Yet MORE evidence that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney LIED AMERICA INTO THE IRAQ WAR, yet still the "major media narrative" of the Bush White House is one of ABJECT FAILURE TO ASK THE TOUGH QUESTIONS...
As the six former CIA officers explain in their letter (below), former CIA Director George Tenet has a hell of a lot of nerve to whimper that he was used by the president and vice president to sell their war - HE was in a position TO DO SOMETHING MEANINGFUL to derail or at least slow down the rush to war - like RESIGN from his office in protest.
Mr. Tenet is a PROFILE IN DERELICTION OF DUTY to the American people to provide unbiased, unhyped intelligence at a crucial time in America's history, just as every day the MEDIA WHORES are PROFILES IN COWARDICE and DERELICTION OF DUTY for FAILING to ask the hard and obvious questions.
Clearly, the media whores long for the good old days of the Clinton administration, when they could serve up "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL!" as a national crisis, with no more effort or risk than waiting like bunny rabbits for the latest GOP talking points.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Former CIA Officers: Ex-CIA chief Tenet a 'failed' leader
April 29, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/29/tenet.letter/index.html
(CNN) -- In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership."
The writers said Tenet has "a moral obligation" to return the Medal of Freedom he received from President Bush.
They also called on him to give more than half the royalties he gets from book, "At the Center of the Storm," to U.S. soldiers wounded in Iraq and families of the dead. (Watch Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice talk about Tenet's book)
The letter, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest rather than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full letter)
Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. McGovern is a former CIA analyst.
Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division and was head of intelligence for the National Security Council in the late 1980s.
The writers said they agree that Bush administration officials took the nation to war "for flimsy reasons," and that it has proved "ill-advised and wrong-headed."
But, they added, "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership.
"You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq."
Tenet's 'lack of courage'
The writers accused Tenet of having helped send "very mixed signals" to Americans and their legislators prior to the war.
"CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq.
"This intelligence was ignored and later misused."
The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq had no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein considered the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda.
"You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003 as the Bush administration pushed and cajoled analysts and managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the verge of getting its hands on uranium.
"You signed off on Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations. And, at his insistence, you sat behind him and visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset - credibility."
The letter described Tenet as "one of the bullies."
"You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war being hawked by the president and vice president.
"It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community -- a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality."
The letter said Tenet's failure to resist pressures from Cheney and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld helped build public support for a war that has cost more than 3,000 American lives and many times that among Iraqis.
"You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.
"Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States."
Tenet's memoir, to be published Monday, covers his tenure as director from July 1997 to July 2004.
In an interview to air Sunday on CBS News' "60 Minutes," Tenet expressed outrage that senior officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have used his "slam dunk" reference in discussing Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq over its weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. (Read full story)
"They never let it go. I mean, I became campaign talk. I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot who told us and we decided to go to war.' Well, let's not be so disingenuous ... Let's everybody just get up and tell the truth.
Tell the American people what really happened."
Monday, April 30, 2007
Friday, April 27, 2007
Exxon-Mobile profits, GAS PRICES UP - DESPITE LOWER PRICES for crude oil & natural gas!
Here is the "majory corporate media" in all of its glory: We American consumers are led to believe that the reason gas prices at the pumps ARE RISING every year at this time - the late spring and early summer months - is because of higher crude oil and natural gas prices. Needless to say, the "major media" is happy to trumpet "HIGHER PROFITS!" but gives NO journalistic inquiry as to why gas prices are up and over $3.00 per gallon when crude oil prices are lower.
_________________________________________________
Exxon Mobil 1Q profit up 10 percent
By John Porretto, AP Business Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070427/ap_on_bi_ge/earns_oil;_ylt=Aq6rCfPz9uUc4lsjtagbYlPMWM0F
NEW YORK - Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. kicked off 2007 with a 10 percent rise in profits, its best-ever first quarter, as higher margins on refining and chemical operations offset lower prices for crude oil and natural gas.
Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, said Thursday it earned $9.3 billion in the January-March period, beating Wall Street expectations, even as revenue slipped and fell well short of analysts' forecasts.
_________________________________________________
Exxon Mobil 1Q profit up 10 percent
By John Porretto, AP Business Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070427/ap_on_bi_ge/earns_oil;_ylt=Aq6rCfPz9uUc4lsjtagbYlPMWM0F
NEW YORK - Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. kicked off 2007 with a 10 percent rise in profits, its best-ever first quarter, as higher margins on refining and chemical operations offset lower prices for crude oil and natural gas.
Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, said Thursday it earned $9.3 billion in the January-March period, beating Wall Street expectations, even as revenue slipped and fell well short of analysts' forecasts.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Another lying slime-ball at the Washington Post: Dean of DC scumbags David Broder...
David Broder is the DEAN of Washington DC whore media pundits. He may not be quite as whiny or despotic as fellow Post whore GEORGE WILL, but then Broder is all the more egregious for pretending that he is less partisan, less right-leaning, than Will.. who has an overtly right-wing CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH AND POWER, "whip-and-flog the peons for daring to presume they live in a democracy" agenda.
Which is exactly what is so despicable about Dave Broder - he, like the other DC pundits, joined in cluck-clucking about the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL!" - WITHOUT DOING ANY RESEARCH TO CONFIRM that there was any substance to his own paper's screaming headlines.
Which is to say, DAVID BRODER IS A PAID, PROFESSIONAL LIAR, for well over 6 years, and counting. Here former Clinton White House official Paul Begala lays out a slightly more objective discussion of Broder's reading off the Fox 'news'/Karl Rove fax-machine talking points.
==========================
David Broder Is a Gasbag
by Paul Begala
April 26, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/david-broder-is-a-gasbag_b_46923.html
One of the few regrets I have in life is that I allowed Ann Devroy of the Washington Post to talk me into apologizing for calling David Broder "a gasbag" in 1995. My admiration for Devroy trumped my contempt for Broder. Ann, sadly, is gone, but Broder remains. She was everything Broder is not: fearless, intellectually honest, scrupulously fair, and suspicious of power.
Broder, of course, is a gasbag. The Hindenburg of pundits. But my respect for Ann knew no bounds, and she thought I was being unfair. In retrospect I was being unfair. To gasbags.
Mr. Broder has been foaming at the mouth these days. A man generally given to soporific prose, Broder has been downright venomous lately. And what has put the Benzedrine in Mr. Broder's Ovaltine? Not the fact that President Bush continues to lie about "progress" in the war in Iraq. Or that Dick Cheney continues to lie about pre-invasion links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Or that the Bush Administration has neglected our wounded warriors, ignored the victims of Katrina, potentially obstructed justice by firing US Attorneys who were pursuing GOP wrongdoing. Not even that the Bush Administration lied to the families of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, cynically using their blood to distract from their own incompetence and dishonesty.
No, none of this raises Dean Broder's hackles.
He reserves his vitriol for Harry Reid.
Why Reid? Because Reid has been one of the few politicians with the courage to speak the plain, unvarnished truth to power, and the hallmark of Mr. Broder's career has been to suck up to power. Reid calls Bush a liar. Broder can't handle the truth.
In a radio interview Monday, Broder blasted Reid, calling him "bumbling," saying he's an embarrassment, and breaking the news that, "at some point down the road the Democrats are gonna have to have a little caucus and decide how much further they want to carry Harry Reid."
Really? And on what did the self-styled dean of the Washington press corps, base this bombshell? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Broder just made it up. That's not journalism, it's bloviating - aka Broderizing. In fact, real reporters on Capitol Hill chased down the Broder charge, actually interviewing Democratic senators and their staffs. They found universal support for Reid.
Lord knows we're all capable of making fools of ourselves on the radio, so when Broder let loose this screamer I bit my tongue. But now he's taken quill in hand and committed his rant against Reid to paper. In his column today, Broder actually tries to equate Reid's courageous truth-telling with Alberto Gonzales's inartful mendacity. In an unfortunate bit of timing for Mr. Broder, his attack on Reid comes on the same day the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll says the American people agree with Reid on the war. 55% of Americans believe victory in Iraq isn't possible. Reid is right. Bush-Broder are wrong.
And so Mr. Broder lashes out at Reid, smearing and sneering at the man he calls "the leading light of Searchlight, Nev."
Mr. Broder has moved with ease from the elite comfort of the University of Chicago to the smug confines of Arlington, Virginia. And so he looks down at a man who rose from among the hard-rock miners and hard-luck hookers of Searchlight, Nevada to be the most consequential senator of his time. While David Broder was thinking great thoughts at his elite university, Harry Reid was working his way through Utah State. While David Broder was pontificating, Harry Reid was working his way through law school as a cop on Capitol Hill.
His arrogant, elitist, condescending attack on Reid is just the latest Broderian baloney. As Eric Alterman points out in What Liberal Media? "Back in 1968 [Broder] felt the anti-war activities of the likes of Robert Kennedy and Gene McCarthy were 'degrading...to those involved.'" Prof. Alterman further notes that Broder "frequently dressed down" the critics of Ronald Reagan as "quick-lipped liberals" who "pop off in opposition."
Broder heaped scorn on President Clinton, telling Sally Quinn, "He came in here and he trashed the place. And it's not his place." In Broder's mind Washington is Broder's place. The Establishment's place. And the man from Hope with a heart as big as Texas just didn't know his place. Hysterically, he said Clinton's marital infidelity was worse than Watergate.
But at the end of a career of sucking up to warmongers and Republicans, Mr. Broder has found his true hero in George W. Bush. Where others see a mush-mouthed semi-literate, Broder sees FDR: "As a counterpuncher to criticism and as a doubt-free exponent of his own beliefs, the current president is right up there with the inventor of the New Deal."
While others were shocked at Bush's callous disregard for the lives of his fellow Americans during Hurricane Katrina, Broder wrote Katrina, "opens new opportunities for [Bush] to regain his standing with the public." (Or at least those members of the public who did not drown due to Bush's incompetence and inaction.)
In February of this year, when the Bush collapse was evident for all to see, the visionary Mr. Broder saw something else. "President Bush is poised for a political comeback," he wrote.
When asked recently if Bush was the worst President in history - a view shared by many eminent historians, including Sean Wilentz of Princeton, Broder replied, "I would not venture at this point whether President Bush will leave the country in better or worse shape than he found it. Internationally, the U.S. suffered setbacks during the Carter administration...." Jimmy Carter, of course, started no wars, invaded no countries, and got our hostages out of Iran alive. But this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is compared to George W. Bush.
Perhaps Broder's bed-wetting tantrum against Reid was spurred by the certain knowledge that while Harry Reid has been telling hard truths, Mr. Broder has been falling hard for transparent lies.
Whereas Reid called for Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal long ago, Broder vouched for Rummy, writing, "Overall, Rumsfeld left me with the impression that he is aware of the risks of war with Iraq, but confident they can be handled."
While Reid has called for investigations into allegations Karl Rove broke the law, Broder vouches for Rove: "Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove.... I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of [Rove's] historic cabin...." Mighty cozy in Karl's cabin, isn't it, Mr. Broder?
I doubt very seriously that Harry Reid is bothered by Broder's comments. Reid has faced down Vegas mobsters who planted a bomb in his family car. He's unlikely to be intimidated by George W. Bush's housebroken lap-dog.
My guess is that Give 'Em Hell Harry is going to keep telling them the truth, and Mr. Broder is going to keep thinking it's hell. As George Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Which is exactly what is so despicable about Dave Broder - he, like the other DC pundits, joined in cluck-clucking about the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL!" - WITHOUT DOING ANY RESEARCH TO CONFIRM that there was any substance to his own paper's screaming headlines.
Which is to say, DAVID BRODER IS A PAID, PROFESSIONAL LIAR, for well over 6 years, and counting. Here former Clinton White House official Paul Begala lays out a slightly more objective discussion of Broder's reading off the Fox 'news'/Karl Rove fax-machine talking points.
==========================
David Broder Is a Gasbag
by Paul Begala
April 26, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-begala/david-broder-is-a-gasbag_b_46923.html
One of the few regrets I have in life is that I allowed Ann Devroy of the Washington Post to talk me into apologizing for calling David Broder "a gasbag" in 1995. My admiration for Devroy trumped my contempt for Broder. Ann, sadly, is gone, but Broder remains. She was everything Broder is not: fearless, intellectually honest, scrupulously fair, and suspicious of power.
Broder, of course, is a gasbag. The Hindenburg of pundits. But my respect for Ann knew no bounds, and she thought I was being unfair. In retrospect I was being unfair. To gasbags.
Mr. Broder has been foaming at the mouth these days. A man generally given to soporific prose, Broder has been downright venomous lately. And what has put the Benzedrine in Mr. Broder's Ovaltine? Not the fact that President Bush continues to lie about "progress" in the war in Iraq. Or that Dick Cheney continues to lie about pre-invasion links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Or that the Bush Administration has neglected our wounded warriors, ignored the victims of Katrina, potentially obstructed justice by firing US Attorneys who were pursuing GOP wrongdoing. Not even that the Bush Administration lied to the families of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, cynically using their blood to distract from their own incompetence and dishonesty.
No, none of this raises Dean Broder's hackles.
He reserves his vitriol for Harry Reid.
Why Reid? Because Reid has been one of the few politicians with the courage to speak the plain, unvarnished truth to power, and the hallmark of Mr. Broder's career has been to suck up to power. Reid calls Bush a liar. Broder can't handle the truth.
In a radio interview Monday, Broder blasted Reid, calling him "bumbling," saying he's an embarrassment, and breaking the news that, "at some point down the road the Democrats are gonna have to have a little caucus and decide how much further they want to carry Harry Reid."
Really? And on what did the self-styled dean of the Washington press corps, base this bombshell? Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Broder just made it up. That's not journalism, it's bloviating - aka Broderizing. In fact, real reporters on Capitol Hill chased down the Broder charge, actually interviewing Democratic senators and their staffs. They found universal support for Reid.
Lord knows we're all capable of making fools of ourselves on the radio, so when Broder let loose this screamer I bit my tongue. But now he's taken quill in hand and committed his rant against Reid to paper. In his column today, Broder actually tries to equate Reid's courageous truth-telling with Alberto Gonzales's inartful mendacity. In an unfortunate bit of timing for Mr. Broder, his attack on Reid comes on the same day the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll says the American people agree with Reid on the war. 55% of Americans believe victory in Iraq isn't possible. Reid is right. Bush-Broder are wrong.
And so Mr. Broder lashes out at Reid, smearing and sneering at the man he calls "the leading light of Searchlight, Nev."
Mr. Broder has moved with ease from the elite comfort of the University of Chicago to the smug confines of Arlington, Virginia. And so he looks down at a man who rose from among the hard-rock miners and hard-luck hookers of Searchlight, Nevada to be the most consequential senator of his time. While David Broder was thinking great thoughts at his elite university, Harry Reid was working his way through Utah State. While David Broder was pontificating, Harry Reid was working his way through law school as a cop on Capitol Hill.
His arrogant, elitist, condescending attack on Reid is just the latest Broderian baloney. As Eric Alterman points out in What Liberal Media? "Back in 1968 [Broder] felt the anti-war activities of the likes of Robert Kennedy and Gene McCarthy were 'degrading...to those involved.'" Prof. Alterman further notes that Broder "frequently dressed down" the critics of Ronald Reagan as "quick-lipped liberals" who "pop off in opposition."
Broder heaped scorn on President Clinton, telling Sally Quinn, "He came in here and he trashed the place. And it's not his place." In Broder's mind Washington is Broder's place. The Establishment's place. And the man from Hope with a heart as big as Texas just didn't know his place. Hysterically, he said Clinton's marital infidelity was worse than Watergate.
But at the end of a career of sucking up to warmongers and Republicans, Mr. Broder has found his true hero in George W. Bush. Where others see a mush-mouthed semi-literate, Broder sees FDR: "As a counterpuncher to criticism and as a doubt-free exponent of his own beliefs, the current president is right up there with the inventor of the New Deal."
While others were shocked at Bush's callous disregard for the lives of his fellow Americans during Hurricane Katrina, Broder wrote Katrina, "opens new opportunities for [Bush] to regain his standing with the public." (Or at least those members of the public who did not drown due to Bush's incompetence and inaction.)
In February of this year, when the Bush collapse was evident for all to see, the visionary Mr. Broder saw something else. "President Bush is poised for a political comeback," he wrote.
When asked recently if Bush was the worst President in history - a view shared by many eminent historians, including Sean Wilentz of Princeton, Broder replied, "I would not venture at this point whether President Bush will leave the country in better or worse shape than he found it. Internationally, the U.S. suffered setbacks during the Carter administration...." Jimmy Carter, of course, started no wars, invaded no countries, and got our hostages out of Iran alive. But this winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is compared to George W. Bush.
Perhaps Broder's bed-wetting tantrum against Reid was spurred by the certain knowledge that while Harry Reid has been telling hard truths, Mr. Broder has been falling hard for transparent lies.
Whereas Reid called for Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal long ago, Broder vouched for Rummy, writing, "Overall, Rumsfeld left me with the impression that he is aware of the risks of war with Iraq, but confident they can be handled."
While Reid has called for investigations into allegations Karl Rove broke the law, Broder vouches for Rove: "Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove.... I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of [Rove's] historic cabin...." Mighty cozy in Karl's cabin, isn't it, Mr. Broder?
I doubt very seriously that Harry Reid is bothered by Broder's comments. Reid has faced down Vegas mobsters who planted a bomb in his family car. He's unlikely to be intimidated by George W. Bush's housebroken lap-dog.
My guess is that Give 'Em Hell Harry is going to keep telling them the truth, and Mr. Broder is going to keep thinking it's hell. As George Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Media whores cower in their million-dollar penthouses, as US troops pay the price for their LIES, incompetence, and rah-rah-for-war propaganda....
Media whores Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire all had a chance to appear in Bill Moyer's documentary of the media's role in transmitting and amplifying the Bush-Cheney administration's "LIES-TO-WAR," but they all refused - cowering behind their multi-million dollar NYC and Washington, DC penthouse apartments, paid for in the currency of big media lies and administration sanctioned big business propaganda.
==========================================
'Devastating' Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week
By Greg Mitchell
Published: April 21, 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003574260
NEW YORK The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear on April 25, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week
While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.
The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."
Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."
At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.
But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don't think we followed up on this."
Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way, explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn't seem ridiculous."
Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light."
Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'"
Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, "Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails."
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters "do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something." But Moyers gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.
The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with "plagiarism."
Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a "quick war" with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote "a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war." The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration's case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would "editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times."
Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.
The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.
"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."
***
Greg Mitchell recalls his appearance with Moyers in April 2003 during the U.S. invasion: "Moyers and Me"
A recent column on civilian casualties in Iraq: "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor and author of seven books on politics and history, including two for Random House, "The Campaign of the Century" and "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady."
==========================================
'Devastating' Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week
By Greg Mitchell
Published: April 21, 2007
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003574260
NEW YORK The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear on April 25, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of "Bill Moyers Journal." E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week
While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility.
The war continues today, now in its fifth year, with the death toll for Americans and Iraqis rising again -- yet Moyers points out, "the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush Administration to go to war on false pretenses."
Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, "The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should've all been doing that."
At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire.
But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, "I don't think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war…We didn't dig enough. And we shouldn't have been fooled in this way." Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to "dig deeper," and he replies, "No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas….nope, I don't think we followed up on this."
Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a "softer" way, explaining to Moyers: "I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light – if that doesn't seem ridiculous."
Moyers replies: "Going to war, almost light."
Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'"
Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, "It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan" and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, "Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails."
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters "do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something." But Moyers gives credit to Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.
The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell's presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -- with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with "plagiarism."
Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
Moyers also throws some stats around: In the year before the invasion William Safire (who predicted a "quick war" with Iraqis cheering their liberators) wrote "a total of 27 opinion pieces fanning the sparks of war." The Washington Post carried at least 140 front-page stories in that same period making the administration's case for attack. In the six months leading to the invasion the Post would "editorialize in favor of the war at least 27 times."
Of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news in the six months before the war, almost all could be traced back to sources solely in the White House, Pentagon or State Dept., Moyers tells Russert, who offers no coherent reply.
The program closes on a sad note, with Moyers pointing out that "so many of the advocates and apologists for the war are still flourishing in the media." He then runs a pre-war clip of President Bush declaring, "We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then he explains: "The man who came up with it was Michael Gerson, President Bush's top speechwriter.
"He has left the White House and has been hired by the Washington Post as a columnist."
***
Greg Mitchell recalls his appearance with Moyers in April 2003 during the U.S. invasion: "Moyers and Me"
A recent column on civilian casualties in Iraq: "Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor and author of seven books on politics and history, including two for Random House, "The Campaign of the Century" and "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady."
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Fox 'news' no more than a PR organ of the Republican Party
As this screen-grab shows, the Republican National Senate Committee needs go no further than - Fox 'news' - to come up with campaign-friendly biographies and talking points for Republican Senators gearing up for election 2008.
FOX 'news' IS AN ORGANIZATION DEDICATED ENTIRELY to electing Republican candidates and maintaining Republican dominance of the US government - and not only do the Democrats have NO ANSWER to Fox 'news,' but the Democrats aren't even able to demand fairness or objectivity from the rest of the "major media" talk-shows and newscasts in covering life-and-death issues from the Iraq occupation to the abject corruption of FEMA, America's goverment disaster response agency that is treated by the Republican administration as a slush-fund dumping ground for party hacks and incompetent, unqualified, partisan officials.
---------------------------------------------------------------
National GOP Multimedia Web Page Is ... Entirely Fox 'News' Video Clips
By Eric Kleefeld
http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/apr/23/national_gop_multimedia_web_page_is_fox_news_video_clips
Great Moments In Fox News Dept. If there was any doubt left that Fox News is just a media organ of the Republican Party, then take a look at this screen capture of the National Republican Senatorial Committee's multimedia page. You might think the term "multimedia" would imply that it's a collection of stuff from various news organizations, plus in-house content from the NRSC. It turns out, though, that it's nothing but ... a collection of Fox News video clips. Every clip in the NRSC's "multimedia" section is from Fox:
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Frank Rich, NYT: Washington's "AMMORAL CULTURE" (and media whoring) have ENABLED the DECEIT of the Bush administration....
(note: Even the New York Times, like a broken clock, has to be right every so often. In this case, former "lifestyle" editor and writer FRANK RICH almost singlehandedly makes up for the serial and systematic lies of not just "the DC press corps," but of the New York Times as well, which in days gone by joined the Republican Party in making "LINCOLN BEDROOM!" and "White House TRASHING!" into synonyms for scandal - with NO 'there' THERE!) Would that the worst crisis facing America today were entirely FABRICATED, New York Times AMPLIFIED, fake scandals!
<< What's being lost in the Beltway uproar [the latest media farces of Paul Wolfowitz'a crony corruption at the World Bank, and Alberton Gonzales' even more farcical servility at the Department of Justice] is the extent to which THE LYING, CRONYISM, and ARROGANCE showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the LYING, CRONYISM, and ARROGANCE, that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, WASHINGTON [i.e. THE MAJOR MEDIA/press whores] is [/are] still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of DECEIT is the deliberate product of its AMMORAL CULTURE, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders. >>
==============================================
Frank Rich looks at the problems that await the Bush Cabal as their little Neo-Con fantasy world slowly melts down.
--The New York Times, April 22, 2007
President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he'll take six weeks to show his face - and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.
But he couldn't inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the "surge" was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg's. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.
At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.
Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.
Mr. Gonzales's politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration's legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America's image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn't end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales's reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.
Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik's longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president's spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had "no reason to believe" that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.
Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan's spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed - by Mr. Gonzales - and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to "questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption," not to mention a "friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime." Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.
Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most inopportune time for the Giuliani presidential campaign. But it's as a paradigm of the Bush White House's waging of the Iraq war that the Kerik case is most telling. The crucial point to remember is this: Even had there been no alleged improprieties in the former police chief's New York résumé, there still would have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any administration job.
The year before Mr. Kerik's nomination to the cabinet, he was dispatched by the president to take charge of training the Iraqi police - and completely failed at that mission. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable chronicle of Green Zone shenanigans, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Mr. Kerik slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile. Rather than train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque appraisals of the dandy shopping in Baghdad's markets.
Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force instead of hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian death squads, there might not now be extended tours for American troops in an open-ended escalation of the war. But in the White House's priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor third to cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik's P.R. usefulness as a symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an administration that has exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq invasion) and tacky (in 2004 campaign ads).
Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had commandeered an apartment assigned to ground zero police and rescue workers to carry out his extramarital tryst with the publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr. Wolfowitz's scandal is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the judgment of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported, he also helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high at the Pentagon in 2003. No one seems to know what she actually accomplished there, but the bill was paid by a Defense Department contractor that has since come under official scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance. So it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.
You don't have to be a cynic to ask if the White House's practice of bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war might be a form of hush money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the World Bank despite a Pentagon record that included (in part) his prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about W.M.D. and a nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his public humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared tell Congress (correctly) that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq after the invasion. Once the war began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national security to bar businesses from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from competing for major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected companies, including the one that employed Ms. Riza.
Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its organs. It's no surprise that one United States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy couldn't possibly win a war.
Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its confrontation over the war's endgame, our desperate president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11 incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it's clear that he's the one with reason to be afraid.
<< What's being lost in the Beltway uproar [the latest media farces of Paul Wolfowitz'a crony corruption at the World Bank, and Alberton Gonzales' even more farcical servility at the Department of Justice] is the extent to which THE LYING, CRONYISM, and ARROGANCE showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the LYING, CRONYISM, and ARROGANCE, that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, WASHINGTON [i.e. THE MAJOR MEDIA/press whores] is [/are] still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of DECEIT is the deliberate product of its AMMORAL CULTURE, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders. >>
==============================================
Frank Rich looks at the problems that await the Bush Cabal as their little Neo-Con fantasy world slowly melts down.
--The New York Times, April 22, 2007
President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he'll take six weeks to show his face - and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.
But he couldn't inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope of the "surge" was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg's. McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for this war.
At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.
Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.
Mr. Gonzales's politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when he helped shape the administration's legal argument to justify torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that destroyed America's image and gave terrorists a moral victory. But his efforts to sabotage national security didn't end there. In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales's reckless role in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of homeland security in December 2004.
Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then, the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single, nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik's longtime patron, Rudy Giuliani. The president's spokesman at the time, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had "no reason to believe" that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had been rushed.
Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know that Mr. McClellan's spin was no more accurate than his exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed - by Mr. Gonzales - and the administration had every reason to believe that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr. Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze with red flags pointing to "questionable financial deals, an ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy prosecuted for corruption," not to mention a "friendship with a businessman who was linked to organized crime." Yet Mr. Gonzales and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22 agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in the post-9/11 era.
Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most inopportune time for the Giuliani presidential campaign. But it's as a paradigm of the Bush White House's waging of the Iraq war that the Kerik case is most telling. The crucial point to remember is this: Even had there been no alleged improprieties in the former police chief's New York résumé, there still would have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any administration job.
The year before Mr. Kerik's nomination to the cabinet, he was dispatched by the president to take charge of training the Iraqi police - and completely failed at that mission. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable chronicle of Green Zone shenanigans, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Mr. Kerik slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile. Rather than train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque appraisals of the dandy shopping in Baghdad's markets.
Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force instead of hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian death squads, there might not now be extended tours for American troops in an open-ended escalation of the war. But in the White House's priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor third to cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik's P.R. usefulness as a symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an administration that has exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq invasion) and tacky (in 2004 campaign ads).
Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had commandeered an apartment assigned to ground zero police and rescue workers to carry out his extramarital tryst with the publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr. Wolfowitz's scandal is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the judgment of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported, he also helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high at the Pentagon in 2003. No one seems to know what she actually accomplished there, but the bill was paid by a Defense Department contractor that has since come under official scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance. So it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.
You don't have to be a cynic to ask if the White House's practice of bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war might be a form of hush money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the World Bank despite a Pentagon record that included (in part) his prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about W.M.D. and a nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his public humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared tell Congress (correctly) that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq after the invasion. Once the war began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national security to bar businesses from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from competing for major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected companies, including the one that employed Ms. Riza.
Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its organs. It's no surprise that one United States attorney fired without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department, Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy couldn't possibly win a war.
Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its confrontation over the war's endgame, our desperate president is reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11 incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it's clear that he's the one with reason to be afraid.
Va Tech Student Govt. to Media: "Please LEAVE us by Monday so we can get on with our lives..."
We here at MediaWhoresUSA.blogspot, who have been following the often awful tendencies of the "Major Media" for years now, do not necessarily believe that "the media" crossed the line into what singer and Eagles songwriter Don Henley once described in his song "Dirty Laundry" as the media's often ghoulish fascination with mass death - "the bubble headed bleach blond [news anchor]comes on at 5... she will tell yo about the plane crash - with a gleam in her eye."
On the other hand, even within the story of the mass shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, you could tell that the corporate media was sticking to their script: that guns are an American right to self-defense, and that the troubled gunman had fallen through the cracks of the school's and state's public health establishments - but otherwise it is back to BUSINESS AS USUAL, with Virginia remaining a national center for what has been called modern American "gun running."
Without further analyzing the shootings, we will simply let the Student Government speak for the students: they would like to get on with their lives, and if the media networks have IMAGES and STORIES to SELL - let it be of something other than the grieving students on campus. No matter how many couch-potato Americans would bolster TV ratings by getting an endless dose of the emotional/macabre story - please just leave them alone.
__________________________________________________
Pastor Urges Va. Tech Back to Campus
Adam Geller and Chris Kahn, AP
April 22, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070422/virginia-tech-shooting
BLACKSBURG, Va. — As pastor of Blacksburg Baptist Church, Tommy McDearis was called on to tell more than 20 families a loved one had fallen victim to Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho.
On Sunday, he urged his congregation and the university to put the pain of the rampage behind them by returning to classes Monday.
"If we give up in the face of this situation, if we quit doing all of the things that really matter in life because this darkness has visited us, then we are going to surrender to the darkness," McDearis said.
McDearis delivered his sermon Sunday as students who had left school following the massacre returned to campus. He told the story of a professor devastated by the deaths of several of his students at Norris Hall, where Cho killed 30 students and faculty members before turning the gun on himself.
The professor said he didn't know if he could come back. But failing to doing so, he said, would be a betrayal of the memories, hopes and dreams of the victims.
"There is no way that any of them would ever look at us and want us to give up," McDearis said. "We owe them more than to just throw in the towel."
In getting ready for the resumption of classes, the university's student government asked hundreds of reporters to leave campus by Monday morning.
Student government spokeswoman Liz Hart said the campus appreciates the reporting on the Virginia Tech story, but students are ready to move forward.
"The best way to know how to do that is get the campus back to normal," she said. "That includes being able to go back to class, to get back into our normal routine as much as a possible without being held back by anything external, reminding us that it will be a difficult road. We already know it."
Yellow crime-scene tape still surrounded the perimeter of Norris Hall, which will be closed for the rest of the semester. Some people snapped photos of the building; others gazed at it solemnly, with bowed heads.
Elsewhere on campus, students toted laundry and suitcases as they headed for their dorms. On the Drillfield at the center of campus, sophomore Ashleigh Shifflett sat with her sister Regan, a 2005 graduate.
Shifflett left campus Tuesday for her home in Maryland and returned to campus Saturday.
"When we ... could see the campus, we both started crying," Shifflett said. "I was happy to see my family, but I felt like I needed to be here, and when I came back here, it was like I'm home."
Meanwhile, state medical examiners completed autopsies on all 32 victims and Cho. Dr. William Massello, the assistant medical examiner based in Roanoke, said he was not sure whether all the bodies had been released to families, but all were ready.
Cho was not especially accurate with his shots, Massello said, but hit many of the victims several times. His shots caused more than 100 wounds.
The investigation into Cho continues, with computer forensics appearing to play a key role. The gunman, a sullen loner who appeared to have few if any friends, bought ammunition clips on eBay designed for one of two handguns used to kill 32 people and himself.
The eBay account and other Internet activities provide insight into how Cho may have plotted for the rampage, including the purchase of several empty ammo clips about three weeks before the attack.
Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said the purchase of the clips from a Web vendor based in Idaho was legal and that the company has cooperated with authorities. Attempts to reach the Idaho dealer were unsuccessful.
Authorities are also examining the personal computers found in Cho's dorm room and seeking his cell-phone records.
Cho, 23, also used the eBay account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.
A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho's e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.
One question investigators hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.
On March 22, Cho bought at least two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named "oneclickshooting," which sells gun accessories and other items. It appears that he bought three Walther P22 clips in that purchase, but the seller could not be reached for comment.
Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year's Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.
"The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class," Cho wrote on the site.
He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.
Andy Koch, Cho's roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn't have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.
"We took him to one football game," he said. "We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game."
Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.
On the other hand, even within the story of the mass shooting at the Virginia Tech campus, you could tell that the corporate media was sticking to their script: that guns are an American right to self-defense, and that the troubled gunman had fallen through the cracks of the school's and state's public health establishments - but otherwise it is back to BUSINESS AS USUAL, with Virginia remaining a national center for what has been called modern American "gun running."
Without further analyzing the shootings, we will simply let the Student Government speak for the students: they would like to get on with their lives, and if the media networks have IMAGES and STORIES to SELL - let it be of something other than the grieving students on campus. No matter how many couch-potato Americans would bolster TV ratings by getting an endless dose of the emotional/macabre story - please just leave them alone.
__________________________________________________
Pastor Urges Va. Tech Back to Campus
Adam Geller and Chris Kahn, AP
April 22, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20070422/virginia-tech-shooting
BLACKSBURG, Va. — As pastor of Blacksburg Baptist Church, Tommy McDearis was called on to tell more than 20 families a loved one had fallen victim to Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho.
On Sunday, he urged his congregation and the university to put the pain of the rampage behind them by returning to classes Monday.
"If we give up in the face of this situation, if we quit doing all of the things that really matter in life because this darkness has visited us, then we are going to surrender to the darkness," McDearis said.
McDearis delivered his sermon Sunday as students who had left school following the massacre returned to campus. He told the story of a professor devastated by the deaths of several of his students at Norris Hall, where Cho killed 30 students and faculty members before turning the gun on himself.
The professor said he didn't know if he could come back. But failing to doing so, he said, would be a betrayal of the memories, hopes and dreams of the victims.
"There is no way that any of them would ever look at us and want us to give up," McDearis said. "We owe them more than to just throw in the towel."
In getting ready for the resumption of classes, the university's student government asked hundreds of reporters to leave campus by Monday morning.
Student government spokeswoman Liz Hart said the campus appreciates the reporting on the Virginia Tech story, but students are ready to move forward.
"The best way to know how to do that is get the campus back to normal," she said. "That includes being able to go back to class, to get back into our normal routine as much as a possible without being held back by anything external, reminding us that it will be a difficult road. We already know it."
Yellow crime-scene tape still surrounded the perimeter of Norris Hall, which will be closed for the rest of the semester. Some people snapped photos of the building; others gazed at it solemnly, with bowed heads.
Elsewhere on campus, students toted laundry and suitcases as they headed for their dorms. On the Drillfield at the center of campus, sophomore Ashleigh Shifflett sat with her sister Regan, a 2005 graduate.
Shifflett left campus Tuesday for her home in Maryland and returned to campus Saturday.
"When we ... could see the campus, we both started crying," Shifflett said. "I was happy to see my family, but I felt like I needed to be here, and when I came back here, it was like I'm home."
Meanwhile, state medical examiners completed autopsies on all 32 victims and Cho. Dr. William Massello, the assistant medical examiner based in Roanoke, said he was not sure whether all the bodies had been released to families, but all were ready.
Cho was not especially accurate with his shots, Massello said, but hit many of the victims several times. His shots caused more than 100 wounds.
The investigation into Cho continues, with computer forensics appearing to play a key role. The gunman, a sullen loner who appeared to have few if any friends, bought ammunition clips on eBay designed for one of two handguns used to kill 32 people and himself.
The eBay account and other Internet activities provide insight into how Cho may have plotted for the rampage, including the purchase of several empty ammo clips about three weeks before the attack.
Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said the purchase of the clips from a Web vendor based in Idaho was legal and that the company has cooperated with authorities. Attempts to reach the Idaho dealer were unsuccessful.
Authorities are also examining the personal computers found in Cho's dorm room and seeking his cell-phone records.
Cho, 23, also used the eBay account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.
A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho's e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.
One question investigators hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.
On March 22, Cho bought at least two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named "oneclickshooting," which sells gun accessories and other items. It appears that he bought three Walther P22 clips in that purchase, but the seller could not be reached for comment.
Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year's Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.
"The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class," Cho wrote on the site.
He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.
Andy Koch, Cho's roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn't have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.
"We took him to one football game," he said. "We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game."
Associated Press writers Kristen Gelineau and Allen G. Breed contributed to this report.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Washington Post soft-sells for Gonzales, Bush, with "chastise" headline for Gonzales' disgraceful testimony...
Under oath in front of a Senate committee today, the nation's top enforcement officer - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales - perjured himself by telling the nation a string of lies, pleading "I DON'T REMEMBER" over 100 times onissues, policies, discussions, and in particular the mass firings ("purging") of US Attorneys that has been the signature "leadership" initiative of the Department of Justice since Mr. Gonzales took the helm of that department.
As can be expected, THE WHORES at the Washington Post SOFT-SELL this betrayal of America's justice system, by giving an innocuous headline to their coverage of Gonzales' disgraceful testimony - "Senators CHASTIZE Gonzales at Hearing." Contrast this anemic headline with what the headlines the WHORE Post used when trying to turn the Clinton's overnight guest list into a scandal (the - gasp! - "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL!") or the Webster Hubell conviction for - overbilling clients?! - into a major scandal - WHILE THE WHORE POST TURNS A BLIND EYE to the current Vice President's ONGOING FINANCIAL REWARD for his extensive efforts to hand billion-dollar government contracts to- HALLIBURTON corporation, the company Mr. Cheney was once Chairman and CEO of!
The WASHINGTON POST is the most despicable organization in the entire American "news" industry - and they are HAPPY to cover for a perjurous Attorney General.
----------------------------------------
Senators Chastise Gonzales at Hearing
Members of His Own Party Pile On as Attorney General Defends Firings
By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 20, 2007; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902935.html?hpid=topnews
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales came under withering attack from members of his own party yesterday over the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, facing the first resignation demand from a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and doubts from others about his candor and his ability to lead the Justice Department.
As can be expected, THE WHORES at the Washington Post SOFT-SELL this betrayal of America's justice system, by giving an innocuous headline to their coverage of Gonzales' disgraceful testimony - "Senators CHASTIZE Gonzales at Hearing." Contrast this anemic headline with what the headlines the WHORE Post used when trying to turn the Clinton's overnight guest list into a scandal (the - gasp! - "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL!") or the Webster Hubell conviction for - overbilling clients?! - into a major scandal - WHILE THE WHORE POST TURNS A BLIND EYE to the current Vice President's ONGOING FINANCIAL REWARD for his extensive efforts to hand billion-dollar government contracts to- HALLIBURTON corporation, the company Mr. Cheney was once Chairman and CEO of!
The WASHINGTON POST is the most despicable organization in the entire American "news" industry - and they are HAPPY to cover for a perjurous Attorney General.
----------------------------------------
Senators Chastise Gonzales at Hearing
Members of His Own Party Pile On as Attorney General Defends Firings
By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 20, 2007; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902935.html?hpid=topnews
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales came under withering attack from members of his own party yesterday over the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, facing the first resignation demand from a Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and doubts from others about his candor and his ability to lead the Justice Department.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Washington Post is Cheney's megaphone for SMEAR ATTACKS on Nancy Pelosi...
(click our headline-link for ThinkProgress' original story, complete with a full set of hot-links documenting the article we highlight below.)
- -IF the cowardly, craven, lying, and corrupt editors and publishers of the WASHINGTON POST stuck to reporting the facts - honestly and with a minimum of "spin" or bias - George W. Bush would never have "won" the election of 2000, the New York World Trade Center towers would probably still be standing, and the US Army and Marines would not be bogged down in Iraq, making new enemies in the Muslim world by the score every time a US Air Force bombing attack wipes out an entire family in its bomb runs on "suspected insurgent positions."
Indeed, were the situation reversed: would a President Al Gore's SECRETARY OF DEFENSE and VICE PRESIDENT (both of them former Secretaries of Defense from a decade earlier) done EXACTLY NOTHING when warned, IN PERSON, by BOTH the CIA Director (George Tenet) and 'Counter Terror Czar' (Richard Clarke), in JULY of 2001 that "AL QAIDA WAS DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA," probably by hijacking or attacking US airliners, then the WASHINGTON POST would have long ago been LEADING the nation-wide calls for a President Gore's impeachment.
Instead, because the Post is so horribly corrupted, all of America gives Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, a FREE PASS for DOING EXACTLY NOTHING when Clarke and Tenet made those urgent, in-person, "system is blinking red" warnings to the sitting Vice President and sitting Secretary of Defense!
And, in typical SMEAR-MOB fashion, the craven, cowardly, corrupt Washington Post is LEADING the Right-Wing assault on Speaker Pelosi, for trying to provide America with SOME kind of leadership alternative to the treacherous, arguably traitorous, 'leadership' of Bush, Cheney, and former Secretary of War Rumsfeld.
--------------------------------
Sources for our comments:
#1. Rumsfeld did EXACTLY NOTHING when warned, in person, by CIA Director George Tenet that Al Qaida was likely planning to attack IN AMERICA:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29account.html
<< Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld WAS IMPEDING THE EFFORT to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda. >>
#2. From the same source (NYT review of WP writer Bob Woodward's book, "State of Denial," written with many first-person accounts from within the Bush-Cheney White House)
<< On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously. >>
#3. There are legions of sources that document that the warnings National Security Advisor Rice recived were also shared between Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Ashcroft. Indeed, in his biographical account of the weeks leading up to the 9-11 attack, 'Counter Terror Czar' Richard Clarke complained that he had communicated his desires to hold a "PRINCIPLES MEETING" to discuss the Al Qaida threat (Al Qaida had attacked the USS Cole with a suicide bomb in Yemen just 8 months earlier) BUT WAS REPEATEDLY REBUFFED by Vice President Cheney.
<< The response in the Bush administration was that it was inappropriate for me to be asking for a principles meeting. >>
We also have this CNN article,
this official Democratic Senate outline "Vice President Cheney's task force on terrorism never met"; this CBS news article "Ashcroft given 'THREAT ASSESMENT' and stopped flying on public airliners in JULY of 2001"; and this Truthout.org article which ties all the above together: that Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and Cheney WERE WARNED that "Al Qaida was DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA," yet these three leaders of America's law enforcement, defense, and national security establishments DID EXACTLY NOTHING - besides get the Attorney General out of the line of fire, while allowing American airline passengers and aircrews to remain exposed, like sitting ducks.
(Bonus citation: Also in July of 2001, the Italian police and secret service established batteries of SURFACE-to-AIR MISSILES around the port city of Genoa, Italy, specifically to protect the assembled presidents attending the G-8 economic summit from BEING ATTACKED BY AIRLINERS HIJACKED by Al Qaida terrorists to be used as flying bombs - a threat which Al Qaida (or someone posing as Al Qaida) actually called in to security forces there!
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/17/genoa.security/
<< The Italian authorities' security measures also include the positioning of surface-to-air missiles at Genoa's Christopher Columbus airport. Dubbed the SPADA, the land-based system consists of missiles capable of a range of 15 kilometres (9.3 miles).
The ministry said the decision to install the missiles is not excessive.
"There's no excessive precaution," military spokesman Colonel Alberto Battaglini told Reuters. "The measure, which was planned by the previous government, may seem open to criticism, but in reality it is merely to act as a deterrent against any aerial incursion during the summit." >>
==============================
Evidence Emerging Of Cheney-Led Smear Campaign Against Pelosi Over Syria Trip
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/14/evidence-pelosi-white-house/
Before Nancy Pelosi left Israel to travel to Syria earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokeswoman Miri Eisin said “Pelosi is conveying that Israel is willing to talk if they (Syria) would openly take steps to stop supporting terrorism.” Pelosi delivered as requested, and this week received a thank you call from Olmert. So why then did the Israeli Prime Minister originally issue a statement of “clarification” about Pelosi’s message which became the basis for right-wing attacks against her?
The evidence of White House involvement behind the Israeli Prime Minister’s statement has been growing this past week. Middle East analysts have suggested Bush deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams — a close ally of Dick Cheney — may have been coordinating the attempts to undermine Pelosi’s trip. “‘It’s obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,’ said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. ‘I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.’”
Rep. Henry Waxman suggested that the White House’s coordinated attempts to smear Pelosi were part of an effort to undermine her on Iraq:
Waxman said the administration is focused on building a case against the Democrats in preparation for a showdown over the Iraq War funding bill. The more they can paint Democrats as weak and irresponsible, the more likely the Democrats will knuckle under and let the president continue the war unchecked. It’s been known to happen.
So Cheney trashes the reputation of men like Lantos and Waxman (who, by the way, has doggedly pursued waste and mismanagement in Iraq by Halliburton, the company that made Cheney rich), and it’s politics as usual.
This is not unchartered territory for Cheney. He has become famous for kneecapping people with whom he disagrees, even individuals within the administration. Middle East experts recalled Cheney’s involvement in a similar situation last year:
Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.
The Cheney campaign against Pelosi hasn’t let up. This week, the Washington Post editorial board — which has helped drive the Pelosi smear campaign from the beginning — published an attack piece from Liz Cheney, the daughter of the Vice President.
- -IF the cowardly, craven, lying, and corrupt editors and publishers of the WASHINGTON POST stuck to reporting the facts - honestly and with a minimum of "spin" or bias - George W. Bush would never have "won" the election of 2000, the New York World Trade Center towers would probably still be standing, and the US Army and Marines would not be bogged down in Iraq, making new enemies in the Muslim world by the score every time a US Air Force bombing attack wipes out an entire family in its bomb runs on "suspected insurgent positions."
Indeed, were the situation reversed: would a President Al Gore's SECRETARY OF DEFENSE and VICE PRESIDENT (both of them former Secretaries of Defense from a decade earlier) done EXACTLY NOTHING when warned, IN PERSON, by BOTH the CIA Director (George Tenet) and 'Counter Terror Czar' (Richard Clarke), in JULY of 2001 that "AL QAIDA WAS DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA," probably by hijacking or attacking US airliners, then the WASHINGTON POST would have long ago been LEADING the nation-wide calls for a President Gore's impeachment.
Instead, because the Post is so horribly corrupted, all of America gives Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, a FREE PASS for DOING EXACTLY NOTHING when Clarke and Tenet made those urgent, in-person, "system is blinking red" warnings to the sitting Vice President and sitting Secretary of Defense!
And, in typical SMEAR-MOB fashion, the craven, cowardly, corrupt Washington Post is LEADING the Right-Wing assault on Speaker Pelosi, for trying to provide America with SOME kind of leadership alternative to the treacherous, arguably traitorous, 'leadership' of Bush, Cheney, and former Secretary of War Rumsfeld.
--------------------------------
Sources for our comments:
#1. Rumsfeld did EXACTLY NOTHING when warned, in person, by CIA Director George Tenet that Al Qaida was likely planning to attack IN AMERICA:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29account.html
<< Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld WAS IMPEDING THE EFFORT to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda. >>
#2. From the same source (NYT review of WP writer Bob Woodward's book, "State of Denial," written with many first-person accounts from within the Bush-Cheney White House)
<< On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously. >>
#3. There are legions of sources that document that the warnings National Security Advisor Rice recived were also shared between Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Ashcroft. Indeed, in his biographical account of the weeks leading up to the 9-11 attack, 'Counter Terror Czar' Richard Clarke complained that he had communicated his desires to hold a "PRINCIPLES MEETING" to discuss the Al Qaida threat (Al Qaida had attacked the USS Cole with a suicide bomb in Yemen just 8 months earlier) BUT WAS REPEATEDLY REBUFFED by Vice President Cheney.
<< The response in the Bush administration was that it was inappropriate for me to be asking for a principles meeting. >>
We also have this CNN article,
this official Democratic Senate outline "Vice President Cheney's task force on terrorism never met"; this CBS news article "Ashcroft given 'THREAT ASSESMENT' and stopped flying on public airliners in JULY of 2001"; and this Truthout.org article which ties all the above together: that Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and Cheney WERE WARNED that "Al Qaida was DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA," yet these three leaders of America's law enforcement, defense, and national security establishments DID EXACTLY NOTHING - besides get the Attorney General out of the line of fire, while allowing American airline passengers and aircrews to remain exposed, like sitting ducks.
(Bonus citation: Also in July of 2001, the Italian police and secret service established batteries of SURFACE-to-AIR MISSILES around the port city of Genoa, Italy, specifically to protect the assembled presidents attending the G-8 economic summit from BEING ATTACKED BY AIRLINERS HIJACKED by Al Qaida terrorists to be used as flying bombs - a threat which Al Qaida (or someone posing as Al Qaida) actually called in to security forces there!
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/17/genoa.security/
<< The Italian authorities' security measures also include the positioning of surface-to-air missiles at Genoa's Christopher Columbus airport. Dubbed the SPADA, the land-based system consists of missiles capable of a range of 15 kilometres (9.3 miles).
The ministry said the decision to install the missiles is not excessive.
"There's no excessive precaution," military spokesman Colonel Alberto Battaglini told Reuters. "The measure, which was planned by the previous government, may seem open to criticism, but in reality it is merely to act as a deterrent against any aerial incursion during the summit." >>
==============================
Evidence Emerging Of Cheney-Led Smear Campaign Against Pelosi Over Syria Trip
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/14/evidence-pelosi-white-house/
Before Nancy Pelosi left Israel to travel to Syria earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokeswoman Miri Eisin said “Pelosi is conveying that Israel is willing to talk if they (Syria) would openly take steps to stop supporting terrorism.” Pelosi delivered as requested, and this week received a thank you call from Olmert. So why then did the Israeli Prime Minister originally issue a statement of “clarification” about Pelosi’s message which became the basis for right-wing attacks against her?
The evidence of White House involvement behind the Israeli Prime Minister’s statement has been growing this past week. Middle East analysts have suggested Bush deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams — a close ally of Dick Cheney — may have been coordinating the attempts to undermine Pelosi’s trip. “‘It’s obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,’ said Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA), a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. ‘I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.’”
Rep. Henry Waxman suggested that the White House’s coordinated attempts to smear Pelosi were part of an effort to undermine her on Iraq:
Waxman said the administration is focused on building a case against the Democrats in preparation for a showdown over the Iraq War funding bill. The more they can paint Democrats as weak and irresponsible, the more likely the Democrats will knuckle under and let the president continue the war unchecked. It’s been known to happen.
So Cheney trashes the reputation of men like Lantos and Waxman (who, by the way, has doggedly pursued waste and mismanagement in Iraq by Halliburton, the company that made Cheney rich), and it’s politics as usual.
This is not unchartered territory for Cheney. He has become famous for kneecapping people with whom he disagrees, even individuals within the administration. Middle East experts recalled Cheney’s involvement in a similar situation last year:
Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.
The Cheney campaign against Pelosi hasn’t let up. This week, the Washington Post editorial board — which has helped drive the Pelosi smear campaign from the beginning — published an attack piece from Liz Cheney, the daughter of the Vice President.
Friday, April 13, 2007
ABC 'news' knowingly whored the "Saddam Anthrax!" story based on abject lies....
File this one under "media majors complicit in innuendo, false assertions, and outright LIES-to-War: Glen Grenwald, in a long, thoroughly referenced article, documents the LIES that ABC told its viewers in October and December of 2001 that SADDAM HUSSEIN was behind the ANTHRAX TERROR ATTACKS - deadly letters placed in the US mail, just shortly after the terror of the 9-11 hijack/airliner bombings in New York and Washington. And what this excellent Greenwald article fails to mention is that the major media players HAD A RESPONSIBILITY to notice the TARGETS of those anthrax attacks - a National Enquirer subsidiary photo-editor killed in Florida, and the Senate offices of Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in their DC government offices - and employ a minimum amount of skeptisism that they were indeed the targets of "Arab extremist" terrorists. For the simple fact is that no self-respecting Al Qaida terrorist would target TOM DASCHLE and PATRICK LEAHY for deadly anthrax letters, when they could sow confusion and despair in other, more prominent targets, such as the White House and Pentagon. Even more preposterous, that someone with the skill and patience to put such deadly letters together (without killing themselves or their neighbors) would use clumsy, almost childish WARNINGS to broadcast the threat to the intended targets, allowing those potential victims time to take Cipro immunization shots.
But, clearly, ABC 'news' and the major media fell for the "Anthrax attacks from Saddam's Iraq!" notion hook, line, and sinker. In reality, Senator Tom Daschle was most famous as the Democratic OPPOSITION leader to the Bush White House; and Patrick Leahy was the Chairman of the Senator Judiciary Committee, WHICH WAS PUTTING THE BRAKES on the "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act" that the White House and Republican Congress were hurriedly pushing by the Democratic controlled Senate - trying to avoid ANY oversight or notice of some of the draconian provisions of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act altogether. The American press/media HAD A RESPONSIBILITY to juse some objective, professional skepticism in this tragic chain of events, but utterly FAILED to do so. Greenwald says it better than we have:
<< The attempt to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks was just as fraudulent -- and just as significant -- as the attempt to link Saddam to 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear weapons. Brian Ross and ABC played a key role in that part of the fraud, yet have never accounted for their conduct. >>
===========================================
The unresolved story of ABC News' FALSE Saddam-anthrax reports
by Glen Greenwald, Salon.com
Monday April 9, 2007
(updated below - updated again)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/09/abc_anthrax/index.html
At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross' new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross -- back in October and November 2001 -- were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.
Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross -- here and here -- but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that -- and these are all quotes:
(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";
(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";
(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";
(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program"; and,
(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."
At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources."
All of those factual claims -- each and every one of them, separately -- were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports -- reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq. There are two vital questions that ABC News should answer:
(1) How can ABC News just let these Saddam-anthrax reports -- as false as they were consequential -- remain uncorrected and unexplained, even through today?
(2) More importantly, Ross claimed at the time, and there is no reason to doubt it, that these false reports -- clearly designed to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks in the eyes of Americans -- were fed to him by "at least four well-placed sources." Who were the well-placed, multiple sources feeding ABC News completely fictitious claims linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks, including false claims about the results of government tests? What possible justification is there for concealing the identity of those who manipulated ABC to disseminate these fictitious claims?
But, clearly, ABC 'news' and the major media fell for the "Anthrax attacks from Saddam's Iraq!" notion hook, line, and sinker. In reality, Senator Tom Daschle was most famous as the Democratic OPPOSITION leader to the Bush White House; and Patrick Leahy was the Chairman of the Senator Judiciary Committee, WHICH WAS PUTTING THE BRAKES on the "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act" that the White House and Republican Congress were hurriedly pushing by the Democratic controlled Senate - trying to avoid ANY oversight or notice of some of the draconian provisions of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act altogether. The American press/media HAD A RESPONSIBILITY to juse some objective, professional skepticism in this tragic chain of events, but utterly FAILED to do so. Greenwald says it better than we have:
<< The attempt to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks was just as fraudulent -- and just as significant -- as the attempt to link Saddam to 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear weapons. Brian Ross and ABC played a key role in that part of the fraud, yet have never accounted for their conduct. >>
===========================================
The unresolved story of ABC News' FALSE Saddam-anthrax reports
by Glen Greenwald, Salon.com
Monday April 9, 2007
(updated below - updated again)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/09/abc_anthrax/index.html
At the end of the post I wrote last week about ABC News and Brian Ross' new report that Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2009, I noted that ABC and Ross -- back in October and November 2001 -- were the driving force, really the exclusive force, behind news reports strongly suggesting that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the anthrax attacks on the U.S. There are several very important issues arising from those events which I strongly believe merit real attention. This post is somewhat lengthy because it is vital to set forth the facts clearly.
Last week, I excerpted several of the Saddam-anthrax reports from ABC and Ross -- here and here -- but there are others. ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that -- and these are all quotes:
(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";
(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";
(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";
(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program"; and,
(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."
At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources."
All of those factual claims -- each and every one of them, separately -- were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so. There is now no question about that. Yet neither ABC nor Ross have ever retracted, corrected, clarified, or explained these fraudulent reports -- reports which, as documented below, had an extremely serious impact on the views formed by Americans in those early, critical days about the relationship between the 9/11 attacks, the anthrax attacks and Iraq. There are two vital questions that ABC News should answer:
(1) How can ABC News just let these Saddam-anthrax reports -- as false as they were consequential -- remain uncorrected and unexplained, even through today?
(2) More importantly, Ross claimed at the time, and there is no reason to doubt it, that these false reports -- clearly designed to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks in the eyes of Americans -- were fed to him by "at least four well-placed sources." Who were the well-placed, multiple sources feeding ABC News completely fictitious claims linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks, including false claims about the results of government tests? What possible justification is there for concealing the identity of those who manipulated ABC to disseminate these fictitious claims?
Thursday, April 12, 2007
IMUS fired from MSNBC TV for his racist slur of Rutgers women's basketball team...
(click our headline-link for the full story from the New York Times:)
NBC News dropped Don Imus yesterday, canceling his talk show on its MSNBC cable news channel a week after he made a racially disparaging remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
The move came after several days of widening calls for Mr. Imus to lose his show both on MSNBC, which simulcasts the “Imus in the Morning” show, and CBS Radio, which originates the show.
-----------------------------------------
Below is a great op-ed we caught by Clarence Page - an African-American reporter who has been on Imus' show - highlighting the ups-and-downs of Imus' career. Imus' major "up" was mastering the talk-radio shtick of skirting close to the edge of controversy over the 3 decades of his career, without crossing it so badly that he got fired. As a talk-radio survivor with an edgy show, he gradually amassed a listening audience, which commanded him a fortune in America's mega-media infotainment industry.
But there was nothing exceptional about Imus' show.
He did interview top candidates, news-makers, and 'news personalities' - the talking heads who now dominate the nation's news and political discourse. (Aside: WILLIAM SAFIRE, of the NEW YORK TIMES, was demonstratively WRONG about almost EVERYTHING he ever wrote about the Clintons - "indictments will be handed down to the Clintons later this week!" was only the most fervid of Safire's "journalistic" excesses given unrestrained syndication from the whore Times - but in part because of Safire's relentless haranguing, the Republicans were able to create a $70 million Ken Starr "independent" Whitewater investigation- into a routine real-estate flop in which the Clintons lost $250,000! The "Whitewater" financial witch hunt of course morphed into the "Monica- did she, or didn't she?" scandal, which led to the Republcian lame-duck impeachment of President Clinton.)
In interviewing top candidates and news personalities, Imus has been far less deferential to his guests (much less reverential) than on most typical news interviews, so he has been able to ask more pressing questions, for example asking Kerry directly about his "wimp" or "flip-flopper" images re the Iraq war. (Unlike Katie Couric's interview of the Edwards, where Couric thought that harping on one question - Elizabeth Edward's cancer diagnosis - was an in-depth interview.)
But Imus' caustic brand of biting interview left our political discourse only slightly better informed than before we heard candidates grovel at his microphone, and in the end Imus is a big part of the CYNICISM that, until recently, led the American people to feel that they were HELPLESS in the face of STOLEN VOTES, rigged voting machines, FEMA incompetence after Katrina, lies-to-war, etc., etc., etc.
Oh - and is now a good time to remind that TIMMOTHY McVEIGH blew up the Oklahoma City Government building - only after listening to years worth of RIGHT-WING HATE RADIO?? Including such "MORAL VALUES" stalwarts as convicted Watergate burglar G. GORDON LIDDY telling his hate-radio listeners that, when shooting at "jack-booted federal law enforcement officers" one should "aim at the head to avid hitting body armor."
--------------------------------------------------
Don Imus' trail of woe
2-week suspension is dust-up's only surprise
by Clarence Page
April 11, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0704100426apr11,1,6159157.column?coll=chi-news-hed
WASHINGTON -- As she faced the world's television cameras to respond to a gross insult by radio and television showman Don Imus, a member of the Rutgers University women's basketball team spoke volumes with one sentence:
"I'm not a ho," she said Tuesday at the team's first news conference after the incident that history may well remember as the Don Imus "nappy-headed hos" eruption. "I'm a woman and . . . I'm somebody's child," she added.
Indeed, she is. So are the rest of Rutgers' Scarlet Knights. And anybody who would make them out to be anything else should be ashamed. Unfortunately, shame is in short supply in the field of shock radio.
Just before the Easter weekend, Imus apparently thought he could get away with a brief apology at the beginning of his program for his racially charged remarks. But by Monday the controversy had percolated to the boiling point. Civil rights activists called for him to be fired. He was apologizing all day long, including on Rev. Al Sharpton's syndicated radio program.
By day's end, his employers, CBS Radio and MSNBC, had suspended Imus for two weeks.
The Imus controversy was not a big surprise to me, although the punishment was. Back in 2001, I led Imus in an on-air pledge in which he promised to avoid humor that relied on inflammatory racial or gender stereotypes, including "simian references to black athletes" and other abuses of which he had been accused.
I had been part of his stable of journalists and commentators who appeared on his show for more than five years. We were invited to the show to offer political views. He took the pledge and we continued with our usual interview, although interestingly I have not been invited back since.
That's probably not surprising. For more than three decades Imus has been one of America's most popular radio personalities, combining some of the shock-jock elements of a Howard Stern, for example, with the irreverent political sense of, say, a Bill O'Reilly.
But when you dance along the edge, you run the risk of slipping. What made the backlash from the Rutgers statement more serious than his previous dust-ups? For one, it was such an obvious cheap shot. The rich and famous, such as Paris Hilton or Whitney Houston, might be fair game, but why pick on a group of college women basketball players?
Second, it was a slow holiday news weekend, which only brought additional attention, spurred by insatiable 24-hour news cycles.
And third, I have a theory, based on the impact of bloggers, YouTube and other Internet-era phenomena, that mass anger of all types has new ways to grow farther, faster and hotter than ever before. After years of surviving controversies that have cost other shock jocks their jobs or at least a month's pay or more, Imus and those who profit from his talents finally found themselves feeling a pinch in their pocketbooks and their reputations.
Now in full damage-control mode, Imus' cleverest move may have been to go immediately to the national confessional that Sharpton's radio show has become for racial transgressors. What could make Imus look more sympathetic than to be berated for an hour or more by a man widely despised by Imus' core audience of mostly white males.
And the ironies don't end there. After all, if Imus offended black folks with his use of words such as "ho" and "nappy head," it was today's black culture that gave him the vocabulary. I understand those who ask whether it is fair to condemn Imus for using language that gets a pass when black rappers use it. Actually I have condemned the demeaning language of rap. So have Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and innumerable other black commentators.
Still, it is not enough. We must passionately condemn the language of hate, not only when others direct it against us, but also when we direct it against ourselves.
If anything good came out of this episode it is the opportunity it gave us to see the women of Rutgers' basketball team. In contrast to the negative images of raunchy radio, they showed the world grace, intelligence, determination and dignity. They had given the world their best. They deserve better than what Don Imus sent back to them.
----------
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com
NBC News dropped Don Imus yesterday, canceling his talk show on its MSNBC cable news channel a week after he made a racially disparaging remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.
The move came after several days of widening calls for Mr. Imus to lose his show both on MSNBC, which simulcasts the “Imus in the Morning” show, and CBS Radio, which originates the show.
-----------------------------------------
Below is a great op-ed we caught by Clarence Page - an African-American reporter who has been on Imus' show - highlighting the ups-and-downs of Imus' career. Imus' major "up" was mastering the talk-radio shtick of skirting close to the edge of controversy over the 3 decades of his career, without crossing it so badly that he got fired. As a talk-radio survivor with an edgy show, he gradually amassed a listening audience, which commanded him a fortune in America's mega-media infotainment industry.
But there was nothing exceptional about Imus' show.
He did interview top candidates, news-makers, and 'news personalities' - the talking heads who now dominate the nation's news and political discourse. (Aside: WILLIAM SAFIRE, of the NEW YORK TIMES, was demonstratively WRONG about almost EVERYTHING he ever wrote about the Clintons - "indictments will be handed down to the Clintons later this week!" was only the most fervid of Safire's "journalistic" excesses given unrestrained syndication from the whore Times - but in part because of Safire's relentless haranguing, the Republicans were able to create a $70 million Ken Starr "independent" Whitewater investigation- into a routine real-estate flop in which the Clintons lost $250,000! The "Whitewater" financial witch hunt of course morphed into the "Monica- did she, or didn't she?" scandal, which led to the Republcian lame-duck impeachment of President Clinton.)
In interviewing top candidates and news personalities, Imus has been far less deferential to his guests (much less reverential) than on most typical news interviews, so he has been able to ask more pressing questions, for example asking Kerry directly about his "wimp" or "flip-flopper" images re the Iraq war. (Unlike Katie Couric's interview of the Edwards, where Couric thought that harping on one question - Elizabeth Edward's cancer diagnosis - was an in-depth interview.)
But Imus' caustic brand of biting interview left our political discourse only slightly better informed than before we heard candidates grovel at his microphone, and in the end Imus is a big part of the CYNICISM that, until recently, led the American people to feel that they were HELPLESS in the face of STOLEN VOTES, rigged voting machines, FEMA incompetence after Katrina, lies-to-war, etc., etc., etc.
Oh - and is now a good time to remind that TIMMOTHY McVEIGH blew up the Oklahoma City Government building - only after listening to years worth of RIGHT-WING HATE RADIO?? Including such "MORAL VALUES" stalwarts as convicted Watergate burglar G. GORDON LIDDY telling his hate-radio listeners that, when shooting at "jack-booted federal law enforcement officers" one should "aim at the head to avid hitting body armor."
--------------------------------------------------
Don Imus' trail of woe
2-week suspension is dust-up's only surprise
by Clarence Page
April 11, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-0704100426apr11,1,6159157.column?coll=chi-news-hed
WASHINGTON -- As she faced the world's television cameras to respond to a gross insult by radio and television showman Don Imus, a member of the Rutgers University women's basketball team spoke volumes with one sentence:
"I'm not a ho," she said Tuesday at the team's first news conference after the incident that history may well remember as the Don Imus "nappy-headed hos" eruption. "I'm a woman and . . . I'm somebody's child," she added.
Indeed, she is. So are the rest of Rutgers' Scarlet Knights. And anybody who would make them out to be anything else should be ashamed. Unfortunately, shame is in short supply in the field of shock radio.
Just before the Easter weekend, Imus apparently thought he could get away with a brief apology at the beginning of his program for his racially charged remarks. But by Monday the controversy had percolated to the boiling point. Civil rights activists called for him to be fired. He was apologizing all day long, including on Rev. Al Sharpton's syndicated radio program.
By day's end, his employers, CBS Radio and MSNBC, had suspended Imus for two weeks.
The Imus controversy was not a big surprise to me, although the punishment was. Back in 2001, I led Imus in an on-air pledge in which he promised to avoid humor that relied on inflammatory racial or gender stereotypes, including "simian references to black athletes" and other abuses of which he had been accused.
I had been part of his stable of journalists and commentators who appeared on his show for more than five years. We were invited to the show to offer political views. He took the pledge and we continued with our usual interview, although interestingly I have not been invited back since.
That's probably not surprising. For more than three decades Imus has been one of America's most popular radio personalities, combining some of the shock-jock elements of a Howard Stern, for example, with the irreverent political sense of, say, a Bill O'Reilly.
But when you dance along the edge, you run the risk of slipping. What made the backlash from the Rutgers statement more serious than his previous dust-ups? For one, it was such an obvious cheap shot. The rich and famous, such as Paris Hilton or Whitney Houston, might be fair game, but why pick on a group of college women basketball players?
Second, it was a slow holiday news weekend, which only brought additional attention, spurred by insatiable 24-hour news cycles.
And third, I have a theory, based on the impact of bloggers, YouTube and other Internet-era phenomena, that mass anger of all types has new ways to grow farther, faster and hotter than ever before. After years of surviving controversies that have cost other shock jocks their jobs or at least a month's pay or more, Imus and those who profit from his talents finally found themselves feeling a pinch in their pocketbooks and their reputations.
Now in full damage-control mode, Imus' cleverest move may have been to go immediately to the national confessional that Sharpton's radio show has become for racial transgressors. What could make Imus look more sympathetic than to be berated for an hour or more by a man widely despised by Imus' core audience of mostly white males.
And the ironies don't end there. After all, if Imus offended black folks with his use of words such as "ho" and "nappy head," it was today's black culture that gave him the vocabulary. I understand those who ask whether it is fair to condemn Imus for using language that gets a pass when black rappers use it. Actually I have condemned the demeaning language of rap. So have Sharpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson and innumerable other black commentators.
Still, it is not enough. We must passionately condemn the language of hate, not only when others direct it against us, but also when we direct it against ourselves.
If anything good came out of this episode it is the opportunity it gave us to see the women of Rutgers' basketball team. In contrast to the negative images of raunchy radio, they showed the world grace, intelligence, determination and dignity. They had given the world their best. They deserve better than what Don Imus sent back to them.
----------
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Citigroup Bank to slash 17,000 jobs. Media FAILS to ask "How many will be OUTSOURCED" - replaced overseas with cheaper labor?
This AP article by Eileen Alt Powell illustrates how conversational and superficial US 'news' reporting has become over the years - and how "OUTSOURCING" of US jobs can be presented as "GOOD NEWS!" by the US whore media.
Yes, there are limitations in how much hard financial data can be included in a 'mainstream' news reports; readers will turn the page if the story goes into too much detail of profit margines, return-on-equity (ROE), and other measures of financial performance. (Which, at any rate, can be manipulated by executives, analysts, and investors alike, i.e. "pump-and-dump" stock news, inflated profit reports, & other "sell Enron stock as executives bail out" schemes, etc.)
And Ms. Powell's report DOES give us the interesting tidbit, "Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is Citigroup's biggest individual shareholder."
WELL BRAVO! America's great Wall St./corporate front is now a subsidiary of foreign oil sheiks, at least in the case of one of America's biggest investment banks. Who knew?
BUT Ms. Powell doesn't even mention the possibility that SOME OF THOSE CITIGROUP JOBS being slashed... JUST MIGHT BE "outsourced" to overseas workers. Especially in the areas of computer programming, data oversight, and customer service.
It may not be Ms. Powell's responsibility to cover all these issues in depth, but on the other hand, it is pretty clear that she could have written this AP story after devoting no more than an hour or two to glancing at Citi corp's official downsizing statements, and doing a quick web-search for the financial figures of similar industry group companies. Maybe, someday in the not-too-far-off future, Ms. Powell's job will also be "OUTSOURCED" to someone sitting behind a computer in India, as well. We certainly wouldn't notice a difference in quality of reporting.
============================================
Citigroup to cut 17,000 jobs
by Eileen Alt Powell, AP Business Writer
April 11, 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070411/ap_on_bi_ge/citigroup_restructure;_ylt=AmCEnnrp4qYb850EVFpjEKXMWM0F
NEW YORK - Under pressure from investors to contain burgeoning costs, Citigroup Inc., the nation's largest financial institution, announced that it will eliminate about 17,000 jobs, shift 9,500 positions to "lower cost locations" and consolidate some corporate operations.
The steps — which are expected to shave more than $2 billion from the bank's operating costs this year alone — also should result in faster service for consumers and businesses, Citi's chief operating officer, Robert Druskin, said Wednesday.
"A lot of the initiatives undertaken in the name of expense reduction also are designed to unclog our corporate system," he told The Associated Press. "We want to make Citigroup a more nimble, entrepreneurial place. We want decision-making to be quicker. We want things to move through the pipelines faster."
The 17,000 job cuts amount to about 5 percent of the bank's 327,000-strong work force.
Druskin led the structural expense review, which was aimed at reducing costs at the New York-headquartered bank and improving profit.
Citigroup executives have been under pressure from analysts and a number of investors, including Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Citigroup's biggest individual shareholder, to improve performance. The bank's stock has not done as well as its peers, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., which have been more profitable.
The elimination of the jobs won't reduce the bank's work force, but merely slow its growth, Citi executives said.
Druskin told a conference call with Wall Street analysts they should expect Citi's headcount to grow this year because of acquisitions and plans to open new branches, especially overseas.
"But that rate of growth will be at a significantly diminished rate," Druskin said.
Goldman Sachs analysts William F. Tanona and Daniel Harris predicted "a tepid reaction" by investors they said had expected deeper cuts.
In afternoon trading, the bank's shares dropped 89 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $51.51 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Carter Burgess, managing director of the Directorship Search Group, a recruiting firm based in Greenwich, Conn., said that "the question is, if all these areas for cutting expenses exist, why wasn't it done sooner?"
He noted that Citigroup, like many of the giant money center banks, was built through a series of mergers and acquisitions and that "it's not totally clear you can make all of this work efficiently together."
Charles Prince, the bank's chairman and chief executive officer, said that implementation of Druskin's recommendations "will improve business integration as well as our ability to move quickly and seize new growth opportunities."
Prince also emphasized that more expense cutbacks were possible, saying that Citi was adopting "a continuous approach to improving our efficiency — this is not a one-time effort."
The changes announced Wednesday include eliminating unnecessary layers of management, reducing staff at corporate headquarters and other locations, expanding centralized procurement and consolidating some back-office and middle-office functions to eliminate duplication.
The bank said that including previously announced information technology savings, the overhaul will save the New York-based bank about $2.1 billion in 2007, $3.7 billion in 2008 and $4.6 billion in 2009.
Citigroup said it will record a pretax charge of $1.38 billion in the first quarter of 2007, and additional charges totaling approximately $200 million pretax over the subsequent quarters of 2007. The bank reports its first-quarter earnings next week.
"More than 9,500 jobs will be moved to lower-cost locations, both domestically and internationally, with about two-thirds through attrition," the announcement said.
Druskin noted that Citigroup operates in more than 100 countries and that the majority of its workers already are overseas. But he emphasized that the move to reduce costs won't mean wholesale transfers abroad.
"We already have lots of jobs in India — but also in Shanghai, Manila and Buffalo, N.Y.," he said. "We're looking for the right location."
Druskin also confirmed that more than 40 Smith Barney units will be consolidated or closed. Smith Barney is the bank's brokerage arm.
The 2007 cost savings were broken down as $650 million in the global consumer division, $400 million in markets and banking, $175 million in wealth management, $375 million in corporate operations and technology and $100 million in "other." That's in addition to $400 million previously announced information technology savings, Citigroup said.
Citigroup, one of the world' largest financial institutions, had assets of more than $1.8 trillion at year's end.
Yes, there are limitations in how much hard financial data can be included in a 'mainstream' news reports; readers will turn the page if the story goes into too much detail of profit margines, return-on-equity (ROE), and other measures of financial performance. (Which, at any rate, can be manipulated by executives, analysts, and investors alike, i.e. "pump-and-dump" stock news, inflated profit reports, & other "sell Enron stock as executives bail out" schemes, etc.)
And Ms. Powell's report DOES give us the interesting tidbit, "Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is Citigroup's biggest individual shareholder."
WELL BRAVO! America's great Wall St./corporate front is now a subsidiary of foreign oil sheiks, at least in the case of one of America's biggest investment banks. Who knew?
BUT Ms. Powell doesn't even mention the possibility that SOME OF THOSE CITIGROUP JOBS being slashed... JUST MIGHT BE "outsourced" to overseas workers. Especially in the areas of computer programming, data oversight, and customer service.
It may not be Ms. Powell's responsibility to cover all these issues in depth, but on the other hand, it is pretty clear that she could have written this AP story after devoting no more than an hour or two to glancing at Citi corp's official downsizing statements, and doing a quick web-search for the financial figures of similar industry group companies. Maybe, someday in the not-too-far-off future, Ms. Powell's job will also be "OUTSOURCED" to someone sitting behind a computer in India, as well. We certainly wouldn't notice a difference in quality of reporting.
============================================
Citigroup to cut 17,000 jobs
by Eileen Alt Powell, AP Business Writer
April 11, 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070411/ap_on_bi_ge/citigroup_restructure;_ylt=AmCEnnrp4qYb850EVFpjEKXMWM0F
NEW YORK - Under pressure from investors to contain burgeoning costs, Citigroup Inc., the nation's largest financial institution, announced that it will eliminate about 17,000 jobs, shift 9,500 positions to "lower cost locations" and consolidate some corporate operations.
The steps — which are expected to shave more than $2 billion from the bank's operating costs this year alone — also should result in faster service for consumers and businesses, Citi's chief operating officer, Robert Druskin, said Wednesday.
"A lot of the initiatives undertaken in the name of expense reduction also are designed to unclog our corporate system," he told The Associated Press. "We want to make Citigroup a more nimble, entrepreneurial place. We want decision-making to be quicker. We want things to move through the pipelines faster."
The 17,000 job cuts amount to about 5 percent of the bank's 327,000-strong work force.
Druskin led the structural expense review, which was aimed at reducing costs at the New York-headquartered bank and improving profit.
Citigroup executives have been under pressure from analysts and a number of investors, including Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Citigroup's biggest individual shareholder, to improve performance. The bank's stock has not done as well as its peers, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., which have been more profitable.
The elimination of the jobs won't reduce the bank's work force, but merely slow its growth, Citi executives said.
Druskin told a conference call with Wall Street analysts they should expect Citi's headcount to grow this year because of acquisitions and plans to open new branches, especially overseas.
"But that rate of growth will be at a significantly diminished rate," Druskin said.
Goldman Sachs analysts William F. Tanona and Daniel Harris predicted "a tepid reaction" by investors they said had expected deeper cuts.
In afternoon trading, the bank's shares dropped 89 cents, or 1.7 percent, to $51.51 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Carter Burgess, managing director of the Directorship Search Group, a recruiting firm based in Greenwich, Conn., said that "the question is, if all these areas for cutting expenses exist, why wasn't it done sooner?"
He noted that Citigroup, like many of the giant money center banks, was built through a series of mergers and acquisitions and that "it's not totally clear you can make all of this work efficiently together."
Charles Prince, the bank's chairman and chief executive officer, said that implementation of Druskin's recommendations "will improve business integration as well as our ability to move quickly and seize new growth opportunities."
Prince also emphasized that more expense cutbacks were possible, saying that Citi was adopting "a continuous approach to improving our efficiency — this is not a one-time effort."
The changes announced Wednesday include eliminating unnecessary layers of management, reducing staff at corporate headquarters and other locations, expanding centralized procurement and consolidating some back-office and middle-office functions to eliminate duplication.
The bank said that including previously announced information technology savings, the overhaul will save the New York-based bank about $2.1 billion in 2007, $3.7 billion in 2008 and $4.6 billion in 2009.
Citigroup said it will record a pretax charge of $1.38 billion in the first quarter of 2007, and additional charges totaling approximately $200 million pretax over the subsequent quarters of 2007. The bank reports its first-quarter earnings next week.
"More than 9,500 jobs will be moved to lower-cost locations, both domestically and internationally, with about two-thirds through attrition," the announcement said.
Druskin noted that Citigroup operates in more than 100 countries and that the majority of its workers already are overseas. But he emphasized that the move to reduce costs won't mean wholesale transfers abroad.
"We already have lots of jobs in India — but also in Shanghai, Manila and Buffalo, N.Y.," he said. "We're looking for the right location."
Druskin also confirmed that more than 40 Smith Barney units will be consolidated or closed. Smith Barney is the bank's brokerage arm.
The 2007 cost savings were broken down as $650 million in the global consumer division, $400 million in markets and banking, $175 million in wealth management, $375 million in corporate operations and technology and $100 million in "other." That's in addition to $400 million previously announced information technology savings, Citigroup said.
Citigroup, one of the world' largest financial institutions, had assets of more than $1.8 trillion at year's end.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Media Whores tout "MACABRE FANTASY" to justify their sordid history of slavish devotion to BushCo....
The great Robert Parry hits another home-run (Go Fish!), this time mentioning "the MACABRE FANTASY" of the sordid media whores... the George Wills and David Broders and William Safires and Arthur Sulzbergers and William Kristols and Charles Krauthammers and Howard Kurtzs - all of whom are SO HEAVILY INVESTED in the lying, atrociously incompetent and corrupt Bush administration.
Make no mistake: the Bush administration has GIVEN AWAY America's MORAL HIGH GROUND, for the sleazy rewards of a few (hundred) billions of dollars of oil money and American taxpayer war funds $$ LOOTED by administration cronies such as HALLIBURTON and BECHTEL and BLACKWATER corporations from the vast US war in Iraq.
WHAT more do we need to document? That the craven, cowardly and corrupt Bush administration DID NOTHING to prevent 9-11... EVEN THOUGH THE COWARDLY ATTORNEY GENERAL, John Ashcroft, STOPPED FLYING PUBLIC AIRLINERS after being warned, in person, by CIA Director George Tenet, that "AL QAIDA WAS DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA." (After al Qaida SUCCESSSFULLY attacked the USS Cole via a SUICIDE BOMBER in October of 2000.. when former Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were busy campaigning for Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign.)
That, as bad and murderous as Saddam's prisons were, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY the words "Abu Ghraib" WILL forever BE LINKED TO AMERICAN SEXUAL SADISM, TORTURE, and MURDER?
That, having supplied and encouraged SADDAM HUSSEIN's Iraq military through the entire 1980s (insert photo, "Don Rumsfeld SHAKES HANDS WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN in 1987" here), the amazingly arrogant and incompetent Bushies not only SENT THE ENTIRE IRAQ ARMY HOME, WITHOUT PAY or PENSIONS.. but ALLOWED the insurgents to WHOLESALE LOOT Iraqi ammunition complexes, as American spy satellites gazed stupidly at the parade of trucks departing, fully loaded, from those bunkers???
--------------------------------------------------------
'Surging' Toward Failure in Iraq
By Robert Parry
April 10, 2007
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/040907.html
The Washington pundits and the press are all atwitter wondering how successful George W. Bush’s Iraq “surge” strategy will be and how fast the Democrats will crumble in a showdown with the steely-eyed President over his demand for $100 billion more for the war with no strings attached.
But the underlying military reality is that the United States has long since “lost” the war in Iraq. As many military and intelligence analysts recognize, it is not winnable in any normal sense of the word. The “surge” of sending tens of thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq only guarantees that the final body count will be higher and the piles of IOUs bigger.
To get a sense of the inevitable disaster ahead, just envision the conditions for U.S. troops stuck in police stations around Baghdad when the summer temperatures rise to over 100 degrees and tempers turn just as hot. By then, too, Iraqi insurgents will have adjusted their tactics to take advantage of isolated American soldiers.
The U.S. death toll in and around Baghdad is already increasing though the “surge” is only partially complete. In the months ahead, as more U.S. troops are exposed in less protected positions, the likelihood is that the casualty rates will grow only worse.
As The New York Times reported on April 9, “For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period.”
But the basic reason that Bush’s “surge” plan is doomed to failure is that it never was a distinctly new military strategy. It was a repackaged version of “stay the course” slapped together in December and January when Bush was under pressure from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the newly elected Democratic congressional majorities.
The Iraq Study Group, headed by longtime Bush family counselor James Baker, called the situation in Iraq as “grave and deteriorating” and proposed a phased withdrawal of U.S. combat forces combined with more training of Iraqi troops and a diplomatic offensive to reduce tensions in the region.
Bush correctly read between the lines, interpreting the report as a repudiation of his open-ended war and a recommendation for a gradual disengagement. “This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever,” Bush fumed, vowing that U.S. forces would “stay in Iraq to get the job done.”
Accepting the Iraq Study Group’s findings also would have meant admitting his failure as the “war president,” which Bush would not do. So, he adopted a plan, favored by his neoconservative advisers, that was less a military strategy than a political device.
‘False Hope’
The “surge” was a way to buy time for Bush’s legacy – to palm off inevitable defeat on his successor – even at the cost of many more American and Iraqi lives. It was like the riff by Comedy Central’s Lewis Black about “keeping false hope alive.” That has been Bush’s pattern for the past four years.
At every key juncture of the Iraq War, Bush has pointed to a new mirage of expected success as the United States staggers deeper and deeper into the desert. First, there was the expectation of victory after Saddam Hussein’s sons were killed and the dictator was captured. Later, there was the writing of a constitution and return of “sovereignty.”
In fall 2004, as Bush needed to get past the U.S. elections, there was the promise of upcoming Iraqi elections that would mark another corner turned. If anything, the heralded elections only deepened the violent divisions between Shiites and Sunnis.
Turning-point after turning-point, conditions only got worse. Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached the conclusion that the Iraq War was pretty much a lost cause, sending Bush a menu of options on Nov. 6, 2006, that focused on disengagement similar to ideas promoted by Democratic Rep. John Murtha.
Rumsfeld’s options included “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces only committed to Iraqi areas that requested them. “Unless they [local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province,” Rumsfeld wrote.
The Defense Secretary suggested that the commanders “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions – cities, patrolling, etc. – and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.”
And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) – go minimalist.”
Bush’s reaction was to fire Rumsfeld two days after receiving this “going wobbly” memo. Bush replaced the headstrong Rumsfeld with the accommodating Robert Gates.
As the New Year dawned, however, Bush understood that he needed to give the American people some reason to expect improvement in Iraq, even if the generals who had the most direct experience – John Abizaid and George Casey – were against the “surge,” as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Bush needed to “keep false hope alive” if he was to fend off anti-war legislation. So was born the “surge,” less a new military strategy than a political tactic. The American people were pointed toward another mirage.
Macabre Fantasy
What is now underway in Washington is the playing out of a macabre fantasy.
The Republicans seek to sustain the fiction of progress. See, for instance, Sen. John McCain’s “stroll” through a Baghdad market surrounded by 100 soldiers and protected by helicopter gun ships.
When the happy talk brings derision – as occurred with McCain’s “stroll” – Bush’s backers turn to a reverse of “keeping false hope alive.” They predict an apocalyptic future – al-Qaeda governing a “caliphate” from Spain to Indonesia – if U.S. troops leave Iraq. Yet the fear is no more realistic than the hope.
Democrats have their own fictions, other plans for success, albeit by setting benchmarks for the Iraqi government and gradually withdrawing U.S. combat forces, a kind of de facto recognition of the grim reality.
It remains easier for Washington politicians – and pundits – to maintain the pretense of future success in Iraq than to risk accusations that they are “defeatists” or that they have lost faith in “the troops.”
Almost no one wants to tell the American people the hard truth: that the Iraq War has been one of the worst national security debacles in U.S. history; it is now beyond salvaging; probably the best that Washington can hope to do is to limit the damage by withdrawing its forces as expeditiously as possible and by starting to rebuild its diplomatic relations with nations in the region.
Yet, in the marble halls and the dinner parties of Washington, it makes more sense, career-wise, to “keep an open mind” about Bush’s new strategy and to handicap the chances for the President prevailing over the Democrats in getting another Iraq War “blank check.”
But Bush’s “surge” and Washington's political calculations make far less sense on the bloody streets of Baghdad or in the tear-filled homes of Gold Star mothers.
[For some of Robert Parry’s earlier writings about the Iraq War, see “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down” in March 2003; “Sinking in Deeper” in February 2005; and “Bush/Cheney Still Lie with Abandon” in April 2007.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Make no mistake: the Bush administration has GIVEN AWAY America's MORAL HIGH GROUND, for the sleazy rewards of a few (hundred) billions of dollars of oil money and American taxpayer war funds $$ LOOTED by administration cronies such as HALLIBURTON and BECHTEL and BLACKWATER corporations from the vast US war in Iraq.
WHAT more do we need to document? That the craven, cowardly and corrupt Bush administration DID NOTHING to prevent 9-11... EVEN THOUGH THE COWARDLY ATTORNEY GENERAL, John Ashcroft, STOPPED FLYING PUBLIC AIRLINERS after being warned, in person, by CIA Director George Tenet, that "AL QAIDA WAS DETERMINED TO ATTACK IN AMERICA." (After al Qaida SUCCESSSFULLY attacked the USS Cole via a SUICIDE BOMBER in October of 2000.. when former Secretaries of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were busy campaigning for Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential campaign.)
That, as bad and murderous as Saddam's prisons were, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY the words "Abu Ghraib" WILL forever BE LINKED TO AMERICAN SEXUAL SADISM, TORTURE, and MURDER?
That, having supplied and encouraged SADDAM HUSSEIN's Iraq military through the entire 1980s (insert photo, "Don Rumsfeld SHAKES HANDS WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN in 1987" here), the amazingly arrogant and incompetent Bushies not only SENT THE ENTIRE IRAQ ARMY HOME, WITHOUT PAY or PENSIONS.. but ALLOWED the insurgents to WHOLESALE LOOT Iraqi ammunition complexes, as American spy satellites gazed stupidly at the parade of trucks departing, fully loaded, from those bunkers???
--------------------------------------------------------
'Surging' Toward Failure in Iraq
By Robert Parry
April 10, 2007
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/040907.html
The Washington pundits and the press are all atwitter wondering how successful George W. Bush’s Iraq “surge” strategy will be and how fast the Democrats will crumble in a showdown with the steely-eyed President over his demand for $100 billion more for the war with no strings attached.
But the underlying military reality is that the United States has long since “lost” the war in Iraq. As many military and intelligence analysts recognize, it is not winnable in any normal sense of the word. The “surge” of sending tens of thousands more U.S. troops into Iraq only guarantees that the final body count will be higher and the piles of IOUs bigger.
To get a sense of the inevitable disaster ahead, just envision the conditions for U.S. troops stuck in police stations around Baghdad when the summer temperatures rise to over 100 degrees and tempers turn just as hot. By then, too, Iraqi insurgents will have adjusted their tactics to take advantage of isolated American soldiers.
The U.S. death toll in and around Baghdad is already increasing though the “surge” is only partially complete. In the months ahead, as more U.S. troops are exposed in less protected positions, the likelihood is that the casualty rates will grow only worse.
As The New York Times reported on April 9, “For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period.”
But the basic reason that Bush’s “surge” plan is doomed to failure is that it never was a distinctly new military strategy. It was a repackaged version of “stay the course” slapped together in December and January when Bush was under pressure from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the newly elected Democratic congressional majorities.
The Iraq Study Group, headed by longtime Bush family counselor James Baker, called the situation in Iraq as “grave and deteriorating” and proposed a phased withdrawal of U.S. combat forces combined with more training of Iraqi troops and a diplomatic offensive to reduce tensions in the region.
Bush correctly read between the lines, interpreting the report as a repudiation of his open-ended war and a recommendation for a gradual disengagement. “This business about graceful exit just simply has no realism to it whatsoever,” Bush fumed, vowing that U.S. forces would “stay in Iraq to get the job done.”
Accepting the Iraq Study Group’s findings also would have meant admitting his failure as the “war president,” which Bush would not do. So, he adopted a plan, favored by his neoconservative advisers, that was less a military strategy than a political device.
‘False Hope’
The “surge” was a way to buy time for Bush’s legacy – to palm off inevitable defeat on his successor – even at the cost of many more American and Iraqi lives. It was like the riff by Comedy Central’s Lewis Black about “keeping false hope alive.” That has been Bush’s pattern for the past four years.
At every key juncture of the Iraq War, Bush has pointed to a new mirage of expected success as the United States staggers deeper and deeper into the desert. First, there was the expectation of victory after Saddam Hussein’s sons were killed and the dictator was captured. Later, there was the writing of a constitution and return of “sovereignty.”
In fall 2004, as Bush needed to get past the U.S. elections, there was the promise of upcoming Iraqi elections that would mark another corner turned. If anything, the heralded elections only deepened the violent divisions between Shiites and Sunnis.
Turning-point after turning-point, conditions only got worse. Even Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reached the conclusion that the Iraq War was pretty much a lost cause, sending Bush a menu of options on Nov. 6, 2006, that focused on disengagement similar to ideas promoted by Democratic Rep. John Murtha.
Rumsfeld’s options included “an accelerated drawdown of U.S. bases” from 55 to five by July 2007 with remaining U.S. forces only committed to Iraqi areas that requested them. “Unless they [local Iraqi governments] cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province,” Rumsfeld wrote.
The Defense Secretary suggested that the commanders “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions – cities, patrolling, etc. – and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.”
And in what could be read as an implicit criticism of Bush’s lofty rhetoric about transforming Iraq and the Middle East, Rumsfeld said the administration should “recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) – go minimalist.”
Bush’s reaction was to fire Rumsfeld two days after receiving this “going wobbly” memo. Bush replaced the headstrong Rumsfeld with the accommodating Robert Gates.
As the New Year dawned, however, Bush understood that he needed to give the American people some reason to expect improvement in Iraq, even if the generals who had the most direct experience – John Abizaid and George Casey – were against the “surge,” as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Bush needed to “keep false hope alive” if he was to fend off anti-war legislation. So was born the “surge,” less a new military strategy than a political tactic. The American people were pointed toward another mirage.
Macabre Fantasy
What is now underway in Washington is the playing out of a macabre fantasy.
The Republicans seek to sustain the fiction of progress. See, for instance, Sen. John McCain’s “stroll” through a Baghdad market surrounded by 100 soldiers and protected by helicopter gun ships.
When the happy talk brings derision – as occurred with McCain’s “stroll” – Bush’s backers turn to a reverse of “keeping false hope alive.” They predict an apocalyptic future – al-Qaeda governing a “caliphate” from Spain to Indonesia – if U.S. troops leave Iraq. Yet the fear is no more realistic than the hope.
Democrats have their own fictions, other plans for success, albeit by setting benchmarks for the Iraqi government and gradually withdrawing U.S. combat forces, a kind of de facto recognition of the grim reality.
It remains easier for Washington politicians – and pundits – to maintain the pretense of future success in Iraq than to risk accusations that they are “defeatists” or that they have lost faith in “the troops.”
Almost no one wants to tell the American people the hard truth: that the Iraq War has been one of the worst national security debacles in U.S. history; it is now beyond salvaging; probably the best that Washington can hope to do is to limit the damage by withdrawing its forces as expeditiously as possible and by starting to rebuild its diplomatic relations with nations in the region.
Yet, in the marble halls and the dinner parties of Washington, it makes more sense, career-wise, to “keep an open mind” about Bush’s new strategy and to handicap the chances for the President prevailing over the Democrats in getting another Iraq War “blank check.”
But Bush’s “surge” and Washington's political calculations make far less sense on the bloody streets of Baghdad or in the tear-filled homes of Gold Star mothers.
[For some of Robert Parry’s earlier writings about the Iraq War, see “Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down” in March 2003; “Sinking in Deeper” in February 2005; and “Bush/Cheney Still Lie with Abandon” in April 2007.]
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Fox 'News' whore BILL KRISTOL pimps "BOMB IRAN for holding British naval prisoners"...
Jewish Nazi William "Bill" Kristol is up to his old tricks - urging a GREATER, WIDER, EXPANDED WAR in the MidEast, this time Kristol lusting over US bombing raids over Iran.
TIME magazine, FOX 'news', and entire swaths of the American media take Kristol's insane "bombs are the first solution" logic as the compelling rational of the current media narrative... just as Adolf Hitler once insisted that Poland and Western Europe had to be bombed, conquered, and occupied to "Save Germany from aggression."
-------------------------------------------------
Kristol: Proper Response To Iran’s Kidnapping Of Soldiers Would Have Been Military Strikes
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/08/kristol-williams-iran-crisis/
Fox News pundit Bill Kristol has been an unceasing proponent of war with Iran. In the past year, Kristol has repeatedly beat the war drums, stating for example that Bush “could easily build support” for an Iran attack “at the beginning of 2008.” He has also said: “I think we could be in a military confrontation with Iran much sooner than people expect.”
This morning, Kristol again promoted the concept of war with Iran. He said Iran’s kidnapping of the 15 British soldiers has brought the world closer to another war. “We came closer to war with Iran this week,” Kristol said, complaining that the U.S. was “very passive.”
Juan Williams then questioned, “Well, what was the alternative? To go in and strike them while the hostages were there?” Kristol said “yes.”
Watch it:
TIME magazine, FOX 'news', and entire swaths of the American media take Kristol's insane "bombs are the first solution" logic as the compelling rational of the current media narrative... just as Adolf Hitler once insisted that Poland and Western Europe had to be bombed, conquered, and occupied to "Save Germany from aggression."
-------------------------------------------------
Kristol: Proper Response To Iran’s Kidnapping Of Soldiers Would Have Been Military Strikes
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/04/08/kristol-williams-iran-crisis/
Fox News pundit Bill Kristol has been an unceasing proponent of war with Iran. In the past year, Kristol has repeatedly beat the war drums, stating for example that Bush “could easily build support” for an Iran attack “at the beginning of 2008.” He has also said: “I think we could be in a military confrontation with Iran much sooner than people expect.”
This morning, Kristol again promoted the concept of war with Iran. He said Iran’s kidnapping of the 15 British soldiers has brought the world closer to another war. “We came closer to war with Iran this week,” Kristol said, complaining that the U.S. was “very passive.”
Juan Williams then questioned, “Well, what was the alternative? To go in and strike them while the hostages were there?” Kristol said “yes.”
Watch it:
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Mainstream News Media Smears Pelosi for Her Peace Mission, While the Bush-Cheney Regime Collaborates with Elements of Al Qaeda and Taliban
Having encouraged the IMPEACHMENT of President Bill Clinton over matters as trifling as the Clinton's overnight guest list ("LINCOLN BEDROOM 'SCANDAL'!" the media whores hyperventilated breathlessly, preparing America for the impeachment brought about by Republican prosecutor with axe-to-grind Ken Starr's perjury-suborning perjury trap) America's media whores are now exposing themselves - to an American public awakening from their propaganda hypnotized stupor - as the crass, craven, and mercilessly undemocratic whores that they are.
In this case, the media whores can't shout -
"PELOSI TREASON for talking to Syria!" fast enough... even as they give the tryanical and obscenely corrupt Bush-Cheney administration a "FREE PASS!" for a rogue's list of incompetence, corruption, and outright crimes. (Including Vice President Cheney's ongoing financial ties to HALLIBURTON - and the president's former close ties to disgraced and convicted ENRON CEO Jeff Skilling - even as Halliburton seeks to ship its corporate headquarters to DUBAI, UAE, theoretically taking all their American military secrets with them to the land ruled by dictator sheiks with a long history of funding smugglers, insurgents, Al Qaida guerrillas in Afghanistan, and even the 9-11 terrorists who were based inside America before the hijackings were executed on 9-11-2001.)
(See also David Sirota's "Washington media elite DESPISES democracy in America" - Sirota names names, and presents those democracy-scorning soundbites in their author's own original comments.
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/08/11/finally-the-dc-media-admits-the-truth-about-itself/
-----------------------------------------------
Hard Rain Journal 4-6-07: US Mainstream News Media Smears Pelosi for Her Peace Mission, While the Bush-Cheney Regime Collaborates with Elements of Al Qaeda and Taliban
By Richard Power
April 7, 2007
http://words-of-power.blogspot.com/2007/04/hard-rain-journal-4-6-07-mainstream.html
The US mainstream news media, e.g., NBC (Think Progress, 4-6-07), CNN (Media Matters, 4-5-07) and the Washington Post (Think Progress, 4-5-07), are busily sliming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her diplomatic mission to Israel, Syria and Saudia Arabia.
Talking to the Syrians (and the Iranians) is not only one of the recommendations of James Baker's Iraq Study Group; according to a World Opinion poll taken in December 2006, it is a notion supported by 75% of the people of the USA.
But the Bush-Cheney regime isn't really looking for solutions, is it?
Here is some context and continuity that the US mainstream news media won't provide you concerning the so-called "war on terror":
Despite the warnings from Clinton-Gore national security team, the Bush-Cheney regime looked the other way and did nothing to thwart the 9/11 attacks. Then, instead of focusing on Afghanistan, Bush-Cheney lied the country into the invasion and occupation of Iraq (a sworn enemy of those that attacked the USA on 9/11).
Now, instead of extracting the US military from that strategic blunder, they seek to compound it with an attack on Iran (another sworn enemy of those that attacked the USA on 9/11).
Meanwhile, the remains of the innocents slaughtered on 9/11 have been used to fill potholes, (Reuters, 3-24-07), the uniform and personal affects of US Army ranger Pat Tillman have been burned, (BBC, 5-5-05), and Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are all still alive and at large.
But even worse, in recent weeks, there have been revelations concerning covert Bush-Cheney regime collaboration with elements of Al Qaeda and the Taliban:
They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began. Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. (Tom Dispatch, 3-13-07)
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News. The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran. . . . The leader, Regi, claims to have personally executed some of the Iranians. "He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members. (ABC News, 4-3-07)
In recent years, the Bush-Cheney regime has blown off a secret Iranian offer to negotiate a regional peace and squashed a secret Israeli effort to negotiate an agreement with the Syrians.
Bush-Cheney does not want peace or stability. It does not even want vengence. It wants empire, and it is willing to wage perennial war for it. Bush-Cheney is not running a "war on terror," it is running a war IN, OF, BY and FOR terror.
Indeed they have sided with those who attacked us on 9/11 against those who would have helped us destroy them.
When will the US mainstream news media back away from this treasonous cabal?
Probably never.
The corporatist stranglehold on the US government is in the media moguls' best interests, or so they think.
And Speaker Pelosi, who is third in the line of constitutional succession, is dangerous to them. She symbolizes the restoration of the Republic.
SOME RECENT RELATED POSTS
Hard Rain Journal 3-30-07: A Call to Conscience and Common Sense from Gen. Wes Clark, and an Update on the War OF, BY and FOR Terrorism
Words of Power #33: A Quarter-Century Ago, Jimmy Carter Warned of This Grim Period, His Prophetic Call was Not Heeded
Hard Rain Journal 2-22-07: Corporatist News Media Still Shields Bush-Cheney from the Savage Truth on Plame, Iraq, Iran, Al Qaeda and Walter Reed
Hard Rain Journal 2-21-07: This is Madness -- Bush-Cheney Target Saddam and then the Iranians -- Both Sworn Enemies of Al Qaeda, Meanwhile...
Hard Rain Journal 2-16-07: What Happens When a Whole Nation is Dragged into Room 101? Remember, 2+2=4
Hard Rain Journal 2-2-07: Forget about 2008, the Fate of the Republic could be Decided in the Next Six Months
Hard Rain Journal 1-19-07: The Hard Rain Falls Between PNAC and the PATRIOT Act, but the US News Media Sees, Hears, Speaks No Evil
GS(3) Thunderbolt 1-11-07: Do You Understand What He Really Said Last Night? These People Opened the Gates of Hell, Now They Want to Drag Everyone In
Words of Power #31: Ghosts of Christmas Past (Katrina) and Future (Iran)
Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and Words of Power. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net
In this case, the media whores can't shout -
"PELOSI TREASON for talking to Syria!" fast enough... even as they give the tryanical and obscenely corrupt Bush-Cheney administration a "FREE PASS!" for a rogue's list of incompetence, corruption, and outright crimes. (Including Vice President Cheney's ongoing financial ties to HALLIBURTON - and the president's former close ties to disgraced and convicted ENRON CEO Jeff Skilling - even as Halliburton seeks to ship its corporate headquarters to DUBAI, UAE, theoretically taking all their American military secrets with them to the land ruled by dictator sheiks with a long history of funding smugglers, insurgents, Al Qaida guerrillas in Afghanistan, and even the 9-11 terrorists who were based inside America before the hijackings were executed on 9-11-2001.)
(See also David Sirota's "Washington media elite DESPISES democracy in America" - Sirota names names, and presents those democracy-scorning soundbites in their author's own original comments.
http://davidsirota.com/index.php/2006/08/11/finally-the-dc-media-admits-the-truth-about-itself/
-----------------------------------------------
Hard Rain Journal 4-6-07: US Mainstream News Media Smears Pelosi for Her Peace Mission, While the Bush-Cheney Regime Collaborates with Elements of Al Qaeda and Taliban
By Richard Power
April 7, 2007
http://words-of-power.blogspot.com/2007/04/hard-rain-journal-4-6-07-mainstream.html
The US mainstream news media, e.g., NBC (Think Progress, 4-6-07), CNN (Media Matters, 4-5-07) and the Washington Post (Think Progress, 4-5-07), are busily sliming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for her diplomatic mission to Israel, Syria and Saudia Arabia.
Talking to the Syrians (and the Iranians) is not only one of the recommendations of James Baker's Iraq Study Group; according to a World Opinion poll taken in December 2006, it is a notion supported by 75% of the people of the USA.
But the Bush-Cheney regime isn't really looking for solutions, is it?
Here is some context and continuity that the US mainstream news media won't provide you concerning the so-called "war on terror":
Despite the warnings from Clinton-Gore national security team, the Bush-Cheney regime looked the other way and did nothing to thwart the 9/11 attacks. Then, instead of focusing on Afghanistan, Bush-Cheney lied the country into the invasion and occupation of Iraq (a sworn enemy of those that attacked the USA on 9/11).
Now, instead of extracting the US military from that strategic blunder, they seek to compound it with an attack on Iran (another sworn enemy of those that attacked the USA on 9/11).
Meanwhile, the remains of the innocents slaughtered on 9/11 have been used to fill potholes, (Reuters, 3-24-07), the uniform and personal affects of US Army ranger Pat Tillman have been burned, (BBC, 5-5-05), and Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar are all still alive and at large.
But even worse, in recent weeks, there have been revelations concerning covert Bush-Cheney regime collaboration with elements of Al Qaeda and the Taliban:
They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began. Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. (Tom Dispatch, 3-13-07)
A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence sources tell ABC News. The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran. . . . The leader, Regi, claims to have personally executed some of the Iranians. "He used to fight with the Taliban. He's part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist," said Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant who recently met with Pakistani officials and tribal members. (ABC News, 4-3-07)
In recent years, the Bush-Cheney regime has blown off a secret Iranian offer to negotiate a regional peace and squashed a secret Israeli effort to negotiate an agreement with the Syrians.
Bush-Cheney does not want peace or stability. It does not even want vengence. It wants empire, and it is willing to wage perennial war for it. Bush-Cheney is not running a "war on terror," it is running a war IN, OF, BY and FOR terror.
Indeed they have sided with those who attacked us on 9/11 against those who would have helped us destroy them.
When will the US mainstream news media back away from this treasonous cabal?
Probably never.
The corporatist stranglehold on the US government is in the media moguls' best interests, or so they think.
And Speaker Pelosi, who is third in the line of constitutional succession, is dangerous to them. She symbolizes the restoration of the Republic.
SOME RECENT RELATED POSTS
Hard Rain Journal 3-30-07: A Call to Conscience and Common Sense from Gen. Wes Clark, and an Update on the War OF, BY and FOR Terrorism
Words of Power #33: A Quarter-Century Ago, Jimmy Carter Warned of This Grim Period, His Prophetic Call was Not Heeded
Hard Rain Journal 2-22-07: Corporatist News Media Still Shields Bush-Cheney from the Savage Truth on Plame, Iraq, Iran, Al Qaeda and Walter Reed
Hard Rain Journal 2-21-07: This is Madness -- Bush-Cheney Target Saddam and then the Iranians -- Both Sworn Enemies of Al Qaeda, Meanwhile...
Hard Rain Journal 2-16-07: What Happens When a Whole Nation is Dragged into Room 101? Remember, 2+2=4
Hard Rain Journal 2-2-07: Forget about 2008, the Fate of the Republic could be Decided in the Next Six Months
Hard Rain Journal 1-19-07: The Hard Rain Falls Between PNAC and the PATRIOT Act, but the US News Media Sees, Hears, Speaks No Evil
GS(3) Thunderbolt 1-11-07: Do You Understand What He Really Said Last Night? These People Opened the Gates of Hell, Now They Want to Drag Everyone In
Words of Power #31: Ghosts of Christmas Past (Katrina) and Future (Iran)
Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and Words of Power. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net
Friday, April 06, 2007
Cable news media whores "SKULL NUMBING LINT" as 'news'... Terrific op-ed on the rot sold by Chris Mathews, Tim Russert, CNN, et al...
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