succeeded in dragging up so much muck on the Clintons that the US Supreme Court ruled that PAULA JONES had a right to sue the president - after a brief, one sentence mention in a William Mellon Scaife funded "ARKANSAS PROJECT" magazine hit-piece (in the 'American Spectator' magazine) that alluded to a brief liaison (or attempted liaison) between then Governor Clinton and some woman named only "Paula"!
From trashing the Clintons for eight years the TIMES shifted their fire in 2000 to the hapless AL GORE. Safire's fellow Times editorial stablemate MAUREEN DOWD has written to knowing that George W. Bush consistently "PLAYED THE CLOWN" in front of reporters on his campaign flights... but she thought it was more important to write column after column about... Al Gore's earth-tone wardrobe, choice of campaign advisors, and Gore's alleged "lying" because Gore forgot which official he had toured which specific disaster site with, out of hundreds of such visits!
ALL OF WHICH "reporting" by the Times and Post put George W. Bush within range of STEALING the presidency, which action was completed when Florida Governor Jeb Bush (brother to George W. Bush) and his Secretary of State KATHERINE HARRIS ILLEGALLY disenfranchised TENS of THOUSANDS of Black voters by using Choice-Point voter-registration purging software and other systematic means (discarded and uncounted ballots) to disenfranchise thousands of likely anti-Bush voters.
That was then - a NIXON speechwriter at the NEW YORK TIMES prepared the ground for the stolen Bush White House, by RELENTLESSLY TRASHING the Clinton administration for 8 years from within the NEW YORK TIMES editorial offices.
TODAY, we learn that the WASHINGTON POST is taking up where SAFIRE and the TIMES left off.. hiring BUSH's LEAD SPEECHWRITER as editorial writer for the WASHINGTON POST.
Well, the good news is, it is all out in the open now - it may take time for the dust (nuclear dust?) to settle, but three, four, or five decades from now, historians will compile the evidence that the AIPAC community, the TIMES, the POST, and other neo-con influences in American media (the Sulzberger owned NEW YORK TIMES and Mr. William Safire at the top of that list) WORKED HARD FOR OVER A DECADE to prepare the way for a Right-Wing restoration to the US presidency, and having obtained that restoration, the United States government has effectively declared that ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD that it so deems is now a FREE FIRE combat zone in the "War on terror," - with COMPLETE SS powers of life-and-death over ANYONE declared an "ENEMY COMBATANT," NO QUESTIONS ASKED, ANSWERED, OR ALLOWED.
THAT is the agenda of the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST, and it is indeed good to know that the Post is hiring Mr. MICHAEL GERSON, Pres. Bush's former speechwriter, just to take up where Nixon speechwriter William Safire left off, and to put that oh-so-holy RELIGIOUS SPIN on the right-wing totalitarian agenda.
We can rest assured that, as he supports polices that GUT the GENEVA CONVENTIONS, treat US military men and women as canon fodder, tax the American public to fund tax-cuts for the hyper-wealthy, dispense with international law and urge UNILATERAL MILITARY THREATS against other nations, Mr. Gerson will continually invoke GOD and religious values for the international bullying and powers that are scarcely indistinguishable from what Himmler sought for the SS.
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Documentation: [Note: This documentation is mostly regarding the links between the Post, the Times, Mr. Gerson, and the Bush White House-Republican Congress, with the neo-con/Likud agenda of expanding wars under a veil of religious morality. Documenting the Washington Post's and New York Times' decade long tirade of lies and smear-mongering against the Democratic White House would take a separate book. And today, much of the Democratic Party leadership is in complete accord with "Defense of the Reich" wartime powers claimed by the Bush White House, including 'Democratic' Senators Lieberman, Feinstein, Clinton, and Schumer, and others, all of whom are AWOL - missing and nowhere to be seen - re supporting the GENEVA CONVENTIONS or other such other democratic restrictions on the unlimited war-time powers claimed by the Bush White House.]
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#1. Michael Gerson- The man behind "God" in Bush's speeches."
13 December 2004
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_001368.php
The Washington Post's Alan Cooperman pays for a Key West junket with a puff piece about BUSH SPEECHWRITER MICHAEL GERSON, the MAN BEHIND the GOD IN THE PRESIDENT's RHETORIC. "At a meeting with reporters in Key West, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday [an annual retreat hosted by the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center], Gerson, who has crafted almost all of Bush's major speeches since 2000 but has rarely spoken to the media, defended the president's religious rhetoric. Although the session was off the record, Gerson subsequently agreed to allow some of his main points to appear in print." Sure, why not? Not as if there'd be any serious accountability. "[O]n the whole, the speechwriter argued, Bush's references to the role of providence in human affairs have been carefully calibrated and fully within the tradition of American civic religion." Leaving aside Bush's critics, if that assertion is so, why do so many millions of Bush supporters see in their man a servant of God unlike any previous occupant of the oval office? And why does Prof. David Domke's analysis of 70 years of presidential rhetoric reveal a marked shift toward the prophetic in Bush's speeches?
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#2. Washington Post HIRES TOP BUSH SPEECHWRITER
by Jeff Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
(reprinted in full at bottom this post)
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the same roof.
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#3.
Backstory: Michael Gergan, Compassionate conservatism's voice
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0713/p20s01-lire.html
'Unlike some conservatives, I have seen that government - careful, energetic, effective government - can be a powerful force for good.'
- Michael Gerson, Bush speechwriter, 1999-2006
[note: "careful, energetic, effective goverment' IS AT CROSS-PURPOSES with the radical-right-wing agenda of the Bush-Cheney administration, as expressed in the infamous Grover Norquist mantra "take government and shrink it down to size until you can drown it in a bathtub." (An agenda which is a TOTAL LIE, because Mr. Norquist AND ALL OTHER Radical-right-wing advocates desire a US military/police/intel/national security bureaucracy large enough to spy on anyone, anywhere in the world.) The NEGLECT of flooding victims in New Orleans WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT - New Orleans since the flood has been effectively DEPOPULATED - ethnically cleansed - of its Black (voting) majority, and it is with premeditation and malice aforesight that the Bush admin. has USED the New Orleans floods AS AN EXCUSE to channel huge, multi-billion dollar contracts to HALLIBURTON and other administration-crony companies. In the simplest, crudest terms, "PRIVATIZATION" is effectively an attempt to round up the slaves and put 'em back on the plantation, where they become, not free American citizens, but THE PRIVATE PROPERTY of the plantation owner. According to the Right-WIng agenda, ECONOMIC DISENFRANCHISEMENT, dislocation, resettlement, and depopulation, and of course voting disenfranchisement ARE ALL STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION - just as President Andrew Jackson depopulated the Cherokee tribes from the Carolinas and Georgia on the enforced ethnic cleansing/death march, "The Trail of Tears" from the Carolinas to Oklahoma.)
Mr. Gerson may HIDE all these actions, ommissions, and premediated policy FAILURES or cruelties behind his rhetoric of "compassionate conservativism" and other similar propaganda themes of religous virtues, BUT_HE_IS_LYING.]
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<< THE PRESIDENT GOEST TO Capitol Hill TO LOBBY *FOR* TORTURE. >>
#4. as this article from the WP documents:
A Defining Moment for America
THE PRESIDENT GOEST TO Capitol Hill TO LOBBY *FOR* TORTURE.
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587.html
[note how the cowardly, whore editors of the Post BURY this story.. on page A-18?
By their OWN WORDS, "A DEFINING MOMENT FOR AMERICA" deserves to be... BURIED on page A-18 ??!
What pathetic Himmler-genuflecting WHORES!
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#5. Just to prove that the NY Times and Washington Post are working IN PARRALLEL, commenting on (if you read carefully) the rise of Himmler's SS-esque war time powers in America, while actually ENABLING and boosting those very un-opposable wartime powers. (Note the pathetic and misleading NYT headline)
** BUSH WANTS TO GUT GENEVA CONVENTIONS **
(as headline-linked at HuffingtonPost.com)
While the COWARDLY, LYING NEW YORK TIMES headline ACTUALLY reads:
An Unexpected Collision Over Detainees
By CARL HULSE
September 15, 2006
News Analysis
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/us/politics/15assess.html
------------
"AN UNEXPECTED COLLISION over DETAINEES" ??! -
- HOW THE HELL does THAT mean "TORTURE" and SECRET, DRUM-HEAD MILITARY TRIALS??
[Note too, the Times byline reads "NEWS ANALYSIS", but you have to READ WAY past 3 paragraphs to realize that the CLASH-OF-OFFICIAL-PERSONALITIES story that the Times, Post, and WHORE media so love to write, IS ACTUALLY ABOUT *UNLIMITED* GESTAPO powers of DETENTION and TORTURE!
(We apologize for mixing our SS and Gestapo metaphors, which are so direct as to not be metaphors. The SS was Henrich Himmler's private black-uniformed army that swore alliegance to the person of Adolf Hitler before the regular German Army ("Wermacht") was forced to do so. Himmler's SS ascended to power when Hitler decapitated his SA Brown-Shirt street army by having SA leader Ernst Rohm - his ally through a decade of Nazi party rise to power - shot for being a homosexual and for other "crimes of treason." The Gestapo was the Nazi state's secret police, set up by and answerable to Herman Goering, the chief of the German Luftwaffe (Air Force) and, like Rohm, one of Hitler's earliest and most powerful supporters. There was always conflict and tension between the SS, Gestapo, and regular German military organizations, each of which had their own intel services, and all competing for power and turf rights - just as security forces and military compete in all other nations. But if you were a partisan, declared enemy of the state, or innocent bystander, it didn't matter if you were arrested by the SS, SA, Gestapo, or even field units of the Wermacht - THE RESULTS WERE THE SAME. (UN Chairman Kurt Waldheim participated in Wermacht "regular army" counterinsurgency operations as an intel officer in Greece, operations that included the deportation of the Jewish population of Salonika, Greece, to death camps in Eastern Europe.)
The conclusion is unmistakable: USING FUZZY-HEADLINES and MISLEADING REPORTING (that focuses on personality conflicts, NOT the TORTURE and SUMMARY ARREST, DETENTION, and DEATH PENALTY powers sought by the US administration) the NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST are in COMPLETE ACCORD with SS/GESTAPO unlimited war-time powers, with NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER with innocent goat-herders and children caught up in the US wars overseas.
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#6. Bob Herbert, NYT
STRANGER in the MIRROR op-ed, 14 Sept. 2006
Over at the NEW YORK TIMES again, the Times' token Black (African-American) in-house editorialist, BOB HERBERT, snivels about "THE STRANGER IN THE MIRROR" - "the fact that "the very character of the United States is changing, and not for the better" as Mr. Herbert writes. We can't LINK to Mr. Herbert's op-ed because the Lying NY Times BURIES all their editorial writers under a "premium" must-pay firewall. No matter, as we have just documented here with #5., Times op-eds are MEANINGLESS unless they fit the template of Safire's unholy JIHAD against democratic goverment and rights; and those (non-Right-Wing) editorials the Times does publish are anyways BURIED under the Times' SHAMELESS editing "An Unexpected Collision Over Detainees" to mean "BUSH ADMINSTRATION SEEKS GESTAPO/SS wartime POWERS!"
[Note #1.- Damn right, the opposition to those powers was "UNEXPECTED" - the Lying Times and Cowardly Post have been SHILLING FOR THOSE nazi-esque r-w powers for a decade now, and are surpised that ANYONE would offer up some "UNEXPECTED" criticism of them!]
Note #2: Mr. Herbert: Jesus admonished us (humans) to "look not the speck in your neighbor's eye, when you have a splinter in your own." Before chasting the American public for "the change in American character" for the worse, not the better... WHY DON'T YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN NEWSPAPER, EDITORS, and OWNER?!
[note#3: As with NYT op-ed columnist MAUREEN DOWD, Bob Herbert jumped on the "TRASH CLINTON AND GORE" bandwagon in 2000 leading up to the elections of that year... Herbert either too stupid, too arrogant, or too ignorant to realize that DISENFRANCHISING BLACK VOTERS was/would become a CORE ELECTION STRATEGY of the Bush-GOP campaign in Florida and elsewhere... in 2000, much less six years later in 2006!
[Note #4: In a sense, Mr. Herbert is correct: America's character IS changing, and NOT for the better. Even highly placed Black writers such as Mr. Herbert CAN NOT or WILL NOT express outrage over the Bush-Cheney administration funnelling BILLIONS of federal, public tax dollars to Halliburton for New Orleans "reconstruction," even as poor Black families in New Orleans have lost their homes, jobs, voting rights... and hometown, WITH NOT PROSPECT FOR RETURN anytime in the next few years! And today the Jewish-owned NY Times (owned by the Sulberger family) and other AIPAC neo-cons in influential positions in the US media are shamelessly advocating nazi-esque wartime powers for the Bush administration, and MUDDYING the issues at every chance they get. (#4 and #5 above) As they say, s*** roles downhill, and with highly placed media and government "LEADERS" BETRAYING America's democratic principles from the inside-out, from the top down, those of us "working class" Americans at the bottom of the pyramid are in a paranoid state of paralysis, waiting for the next blow to land - and looking suspiciously and reactively at our neighbors, whether next door, across town, or across national borders.)
----------------------------------------------------
#7. Back to the POST again, where the Post actually allows Lawrence Korb and Peter Ogden the editorial space to confront and deconstruct the NEO-CON god-father wannabe WILLIAM KRISTOL's (and Rich Lowry's) call for ** MORE US TROOPS IN IRAQ! **
Why We Can't Send More Troops
By Lawrence J. Korb and Peter Ogden
Thursday, September 14, 2006; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/13/AR2006091301575.html
[ Make no mistake, the Bush/NEO-CON agenda is about GRABBING MORE WEALTH AND POWER, and THE ONLY WAY that the Bush-Cheney government will be able to find enough warm bodies to heed WILLIAM KRISTOL's CALL for "MORE TROOPS in Iraq!" is by INSTITUTING THE DRAFT: taking America's young men (and women) out of their homes and hometowns, and shoving them into Uncle Sam's army AT MINIMUM WAGE, there to risk their lives and limbs under the ATROCIOUSLY INCOMPETENT and CORRUPT 'leadership' of Don Rumsfeld's Department of War. Rumsfeld IS SO CORRUPT (and the American press/media SO cravenly COMPLICIT) that no one even notices the irony or outrage, that SECRETARY RUMSFELD ordered his Army to PROSECUTE FEMAL PRIVATE VOLUNTEERS for "abusing" Iraq prisoners held by US forces in KANGAROO COURT Military 'trials'... WHILE Mr. Rumsfeld PROMOTES the US TORTURE GENERALS, and WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH goes hat-in-hand to Capitol Hill (Congress) SEEKING UNLIMITED TORTURE (and, yes, 'abusive,' sadistic, degredation and humiliation) POWERS!]
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#8. Back to the TIMES for this one, ELISABETH BUMLLIER writes an article "explaining" Pres. Bush's use of RELIGIOUS THEMES
and invoking "DEMOCRACY" to JUSTIFY WARS overseas.
Note also that this article notes that NATAN SHARNSKY was "a former SOVIET DISSIDENT, IS NOW A HAWKISH government minister in Israel" !!!
Look at that: "DISSIDENTS" *used to be* SYNONYMOUS with "human rights," but in today's charged Bush/neo-con/Republican/everlasting-war-on-terror atmosphere, you can go from being a "HUMAN RIGHTS DISSIDENT' to a "GESTAPO-POWERS WAR-on-TERROR HAWK" in one easy move!
White House Letter; Bush's Book Club Picks a New Favorite
By ELISABETH BUMILLER (NYT); National Desk
January 31, 2005, Monday
Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 21, Column 1, 954 words
DISPLAYING ABSTRACT - Pres Bush says themes of Natan Sharansky's book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, will be invoked in his State of Union address, as it was in his Inaugural address; Sharansky was invited to White House to meet with Bush in Nov; Sharansky, former Soviet dissident, is now hawkish government minister in Israel; his influence on Bush has become part of buzz of Washington (White House Letter)
[note: search for your own link, NY Times puts up a for-pay firewall)
To read this archive article, upgrade to TimesSelect or purchase as a single article.
----------------------------------------------------------------
#9. And here's the link between Sharansky's former "human rights dissident" now SS/Gestapo UNLIMITED-WARTIME-POWERS Hawk agenda (with a veneer of RELIGIOUS VALUES!) to Mr. Bush's former speechwriter, new WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST Michael Gerson
Closing the Neo-con Circle
Mr. Michale Hersh
Newsweek Jan. 25, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6867187/site/newsweek/
<< In Bush’s speech, drafted by chief White House speechwriter Michael Gerson with input from an old Sharansky ally dating to the Reagan years, National Security Council official Elliott Abrams, Bush in effect declared......
-------------------------------------------------
#10 and here is a more detailed, thorough analysis of the Neo-con/Bush war-on-terror agenda infused with a patina of "spreading freedom and democracy" (at the point of a guns and "shake & bake" treatment for any cities that resist) and "religious values" as espoused by the neo-cons and Republicans:
Natan Sharansky and George W. Bush
The Foreign Policy Diaspora—From Jerusalem to Washington
by Tom Barry | February 8, 2005
IRC Right Web -
http://www.irc-online.org/rightweb/rw/707
The State of the Union Address and Bush’s second Inaugural Address focused U.S. and international attention on Natan Sharansky, author of The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror. Pundits and reporters noted that the president’s lofty rhetoric about “ending tyranny in our world” and guaranteeing “freedom from fear” echoed Sharansky’s language.
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#11. UN's IAEA accuses US Congress subcommittee of releasing a "DISHONEST" and "OUTRAGEOUS" report that would JUSTIFY US "other actions" against Iran... i.e. the US government FABRICATING EVIDENCE to JUSTIFY A WAR (embargo, bombings, or other such "other actions", in the words of US Ambassador (recess apptmnt) to UN John Bolton.)
Not only did such FRAUDULENT Bush administration "WMD" claims lie behind the US war, invasion, and occupation of Iraq in 2003, but it is also starting to sound like Germany's relentless formulation of excuses for occupying first the Sudentenland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and finally blaming Poland for "an attack which led" to the German invasion of Poland and European phase of WWII.
IAEA: US Report on Iran "DISHONEST"
By GEORGE JAHN, Associated Press Writer
15 September 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060915/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iran_nuclear_us
VIENNA, Austria - A recent House of Representatives committee report on Iran's nuclear capability is "outrageous and dishonest" in trying to make a case that Tehran's program is geared toward making weapons, a senior official of the U.N. nuclear watchdog has said.
The letter, obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday outside a 35-nation board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, says the report is false in saying Iran is making weapons-grade uranium at an experimental enrichment site, when it has in fact produced material only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms.
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#12.
- Port Security Won’t Bankrupt Us
NYT unsigned (editorial board) editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/opinion/14thu1.html
Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, seems determined to outdo his commander in chief in RATCHETING UP FEARS of Al Qaeda whenever he wants to score political points. This week, he raised the specter that if the government starts too many expensive antiterrorism programs it could further a plot by Osama bin Laden to “drive us crazy, into bankruptcy” through overspending on homeland defense.
It was particularly ironic that Mr. Chertoff spun this theory while he was FIGHINT OFF [AGAINST] a measure, up for a vote today, THAT WOULD HELP PROTECT OUR PORTS against the threat that he himself deems most worrisome — a nuclear explosion within our borders — without government spending.
[note: the Bush government/congress are so insane with lust for war powers that rival the Gestapo/SS's, and the right-wing is so lustful for using TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS against "enemey targets," that it is hard not to conclude that the Bush administration is almost ROLLING OUT A RED CARPET for the NEXT terror attack on US targets, such as happened immediately leading up to the 19 Saudi terrorists boarding US airliners on 9-11.... With the Bush government DERELICT at providing even a GENERAL TRAVELLER's ADVISORY that Al Qaida hijack plots were filling FBI, NSA, CIA and other agencies' attentions. Such a (future) terrorist attack would of almost certainly and immediately blow away even the minor, timid, and tepid opposition to those war-time powers of absolute totalitarian control as claimed by Mr. Bush and his advisors.
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#13.
9-11 Commission Given "D" an "F" FAILING grades re implementation of counter-terror recommendations by the 9-11 Commission: A.) Official Report Summary, government PDF file"
http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-12-05_report.pdf
B.) Washington Post review of same;
"US Given FAILING GRADES by 9-11 Panel" for FAILING "at enacting numerous reforms that could save American lives and prevent another terrorist attack on U.S. soil."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/05/AR2005120500097.html
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Smoking Gun: Washington Post Hires Top Bush Speechwriter
by Jeff Cohen
at BuzzFlash Thu, 09/14/2006 -
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/410
Few media marching bands have beat the Iraq war drums more frantically and with more influence than the editorial pages of the Washington Post. On Monday, the Post announced the hiring of another drummer boy, one who played a key propaganda role inside the Bush White House.
The Post editorial pages were an echo chamber for pre-war distortions and paranoid fantasies originated by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). So it's grotesquely fitting that the Post would hire as an op-ed columnist, Michael Gerson, Bush's top speechwriter who -- as a key wordsmith within WHIG -- helped originate the flights of rhetorical fancy that so dazzled the Post's laptop warriors. Gerson spun the deceit; the Post peddled it. Now they'll operate under the same roof.
In explaining why the Post was adding yet another pro-war voice to its op-ed page, hawkish editorial page editor Fred Hiatt described Gerson as being "a different kind of conservative from the other conservatives on our page." Thanks, Fred, for all the diversity.
In their new book "Hubris," Michael Isikoff and David Corn write that it was Gerson who -
* inserted references to the yellowcake-from-Niger tale into various Bush speeches, including the 2003 State of the Union.
* helped prepare Secretary of State Colin Powell's dishonest and bellicose speech to the U.N.
* conceived Team Bush's trademark paranoid "soundbite" warning of a potential Iraq nuclear program: "The first sign of a smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud."
According to "Hubris," the "mushroom cloud" line was intended for a Bush speech, but was too good to hold. It was first deployed in September 2002 by anonymous White House aides in a New York Times front-page scare story (by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon) warning that Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons." On CNN that day, Condoleezza Rice declared: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." And Gerson's line became a standard and manipulative war cry from then on.
Speechwriter Gerson should be right at home at the Washington Post. From September 2002 through February 2003, the Post editorialized 26 times in favor of the Iraq war. As Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman have documented, its op-ed page was also dominated by hawks screaming for war. War skeptics were denounced as "fools" and "liars" and worse -- and the skeptics were not given space to respond.
As Gerson's "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" soundbite took flight, Al Gore made an Iraq speech questioning "preemptive war." On the Post op-ed page, Gore's speech was "dishonest, cheap, low" and "wretched...vile...contemptible." And that was all in one column. Another called it "a series of cheap shots."
By contrast, the error-filled Colin Powell speech at the U.N. (that Gerson worked on) was hailed at the Post with almost Pravda-like unanimity. An editorial -- headlined "Irrefutable" -- declared: "It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." And the Post op-ed page from right to "left" embraced Powell's speech.
"When reading the Post's pre-war coverage," summarized journalist Robert Parry, "there was a whiff of totalitarianism in which dissidents never get space to express their opinions but are still excoriated by the official media. When the state speaks, however, the same media hails the government's brilliance."
Gerson and his new colleagues at the Post worked together to help bring us one of the worst foreign policy debacles in our nation's history. Newspapers are supposed to hold discredited public officials to account. The Post is hiring him.
It's partly because of the Post's inexcusable coverage before the war, and its ongoing pro-war editorial bias, that I will be joining Scott Ritter, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and other activists at Camp Democracy in Washington D.C. this Tuesday, Sept. 19, for a public forum on the media's role in Iraq and Iran.
There will also be a protest march to the Washington Post headquarters that evening. With the newspaper's hiring of Gerson, I know an appropriate slogan: "Two, four, six, eight/Separate the press and state."
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, and author of the new book: "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media"
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