Corporate Media = CONFEDERATE media: ALWAYS TRYING TO PIT SLAVE against MASTERS.....

GILDED MEDIA WHORES: Corporate Media Whore executives among those at a Bush fundraiser dinner, part and parcel of "THE ELITE" - "THE HAVES AND THE HAVES MORE"- that pResident George W. Bush calls his base."

IN this terrific commentary Larisa Alexandrovna points out a new aspect of the MoveOn.org ad questioning the veracity of General Patraeus' "I did not write this report with any direction from the White House" report to Congress on the state of Iraq war (and of 'the surge' specifically) on 9-11-2007: Larisa points out that the MoveOn full-page ad in the New York Times EFFECTIVELY BROKE THROUGH the GHETTO WALLS of media PROPAGANDA CONTROL that the "Major Media" tries to impose on us Americans.
Of course the most obvious, if forgotten, example of media hypocrisy in trying to CONTROL the pro-war American narrative is how the DC media press whores helped Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, Asst. Sec. of War Paul Wolfowitz, and the Bush administration RUN OUT OF TOWN, in derision and scorn, Army Chief of Staff GENERAL SHINSEKI for telling the Ameican people (in his testimony before senate committee) THAT THE IRAQ WAR WOULD REQUIRE 500,000 TROOPS, but four years later those same MEDIA WHORES would be SO UPSET and outraged that a MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times would question the credibility of the Bush administration's attempt to put on a Teflon vest (as Frank Rich put it this week) in the person of General David Patraeus. Indeed, thanks to the miracle of the internet, we have the New York WHORE Tiems/Eric Schmitt HIT PIECE deriding General Shinseki click HERE: NOTE how the WHORE Times, and their hired smear-brown-shirt thug Schmitt, use WEASEL WORDS to cast SHINSEKI - not Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld - in a bad light. {i.e.

<< The Pentagon's second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general's assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.>>

Note how, in typical "official" WHORE fashion, Mr. Schmitt cast it as a case of OFFICIAL Washington - "The Penagon's seocond ranking official" coupled with "DISAPARAGED a top Army general." Mr. Schmitt, YOU ARE A LIAR BY OMMISSION: General Shinseki wasn't merely "a top Army general" - he was THE top Army general, Secretary of the Army, the only higher uniformed official the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fellow NY Times-man (and one of only a small handful of honest Times-men) Paul Krugman highlights what happened to HONEST WHISTLEBLOWERS and government critics of the Bush administration: THEY ARE ALL GIVEN THE VALERIE PLAME treatment, or threatened with it.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E4DA1630F930A15750C0A9629C8B63


Further into her commentary, she uses an even more dramatic metaphor than "wall" of media propaganda dividing Americans from their government: first she details how "CORPORATE INTERESTS MERGE WITH STATE INTERESTS," and then she points out the biggie: THE CORPORATE CONFEDERACY.

For, indeed, America's corporate media whores - the executives who CONTROL the media companies - DO have a desire to take us 21st Century Americans BACK to the ANTE-BELLUM (pre-Civil War)era economic and governance models, when nearly half the population in some districts was counted as "THREE-FIFTHS" of a man for voting purposes FOR THE OWNERS, ONLY - but otherwise those people had NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER. And of course the slave plantation economic model held that ALL profits and wealth acrue to the owner exclusively - the plantation aristocracy - ONLY, and that HEALTH CARE, and all other "luxuries" for the slaves should be paid AT THE CONVENIENCE OF THE 'OWNERS,' only.

As Larisa correctly points out, thanks to the CORRUPTED Democratic Party, the CORRUPT "major media" and the blatantly neo-segregationist Right-Wing Republican Party (and their Surpeme Court allies such as CLARENCE "my Yale degree was soiled by affirmative action - that's why I'm in favor of a return to neo-segregation!" THOMAS) - WE AMERICANS ARE NOW REFIGHTING the agenda if not the battles of the Civil War, and the MEDIA WHORE BOSSES are most definitely NOT on the side of

"OF THE PEOPLE, BY the people, FOR the people".....

===================================

Larisa Alexandrovna
Our Cold Civil War...
Posted October 5, 2007 |
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/our-cold-civil-war_b_67383.html


It took me sometime to process the whole MoveOn.org controversy and I finally realized that something truly monumental has happened in our nation. While the coverage of the now world famous MoveOn.org ad has been wall to wall and spun and re-spun from every conceivable political and ethical angle, the most important developments of this whole story have entirely been missed.


In order to understand what has happened, really happened with the advertisement asking if General Petraeus was essentially acting as a Teflon vest for the Bush administration, we must first understand the context and the background.

Propaganda Presidency

The Bush administration has been using media outlets as cutouts for state sponsored propaganda since even before the unelected Bush was appointed to office by a politically motivated Supreme Court decision against the will of the people and the popular vote. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not the singular, all-transforming event that changed everything. Rather, it was the Supreme Court decision of 2000 that changed everything, a consequence of that single monumental failure to protect the Constitution. It was in a more general way, really, the 2000 election cycle that showed us just how willing the corporate fourth estate bosses were to fabricate a myth of goodness and accomplishment out of a man so ill suited to be anywhere near government, let alone the presidency of the United States.

The robber barons needed their figurehead, and so their allied fourth estate bosses fixed the propaganda around the myth, creating substance where there was none. The propaganda worked to create an image of a war veteran candidate Bush with a stellar educational background, an experienced and successful businessman, and an honest Texan raised on a farm. Those lies led to more lies and since then, we have essentially been held hostage by an ever expanding parade of liars.

The most extreme example of this, of course, is Fox News, which is seen by all credible reporters as political porn, of the low grade variety at that, featuring D-listers in the news industry with the ethics of Debbie and her Dallas doers. Fox is laughable, and it is clearly a state run organ which hires official state reporters to report officially sanctioned news.

The Fox outfit is obvious propaganda, but it has played the foil to something far more insidious and sinister, and which in its sheer subtlety is far more dangerous. The mainstream press, as it is known, compared with Fox looks like left wing reportage, of course. In reality, however, the mainstream is neither left wing nor anything remotely resembling even a moderate or objective fourth estate.

Should you have doubt in this regard, I urge you to consider, as an example, the revelations from Dan Rather about what CBS did to curry favor with the White House.

Or the most criminal example of what can happen to a corporate owned, fully politicized, fourth estate: the Iraq war. These types of political propaganda practices used to be called Yellow Journalism. Now they are the standard, cleverly renamed "fair and balanced."

So it naturally follows that the robber barons and their fourth estate business partners should indeed benefit from the puppet they all worked so vigorously to enthrone.

Corporate Interests merged with State Interests

The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.

Think about this for a moment.

A defense contractor pays heavily into the coffers of political candidates to get them elected to office. After they are elected, those same defense contractors get big contracts -- but for what? If there is no war, how will money already promised to these companies be justified?

The mechanism is of course propaganda, repackaged as news, sold to us to convince us to part with our hard earned money so that the few can profit and re-profit from a veritable buffet of free labor, free brand marketing, and easy money, and all under the banner of patriotism, something which no one will criticize easily or lightly.

You see, these same defense contractors also happen to either own (as with General Electric) or have business relationships with media giants, which makes the solution of creating a war much easier. If the news informs us, as it did prior to the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein has built an entire arsenal of WMD's ready to kill us all, we believe it, and since dissenting views are excluded, what other choice or avenues of information can we turn to? What other arguments from what other "experts," and what other evidence from what other "independent" institutions, can we compare to the so called facts being put forth?

Do we have a choice then but to believe, if for no other reason than to because we want to have faith that someone is telling us the truth? But it does not end there, just in case a few questioning minds might try to locate a pebble of truth outside of the pre-packaged, pre-approved, formally sanctioned propaganda we have been so meticulously fed to us. The same corporate and political interests have not only purchased the truth or manufactured their version of the truth, they have also purchased identities, created front groups, bought off churches and through them the souls of the congregants, to act as a secondary machine of disinformation and even - when needed - to be called upon to attack and destroy.

If a voice of dissent should manage to slip through the heavily corporatized and politicized public censors, as we saw happen in the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a cadre of purchased truth tellers, reporters, and grassroots groups are ready in the wings to react swiftly, to silence and discredit back into the shadows not only the lone whistle-blower, but any other person considering coming forward.

This is not something that happens in a democracy. This type of political character assassination in which the assassins are so much of the mainstream does not happen in a democracy. It only happens in countries under the control of something other than the people, but not in a democracy.

In a nation where corporations control the government, the military, and every possible freedom that can be afforded to a people (voting rights, access to basic life sustaining resources, etc.), a thing such as "democracy" is merely another marketing strategy or product brand, worn like one might wear a tiny American flag on the lapel of a dinner jacket.

Such corporate control and merger with the government and military has been in modern times called fascism. In America, we call it "privatization," so that the jagged edges and unpleasant concepts of a nation where no choice is our own to make can be much more easily digested.

Some discontent began brewing in pockets across the nation shortly after the appointment of a corporate approved leadership. It was momentarily interrupted by the horrors of an attack on this nation, but it continued to grow again as the fear tactics of the state sponsored machine could no longer keep us all silent at the same time and for the same duration. Of course, the modern day printing press in the form of the Internet is something that cannot be emphasized enough as the single most important technological development of our modern era.

In America we now have designated areas where people may protest, conveniently far away from news cameras and the people they are protesting - so out of sight are the new Americans that they have been rendered largely invisible. The right to congregate, as with other constitutionally protected rights, would have been almost entirely dismantled by this administration if not for the Internet. So armed with a new printing press, a global printing press at that, it would not be long before the public awoke from the lies that led to the Iraq war.

And even when those lies were finally exposed, and we - the public knew that we were all being lied to, we watched is stunned horror as the corporate owned/state sponsored "news" outlets attempted to convince us that we simply did not understand the reasons given for the war in the first place. It was WMD; no, it was the spreading of Democracy; no, it was something or other; but whatever it was, it was always "we the people" who were at fault. We simply did not get it, is what we were told. The entire administration set off on a tour of the US hoping to convince us that we simply did not get it. What they did not realize, however, is that we simply no longer bought it.

And so we move into the Cold Civil War

It has slowly become more and more obvious that we are fighting a domestic war, as yet unnamed, but is palpable to any of us who pay attention. Although it is important today as ever that we hold the Bush administration accountable for cooking intelligence that led us into a war of choice against a nation posing no threat to us, the most immediately important questions surround the reasons for why we continue to be held hostage to that war.

Understanding the nature of the domestic battle can only lead to a single conclusion. Whatever the myriad lies that have led us into Iraq in the first place, we now only continue to remain in Iraq as a distraction from the real war at home and likely for the worst kind of political abuses.

What possible motivations can continue to keep this administration focused on seeing through the worst policy decision ever to have been conceived, let alone carried out? It can't be the continued profiteering as the rape and pillage of Iraqi resources had already climaxed some time ago and the domestic pressure of Congressional investigations has already changed how US companies in Iraq are operating.

We can't be in Iraq because the people want to fight and win the war on terror as the majority of the nation does not believe this slogan anymore and also understands - despite the failings of the fourth estate - that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. It can't be that we are in Iraq because our allies want continued war - although the House of Saud likely wants us to clean up the mess we have already made. In general, however, the international community certainly wants a political solution at this point.

What motive is left for keeping our nation embroiled in a civil war abroad? If we had men of honor in leadership, then I might believe the humanitarian concerns about the Iraqi refugees and so many displaced and so much destroyed as a possible motive. Yet could anyone call George W. Bush and Dick Cheney men of honor or say of them in earnest that they are truly concerned with the humanitarian nightmare that is now Iraq?

No. The reason we continue to remain in Iraq is that it is the only weapon left in the political arsenal of the corporate robber barons trying drastically and desperately to maintain their grip on domestic power. That fight for domestic power and the abuses of those who I would call the domestic villains in the saga is nothing short of a civil war, a cold civil war to be sure, but nevertheless a national struggle with the same stakes and the same motives. Although there are no geographical demarcations indicating enemy territory, there is no uniform identifying the adversary, and there is no bloodshed in the streets, it is still a war, a war for the foundation of this nation and the future of democracy. Even the villains are the same now as they were during the violent Civil War, although they do not all congregate along a particular geographical locale. They are the same villains who during the American Civil War wanted corporate power, slave labor, and control of government and national resources.

Yet those villains would have us believe we are fighting each other, a nation divided by its own political and social views. The same corporate interests who are robbing us blind would have us believe that we are a deeply divided nation: pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, taxes vs. no taxes, God vs. godlessness, gays vs. heterosexuals, and on and on it goes, pitting us against one another on the basis of every conceivable human attribute, position, and whatever differentiates any one person from another.

Does it not seem odd that differences that have for so long existed and co-existed, even with some tension, would suddenly now be strong enough to split this nation apart over the policies of George W. Bush? I have yet to meet a sane and rational person, regardless of political affiliation, who believes anything positive about Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their administration. When I talk to everyday people in everyday context, they don't bring up pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, nor do they bring up the mantra of gays taking over the country. No, everyday people I talk to are appalled, embarrassed, and frightened of this cabal.

Indeed, on the most important issues of our time and despite our many individual differences, the majority of us agree on the basics of what is currently wrong with this country and its leadership.

So why are we being constantly bombarded with the idea that we are a nation divided? And just who spending billions on propaganda to make us believe it?

The Corporate Confederacy

In our cold civil war, the enemy is not a part of the country called the "red states," as conveniently manufactured. Nor is the enemy a phantom right wing "wing-nut" or left wing "liberal loony," although there are some people who fall very much under those definitions. On the whole, however, there are simply not enough delusional and/or corrupt Americans to fill the manufactured stereotypes of the typical this or a typical that, even if the label is even color-coded for political fear tactics.

The image of a divided nation at war with itself is a false one, as false as the reasons for this war and the general war on terror, which is more of a reign of terror than anything else. But who is it trying so hard to divide this nation and for what reason?

Perhaps the most obvious answer lies in that same question reworded thusly: Who benefits? Consider this question in yet another way: So long as we are standing face to face and not standing shoulder to shoulder, who is benefiting? The answer of course is the same corporations and their lackeys masquerading in the garb of government. They need to distract us, divide us, spend billions of dollars trying to convince us what we need, what we hate, what we love, who is evil, who is good and everything in between.

These authoritarians, more appropriately fascists, understand that dissent is to be treated like a virus. It has to be, because the spread of individual opinions might collapse a whole industry. The more you know, the more you question; the more you question, the more you infect others; and the more people there are asking questions, the more we become a nation that cannot be ruled or bullied. We are far too many, and if we are left to think for ourselves, we might not like what we find.

We are, therefore, a threat, a virus, a thing that must be entertained, distracted, confused, frightened, anything, but allowed the freedom to think for ourselves or express those views to one another. People standing shoulder to shoulder outnumber the few who have claimed the control of our nation for themselves and against our best interests. We outnumber them and we frighten them because should we stand together, they cannot stand for long.

Forcing the President to Answer...

This brings me to the MoveOn moment of history, not so much for the ad itself, which I actually found petty because of its title. No, the ad has become almost irrelevant to the aftermath and the series of events that followed. It is those events collectively that are historic in their meaning, and on many and important levels.

Remember, the majority of the American public - regardless of age, religion, and political leanings -- is opposed to the war in Iraq. MoveOn represents but a mere 3 million or so Americans out of this majority, but still a large delegation expressing a very mainstream and popular view. So what happened, then? What was the real issue that no one noticed or actually verbalized, but felt almost instantaneously? We all felt it. I felt it. You felt it. But what happened that we all felt?

One of the major accomplishments of the MoveOn ad is that it showed that a President who claims not to care about the poll numbers, and hence the opinion of the public he claims to represent, suddenly had to answer the gauntlet publicly thrown down. His arrogance demanded it and his opportunistic nature wanted to exploit it.

Imagine this. The President of the United States had to answer 3 million Americans because they placed an advertisement in a newspaper. One newspaper ad is all it took for the most arrogant and misanthropic failure of a President in US history to be forced to stand up on national television and face the public. That is fairly miraculous in my humble opinion, and had the public known that this would work earlier, they would likely have peppered every space within every newspaper with a constant assortment of expressions, judgments, demands, and so forth. That alone would be a victory, but it is not the only victory that came, in quick succession, one after the other.

When the President denounced the ad as disgusting, he also denounced the public opinion of most Americans and, without meaning to, actually united and energized the public. He energized the public against him and the corporate-political junta he represents. We all felt energized by the arrogance of a leader who would so insult his own constituents and in such a public forum. In reaction, it was as though everyone was pushed into the streets - like it or not - at the same time.

Forcing the Corporate Confederacy into a defensive posture...

Yet the President and his corporate owners were far too panicked to stop at that. They were downright terrified -- enough to actually condemn the majority of Americans, including active duty members of the military, in the public circus of a formal Senate rebuke.

Think about this for a moment. Here is a Congress which cannot or simply will not do what they have been elected to do. We do not want a law passed, and they pass it. We want to redress our grievances, and they ignore us. Yet they were able to muster up the energy and numbers to get together in a collective rebuke of us because of an advertisement?

I'm not a member of MoveOn and I likely and in all honesty would have ignored the ad. But I felt insulted, as did many other people who might have also ignored the ad. If the corporate-political mechanism had not so panicked and not so overreacted, this would have been but an advertisement placed in a paper by a so-called liberal group. Perhaps a few official opinion makers would have noted it as a bit petty, but it was nothing anyone really would have remembered in a society where information is processed only in short bursts and quickly forgotten.

But the corporate and political mechanism could not ignore this, would not ignore it, and by attacking and rebuking the very mainstream sentiments about this war, they inadvertently made each and every American who shares that view feel directly insulted.

The realization that in numbers comes strength...

Something happened here, something momentous, but it took me some time before I fully understood what it was that occurred. In the end, it was really not the ad itself that caused such shameless and desperate attempts to muzzle the public. No, the ad was simply a mechanism for a popular opinion. What really frightened the corporate owned and their masters is that roughly 3 million Americans realized that in pooling their resources and standing together, they could take on the big boys. That is to say, they realized that regardless of their differences, they could stand shoulder to shoulder and this sent a wave of panic inside America Inc.

Because what would happen if more and more people defied the propaganda of a nation divided in opinion about this war? What if more and more people joined the ranks and showed that that without doubt, the public is very much united against this war? Most importantly, what if the public realized that it is not just the war they are so fully united in opinion on? What if this spread to other industries, such as health care, or taxes, and so on?

That notion is far too dangerous for America Inc., and also for their employees in government. What would happen if Americans could be heard above the din of corporate lobbyists and opinion makers, and were able to directly invalidate the carefully produced message telling us who we are, what we like, what we hate, what we want, what we need, and everything in between? You see the danger in this for those who spend billions upon billions a year on "public relations" and "advertising" and "image-making," all in order to make us believe that we do not agree and therefore cannot be united?

The public demand for redress was swift and unexpected, it blindsided the state mechanism, and it delivered a direct hit using nothing but a slogan, a picture, and facts.

Those who have betrayed us identify themselves...

But there is one more reason why this was something of a historic moment in its collection of reactions and counter-reactions. It exposed those in government as representative of someone or something other than the American people.

Consider that the majority of the public shares the sentiment of MoveOn's ad, not in the petty title of it, but in its content. The majority of the public which shares this opinion is also the majority of the voting public to whom these politicians in office are beholden, right?

Yet the President held full court to denounce the public. The Senate Republicans and 20 Democrats held full court to rebuke the public. The paid propagandists ran out with pen in hand to reprimand the public. TV screens were filled from channel to channel by the mobilized shills all condemning the public. And the corporate owned "grassroots" organization called Freedom's Watch wasted no time in creating and distributing its own ad vilifying the public. Does this not strike anyone as strange?

If the majority of the public shares this sentiment, then who are all these people rushing forth to defend? Who is this highly organized, well funded condemnation of the American public for? The only conclusion that can be reached is that the people who voted to rebuke the American people do not represent the American people. It is that simple. Whoever the elected officials in office are beholden to, it is most certainly not the public.

For the Still Deluded Among You...

If you are still a card carrying Republican, then you likely believe that the President and his party represent you. In reality, for those of you "Conservatives" still imagining yourselves to be the "base," and somehow represented by this President and his cronies, I have news for you: You are not in that club either.

Take a moment to see for yourselves:


Do you see a single soldier or a family member of a soldier represented in the President's "base?" Do you see a church, a temple, or any other religious organization represented, or a religious object in any way displayed at this "base" dinner? Do you see your political party friends or associates here, dining on food most of you cannot even afford to look at? In fact, do any of these people appear to you to be anyone you know? Does this event resemble your dining experience in general or your access to our dear leader in particular?

The majority of us now know that we are no longer represented by those in elected office. What we did not know until the Senate resolution to rebuke the MoveOn ad is just which of our elected public officials were "with us" and which were most decidedly "with the President." On that point, there is no longer any doubt. Every elected official who voted for condemning roughly 3 million Americans for something so fundamentally protected by the Constitution as the freedom to disagree with the President - does not represent us. Whoever they represent, it is not us.

In the cold civil war in which we are now all fighting to free ourselves from the corporate confederacy, the MoveOn ad was the first direct hit against a monolithic machine thought impervious before.

America's COWARDLY 'leadership' - Democrats, Bush, media whores - IGNORE massacres and mass-murder by regime in Burma....

Media Whores, cowardly, corrupted Democrats, and Bush-Cheney Republicans, NOT INTERESTED in covering Burma massacries, SUPPRESSION of democratic protests, and MASS SLAVERY by the Burma junta.....


US Media Don't Cover It
Posted October 2, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/if-a-tree-falls-in-burma_b_66863.html


The story in Burma just gets worse. The "warehouse", in which more than a thousand have been kept since their arrest, sounds like someplace even worse than Gitmo. And then there's the story of the Army major who deserted rather than stay to shoot monks, lest he burn in hell forever. American media, to the extent they ever cared about the Burma story, have moved on.
We allow ourselves to be roused to warlike ire by such stories when the government sees fit, even when those stories are untrue. But here, when the reporting on Burma seems against all odds to truthfully reflect the awful situation there, it's hard for us to be roused even to a simulation of moderate interest...

UPDATE: "We'll continue to cover this story, no matter how long it takes.." That was Anderson Cooper Tuesday night, wrapping up a CNN segment in which "exclusive" video of the demonstrations (and the military response) in Burma was aired for the first time--on CNN. Tuesday night--more than a week after the demonstrations occurred, and almost four full days since Al Jazeera English and BBC World aired if not the same almost virtually identical footage. How about continuing to cover it while it can still do some good--i.e., while demonstrators are still putting their lives on the line in the hope of some support from the West?

Media Whores echo AIPAC, Bush "I HATE IRANIANS!" narrative... Just as Goebbels and Hitler HATED the Jews....

It is ONLY because the Iraq war has squandered the better part of a trillion dollars (question: how many solar panels, and how much energy generated, would a TRILLION DOLLARS buy for America's sunbelt?), ground the United States Military into the dust of the Mideast, and broken the bodies of thousands of American men and women (and killed at least several hundred thousand Iraqis, not that they count) that this story even makes it to the pages of the "far left web."

IF it weren't for all that DEATH and DESTRUCTION unleashed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney's war(s), Ms. Cagan's grotesque comments would be just some more anonymous VIP mutterings from the bowels of the Bush-infested Department of Defense, sort of like Douglas Feith (whose "parrellel" intel agency subverted and bypassed CIA, NSA, State Dept., and other legitimate intel estimates) or Paul Wolfowitz or even that master of ceremonies himself, Donald Rumsfeld, who back in the good old days could wow the DC press corpse with his mastery of Dr. Strangelovian meaningless gobbledygook doublespeak. ("We know where the WMDs in Iraq are... they are in points to the North, East, South, and West of Tikrit... and Over the Rainbow, too!")

-----------------------------------------------
"I Hate All Iranians"
Frank Talk from [a Bush-infested] Defense Department Official
By GARY LEUPP
October 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp10022007.html


It ought to be political suicide. A Bush administration official (specifically, the Defense Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs) told a group of six members of the British Parliament, "In any case, I hate all Iranians." Three MPs attending the meeting have confirmed this to the British tabloid The Daily Mail.

The official in question, Debra Cagan, appears in the Daily Mail photo in a red leather blouse and what looks like a chain-mail choker around her neck, along with some sort of martial cross although I understand she's Jewish. Her hair's slicked back like that of a fifties street gang kid. She looks like a butch dominatrix. I hope she would not be offended by this description because it is accurate and I suspect it's her intention to project such an image. (Compare Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in February 2005 arriving at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield wearing a black skirt showing just a little leg, a black gold-buttoned coat descending to mid-calf, and knee-high dirk-slim high-heeled boots. What fashion statement are these powerful political women trying to make?)

Dressed that way, she states in a casual aside to respectable Britons, as though they'll understand and be anything other than appalled, "I hate all Iranians." Did she preface the remark with, "Just between us imperialists"? Did she expect that they'd just nod in sympathy and keep the matter to themselves? The Mail reports they were in fact "taken aback," which of course speaks somewhat well for them.

So now the word is out, but predictably, denied. "She doesn't speak that way," an unnamed Defense Department official assured the Mail. It's not fashionable in the early 21^st century to hate entire peoples, and there are actually laws in civilized countries against hate speech. A Defense Department official cannot say to British MPs, "In any case, I hate all Jews," for example. This was possible in the 1930s, but would be political suicide today. But maybe you can say what Cagan did, without job consequences.

When you have the entire Senate calling for the U.S. to "confront" Iran, the entire Congress deferring to AIPAC in its refusal to demand that Bush consult with it before attacking Iran, the Persian Empire of Xerxes ludicrously depicted as the enemy of "freedom" in a popular film, the president of a great U.S. university taking the opportunity of the Iranian president's invited visit to insult him at length before conceding to him the podium---well, you know that norms of civility no longer apply. Logic, reason, balance pale before the power of myth and backwards reasoning of those seeking to create their own new, wild and spectacularly crazy reality. The Nazis called it "the triumph of the will"---the will that slams down the hated, weaker, lesser peoples and allows the Ubermenschen, the supermen, to realize their fate.

Somehow it seems fitting that a Defense Department official should speak so frankly as three U.S. aircraft carriers linger off the Iranian coast, the well-financed anti-Iran disinformation campaign swells, and neocon ideologues granted extensive White House access explicitly demand the bombing of Iran. It is the natural culmination of the vilification trend. If you hate all of them (and are grotesquely ignorant of their vast contribution to human civilization), why not nuke them, and their monuments and treasures, and destroy their 3000 year history, and "wipe them off the map"? Why not prepare public opinion for that shattering scenario, and grind those boot heels into the brains of any sympathizers of those you call "sand-niggers" as you try to spread Bush's gospel of hate?

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Media whores IGNORE the CHEVRON-Condoleeza Rice-BURMA MASS MURDER CONNECTION....

CHEVRON'S PIPELINE in Burma is the conduit that fuels Burma's MURDEROUS THUG REGIME....

Because GREED, lust for profit, centralization of wealth and power, and WORSHIP of MONEY are the elements that govern America's Right-leaning corporate media, THIS STORY about CHEVRON's SUPPORT for the MASS-MURDER BURMA REGIME is only found on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" newscast.....

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Chevron’s Pipeline Is the Burmese Regime’s Lifeline
By Amy Goodman
Posted on Oct 2, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071002_chevrons_pipeline_is_the_burmese_regimes_lifeline/

<< ...Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: “Sanctions haven’t worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma’s regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It’s really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers.”

The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal’s exemption from the Burma sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.

Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.

Human-rights groups around the world have called for a global day of action on Saturday, Oct. 6, in solidarity with the people of Burma. Like the brave activists and citizen journalists sending news and photos out of the country, the organizers of the Oct. 6 protest are using the Internet to pull together what will probably be the largest demonstration ever in support of Burma. Among the demands are calls for companies to stop doing business with Burma’s brutal regime. >>

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.

CNN, US media whores, DOWNPLAY, WHITEWASH, CENSOR the FEROCITY of Burma regime's brutal, MURDEROUS crackdown on democracy protesters.....

CNN, US media whores, DOWNPLAY, WHITEWASH, CENSOR the FEROCITY of Burma regime's brutal, silent, MASS-MURDER crackdown on regime opponents and pro-democracy protesters.... BECAUSE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH and POWER (anti-democratic tendencies) ARE WHAT AMERICA's MEDIA WHORES - CNN, Fox 'news' - are all about.

TEXTBOOK photo of MILITARY as parasites: Burma's army has one and only one main purpose: TO TERRORIZE the citizens of that country, so the military junta can rob the nation of its wealth and ENSLAVE the regime's enemies and opponents.


SOLDIERS HUNT DISSIDENTS in Myanmar http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar;_ylt=Ag42Ph9LAtoy0CWEkFU0BvGs0NUE



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar;_ylt=Ag42Ph9LAtoy0CWEkFU0BvGs0NUE

'MAJOR MEDIA" downplays, censors story of Back woman kidnapped, tortured, raped by white family in West Virginia....

ePluribus Media details the story of a Black woman kidnapped, rapped, tortured, and forced to eat animal feces, by her White-trash captors... and how the "MAJOR MEDIA" downplays or minimizes the story, to where it is nonexistent in national coverage. CNN does carry the story in a one-page web article:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/12/woman.tortured/index.html
...but as ePluribus points out, this story with all the elements of true outrage and horrendous cruelty receives almost no media coverage, while "Missing White Women" are still the "mainstream media's" favorite "slow news week" distraction/filler stories.

'

Dan Rather's Lawsuit against CBS/Viacom lays out how CBS SUBORDINATED factual reporting to Viacom's support for Bush-Cheney administration....

While Dan Rather is far from the perfect journalist, perfect network news-anchor, or perfect corporate job-axing victim, his LAWSUIT against his superiors at CBS news and VIACOM, the corporation that owns CBS, is an excellent case of journalism in itself, for Rather has the "insider goods" on CBS-Viacom's corporate policies, and how those policies TAINTED 'NEWS' COVERAGE towards be a DUMBING DOWN of CBS news' viewers, in an effort to curry favor with the Bush-Cheney White House. Those efforts by CBS and corporate parent Viacom were about huge, multi-million dollar tax cuts the Bush administration was handing out to friendly corporations (campaign donors), favorable consolidation for hostile takeovers and media conglomerate buyouts of smaller companies, and easy access to administration and government sources who could provide fodder for future 'news' stories. In effect, CBS/Viacom KILLED not only the "Lt. Bush AWOL from Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam War" story, but CBS also smothered, for several weeks, honest and accurate reports to American viewers about the unfolding ABU GHRAIB prisoner torture/'abuse' program at the US run prison in Iraq. Those two stories are just the tip of the iceberg of CBS's media atrocities, including suppressing the many cases of computerized vote fraud in 3 national elections since 2002, under-reporting the full extent of America's vast budget deficits; under-reporting the full extent of Iraqi civilian casualties since the US invasion of Iraq; under-reporting the full extent of global warming and scientific evidence supporting those findings, and DOZENS of other stories CBS and its "MAJOR MEDIA" corporate allies all continue to under-report and MISINFORM American readers and viewers about.

<< The danger to the mainstream news industry in general, however, is not in the allegations themselves, but in the context surrounding them provided by a long-time insider who knows where all the bodies are buried.

Consider the first paragraph on the fourth page of the complaint. According to Rather, CBS chose to jettison both himself and the Texas Air National Guard story because, "CBS's parent company, Viacom, and it Chief Executive Officer, Sumner Redstone, considered it to be in its corporate interest to curry favor with the Bush administration." >>

<< "What emerges here," writer Greg Sargent concludes on the Talking Points Memo blog [about the Abu Ghraib US prison torture and "abuse" scandal], "is a striking portrait of a big news org that, fearful of pressure from conservative critics and eager to curry favor with the Bush administration, allegedly dragged its feet to an extraordinary degree in order to avoid revealing the truths it knew about a horrifying scandal of international dimensions [the release and publicatio of Abu Ghraib torture/abuse photos at the hands of American guards/soldiers]. Sobering stuff." >>

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Dan Rather's Magnum Opus
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Wednesday 26 September 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092607A.shtml

Media is a word that has come to mean bad journalism.
- Graham Greene

His face was once a totem, a comforting TV-screen touchstone. His voice and inflection lent suppertime credence to the myth of American permanence, safety and dependability, night after night, for a quarter of a century. It is surpassingly strange, therefore, to encompass Dan Rather's recent and abrupt metamorphosis. The former "CBS Nightly News" anchor, previously a study in constancy and predictability, has suddenly become a genuine threat to the entire mainstream news industry.

Last week, Rather filed a $70 million lawsuit (PDF link, Adobe Acrobat required) against CBS, its chief executive Leslie Moonves, former network president Andrew Heyward, CBS's parent company Viacom and Viacom's Executive Chairman Sumner Redstone.

The suit stems from a sensational September 2004 CBS report detailing documentary evidence of George W. Bush's poor performance during and constant absence from service in the Texas Air National Guard during the early 1970s. The report was met with an immediate chorus of scornful dismissals from Bush administration officials, Bush campaign spokespeople and right-wing bloggers that eventually cast doubt upon the authenticity of the documents. Within two weeks, CBS retreated in humiliation from the story. Rather staggered on as the "CBS Nightly News" anchor for a few more excruciating months, but finally departed on March 9, 2005.

Among the assertions in his suit, Rather claims CBS failed to provide him sufficient time and support to defend the veracity of his report, that the network essentially folded like sodden newsprint under pressure from right-wing advocates of the Bush administration, and that the entire matter permanently ravaged his professional reputation. Presumably, CBS finds Rather's public allegations disconcerting to at least some degree; their news section is already burdened by cratering viewership resulting from the Katie Couric fiasco, so the additional burden of this suit can only be another unwelcome complication in an already messy state of affairs.

The danger to the mainstream news industry in general, however, is not in the allegations themselves, but in the context surrounding them provided by a long-time insider who knows where all the bodies are buried.

Consider the first paragraph on the fourth page of the complaint. According to Rather, CBS chose to jettison both himself and the Texas Air National Guard story because, "CBS's parent company, Viacom, and it Chief Executive Officer, Sumner Redstone, considered it to be in its corporate interest to curry favor with the Bush administration."

Consider CBS's handling of a far more serious Bush administration scandal, the torture of Iraqis by American forces at Abu Ghraib prison, as described on pages 11 and 12 of the complaint. According to Rather, "Despite the story's importance, and because of the negative impact the story would have on the Bush administration, with which Viacom and CBS wished to curry favor, CBS management attempted to bury it."

"Even after obtaining nearly a dozen now notorious photographs," continues the complaint, "which made it impossible to deny the accuracy of the story, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to delay the story for an additional three weeks... CBS imposed the unusual restrictions that the story would be aired only once, that it would not be preceded by on-air promotion, and that it would not be referenced on the CBS Evening News."

"What emerges here," writer Greg Sargent concludes on the Talking Points Memo blog, "is a striking portrait of a big news org that, fearful of pressure from conservative critics and eager to curry favor with the Bush administration, allegedly dragged its feet to an extraordinary degree in order to avoid revealing the truths it knew about a horrifying scandal of international dimensions. Sobering stuff."

Sobering indeed, and therein lies the threat. The willful collusion between CBS management and the Bush administration, offered by Rather to frame his accusations, illuminate an insidious, grotesque, and altogether deadly alignment of circumstances hiding in plain sight before the entire American populace. An explanation for why the legitimate fears and anxious uncertainties of the people are never soothed or clarified by mainstream news outlets like CBS, but are instead methodically aggravated and intentionally amplified by those outlets, begins to take shape in light of Rather's inside-view revelations.

Underscored here, in no uncertain terms, are the grim realities of modern American journalism, realities that have little to do with the original conception of the institution. While a number of the Founders were not especially enamored with the printed slings and arrows of the journalists of their day, they were united in the belief that a free and honest press was absolutely necessary to the safety and liberty of the country. "The only security of all," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1823, "is in a free press."

American democracy ceases to function when people blither their votes into ballot boxes on the basis of opinions and ideologies that are swaddled in the beggar-rags of ubiquitous disinformation and bewilderingly muddled cant, but such is now and has long been this nation's common plight. Today's "free press," however, bears little resemblance to the conceived constitutional bulwark cherished by the Founders.

In its place, we now have a tightly-woven confederation of profit-seeking businesses that own virtually every print and broadcast news outlet of significance in the country. There is but scant allegiance to the truth found within these outlets, because their foremost priority when reporting on most issues of national consequence is to protect the interests of those parent companies and their advertisers.

If a parent company is heavily involved in the manufacture and sale of weaponry to the Pentagon, for example, that company's pet news outlet will skew its coverage to cast the most favorable light on a war - and on the politicians and political parties who support it - because that is money in the bank for that parent. There is nothing theoretical in this; NBC, MSNBC and CNBC all championed both the Iraq war and its architects, because they are owned by huge defense contractor General Electric, which has profited enormously from the war.

Media conglomerates like Time-Warner - whose massive holdings include CNN, HBO, Warner Bros., AOL, Time magazine, People magazine, dozens of other periodicals, film production companies, book publishers and television networks - are utterly incapable of providing objective reports to the American people regarding a broad constellation of significant and pressing issues. CNN is inescapably connected to all of Time-Warner's myriad subsidiaries and affiliates, and to the political affiliations, which guarantee the biggest profits for these entities.

Thus, many stories on a variety of serious matters (the crippling side-effects of well-hyped but poorly-tested pills, for example, or the abuse of workers in third-world technological sweatshops, or thousands of dead fish rotting downstream from a coal plant, or the deceptions that led to a failed war and thousands of dead American soldiers) almost never tend to see the light of mainstream-newsroom day. This is not called censorship or suppression or collusion or treason in the offices where such decisions are made. This is called sound business practice.

In their desire to curry favor with the Bush administration, the mainstream news media became willing accomplices to one of the most unspeakable crimes ever committed against the American people: the deliberate and strategic use and manipulation of fear by the Bush administration to increase their own power and influence.

The ordinary common sense and sound judgment of the American people was systematically attacked and debased, the psyche of the entire population was ceaselessly pummeled by a paranoid muddle of murky suspicions and nebulous fears, in order to create a population of permanently frightened and thus easily led dupes. The grisly reports of inhuman acts of torture by Americans, the undermining of the Constitution and our rights, the program of domestic surveillance, all this and so much besides, fell by the wayside because Americans became programmed by the news media to accept the unacceptable, lest they be branded as traitors or killed outright by swarming hordes of al-Qaeda/insurgent/shoe-bombers.

It will be many years before the nation recovers from this despicable onslaught, if indeed it ever does, and the mainstream news industry is exactly as guilty as the Bush administration for perpetrating this unspeakable, harmful offense. Even amid the demonstrably ruinous consequences of their behavior, the prime players of the mainstream news industry still languish like cream-glutted cats before the furnace of history, and still seek to curry favor from the Bush administration.

Nothing could be more dangerous to their conniving complacency than the exposure of their voluntary collusion in the promulgation of mortal lies and lethal hyperbole. Conversely, nothing could be more beneficial to the health and security of America and its citizens than exposing the sham passing itself off as "journalism," exposing what was so deliberately done to them, and exposing the grim truth that almost everything they've heard from their government and their news media has been a rank, rancid, self-serving pile of lies designed to imprison their minds and control their behavior.

Because he willingly participated in this for many years, Dan Rather cannot be considered some sort of saint or martyr. But it was that very participation which informs his lawsuit, and because he is now divulging what he came to know through his complicity, Rather is a true menace as far as the mainstream news industry is concerned. This is his final broadcast of sorts, his magnum opus in 32 pages, a parting jolt of desperately needed journalism, one last story filed to report the truth about what journalism has become.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

Iran's President Ahmadinejad shows up Columbia University's preoccuption with war and power over Human Rights....

In trying to BULLY and DEMEAN Iranian President Ahmadinejad's appearance at Columbia University, according to "mainstream media" notions and America's PROPAGANDA NARRATIVE that are so prevelent today, Columbia University students and their president instead illustrated AMERICA's "what's in it for us" BIAS.
Columbia University tudents and President Bollinger revealed not only America's PREOCCUPATION with EMPIRE and FOREIGN WARS - America's armies and hired death squads now on TWO BORDERS of Iran - over the HUMAN RIGHTS of Iranians put at risk by the regime there (which brutality has only INCREASED since the two US wars on Iran's borders), but they also demonstrated the STRANGLEHOLD that the Jewish lobby in America (of which AIPAC - the Israel-America Political Action Committee is only the most visible) has on America's foreign policy and national discourse.
Israel is a nation with nuclear weapons, a nuclear stockpile, and NO international weapons inspections. Yet America's Jews, including the "best and brightest" in academia at Columbia and other universities, take it as a god-given right that other nations must bow to international inspections, while Israel ignores them. In his brief appearance at Columbia University, in the heart of the power-base of New York City's Jewish academic, business, and political elite, Iran President Ahmadinejad illustrated to the whole world America's real priorities - and Human Rights are far down the list.
As, for example, the New York academic/political/business elite IGNORING the Arab/Islamist GENOCIDE in South Sudan, from long before 9-11-2001, because Americans considered effort there to be below our economic/political cost-rewards threshold, except for an occasional academic symposium held to denounce the bought-and-paid for rape, pillage, killings, and mass murders.
(Note: unlike the US "Blackhawk Down" debacle in Somalia, in the South Sudan there are millions of African natives willing to defend themselves against the murderous "ethnic cleansing" rape, pillage, and murder raids sponsored by the Khartoum Arab-Islamist regime, if only the South-Sudanese had some support and supplies to counter the Khartoum regime's sponsorship of murderous militias via millions of dollars donated by wealthy Arab oil nations. In a stunning example of American foreign policy ignorance and gross hypocrisy, America has for the past decade given far more respect to the Khartoum regime SPONSORS OF MASS-MURDER TERRORISM, than we have given to the African victims of that terror.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=%7B6560F4B3-DCE5-4609-8845-4CD1BF0FE115%7D

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[Iran's President Ahmadinejad]- Smartest Man in the Room [at Columbia Univ. speech]
by Sam Sedaei
Posted September 25, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-sedaei/smartest-man-in-the-room_b_65843.html

Dan Rather's "get along, go along" obsequiousness to CBS management led to his disgraceful exit from journalism....

IN our previous report, we highlighted Dan Rather's comments that American democracy can not endure not having an independent and aggressive press-media to provide a "watchdog" function against government and powerful private interests.
In that report, we suggested that Mr. Rather himself had been part of the problem, not noticing, or failing to aggressively investigate, the widespread reports of then Texas Governor George W. Bush's less than stellar record of duty in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s during the Vietnam war. The fact that the press and media did not RUSH to cover the "Bush AWOL during Vietnam war?" story in the summer of 2000 indicates just how lazy and complacent the media had become after almost a decade of Clinton-bashing, when all it took to start a cable 'news' show, or have your name as the by-line under a blaring front page headline, was to get the latest salacious "DID SHE OR DIDN'T SHE?" leaked Grand Jury tidbits from federal prosecutor Ken Starr (about the 'Monica scandal'), or any of five dozen other Republican leaders or partisan writers calling for the impeachment of then President Clinton based on various alleged scandals and accusations, many of which were hyped ("China satellite 'scandal'!") and many of which were false scandals created entirely out of thin air, as for example the "LINCOLN BEDROOM SCANDAL!" or the "White House TRASHING 'SCANDAL'!" the later of which had NOT ONE SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH to corroborate WEEK'S worth of accusatory headlines from the incoming Bush administration press department (Ari Fleischer, Karen Hughes, and Karl Rove), and the former of which ("Lincoln bedroom scandal") was ridiculous back then, much less today when the Vice President refuses to detail who even visits the VP mansion - with narry a peep of outrage and concern from the very press-media folks who were so indignant about those faux Clinton 'scandals.'

Today, investigative reporter GREGG PALAST adds another chapter of the "Dan Rather: TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE for his own good" story. Palast reports on how Rather buckled to CBS management in 2004, disavowing his own reporting. It should be noted, that Rather had previously gotten on the first President Bush's bad side, Rather trying a "gotcha" question on the senior Bush, only to have then President Bush refuse to answer the question, and instead Bush went vengeful, attacking Rather's veracity and integrity in asking the question.

It looks like, not once, but TWICE in his career Dan Rather has been STYMIED if not sidelined (and driven out of business altogether) by the Bush family. Too bad Mr. Rather didn't stick up for himself earlier: 7,000 Americans killed (in Iraq war and 9-11 attacks), and thousands more wounded, might still be alive, whole, and well today if he had.

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DAN RATHER: TASED AND CONFUSEDPublished September 24th, 2007
by Greg Palast
Monday September 24, 2007
http://www.gregpalast.com/dan-rather-tased-and-confused/

The Still-Unreported Story of “Top Gun” George Bush



New York- Newly unearthed records reveal that, in 2004, when Americans were in the midst of a brutal electoral battle over whether to reelect a president posing as a war hero, a commanding US reporter, Dan Rather, went AWOL.

Just three months before the election, Rather had a story that might have changed the outcome of that razor-close race. We now know that Dan cut a back-room deal to shut his mouth, grab his ankles, and let his network retract a story he knew to be absolutely true.

In September 2004 when Rather cowered, Bush was riding high in the polls. Now, with Bush’s approval ratings are below smallpox, Rather has come out of hiding to shoot at the lame duck. Thanks, Dan.

It began on September 8, 2004, when Rather, on CBS, ran a story that Daddy Bush Senior had, in 1968, put in the fix to get his baby George out of the Vietnam War and into the Texas Air National Guard. Little George then rode out the war defending Houston from Viet Cong attack.

The story is stone-cold solid. I know, because we ran it on BBC Television a year before CBS (see that broadcast here). BBC has never retracted a word of it.

But CBS caved. So did Dan.

That’s according to Rather’s written confession, his law suit, which is as much a shameful set of admissions as it is a legal complaint. In the suit filed Thursday, Rather tells us that Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom, owner of CBS, was “enraged that the [Air Guard] Broadcast had hurt CBS in the eyes of the Bush administration.” Viacom then set out to, “divert public attention from the accurate facts reported in the Broadcast concerning President Bush’s service (and lack thereof) in the TexANG during the Vietnam War; and enable CBS and Viacom to curry favor with the White House….”

Redstone roared and Dan, hearing his Dark Lord’s voice, admits he then “refrained from defending” the truths in the Broadcast. Dan shut his mouth, he confesses, in return for 30 pieces of Viacom silver: a promise that “his contract would be extended.”

Had Rather stood up to the Viacommunist thugs and defended his story, President Kerry and our nation could today express gratitude for his public service. Instead, Dan traded the public interest for airtime on 60 Minutes. Yuck.

Now Dan is shocked to find that the network snakes didn’t live up to their slimey bargain with him. Well, Dan, that’s what happens with snakes. Get in bed with them and wake up slimed.

The Story Still Not Reported

By contrast, BBC never backed down from the story of the fix that got Little George out of ‘Nam. We had a smoking hot document [view it here] and an interview with the crucial source: the man who confessed to making the call for Bush to the head of the Air Guard.

No, I won’t give you his name. I don’t expose sources - unlike Dan and CBS. That’s another thing that makes me just FURIOUS. Rather revealed, then blamed, a source, retired Air Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett. Burkett, an Abilene rancher, is a courageous, stand-up guy. [See The Real Lt. Col. Burkett]. But after standing up with Dan, he was ruined, ostracized from the cattle business. No one would sell him feed. Dan got a multi-million dollar kiss-off from Viacom. Burkett got dead cows and bankruptcy.

And there’s more. More that Dan didn’t report. As I said, Dan picked up an old story, one that I reported, as did others, in 1999. But we added our discovery of a confidential document which had walked its way out of the files of the US Department of Justice. It was a whistleblower statement that explained why the Lt. Governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, who arranged for George W. to get into the Air Guard, kept silent about it for 35 years. It states that, in 1997, Governor George W. Bush overruled his state’s Lottery director and gave a billion-dollar contract to a company tied to Barnes. Barnes received a cool fee of $23 million from the contractor.

This is a devastating accusation. And one that’s more serious than the scandal of a draft-dodging rich kid’s vile use of daddy’s connections three decades ago. Here was evidence of gross abuse of public office by Governor Bush to pay off a crony who kept silent while Bush ran for the presidency.

US Reporting: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

But how could I expect Rather to take on the tough story when he wouldn’t stand by the easy one? In June 2002, two years before his media lynching, Rather explained his Fear of Reporting in an interview on BBC Television (cautiously, to a European audience only):

“It’s an obscene comparison but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often. Again, I’m humbled to say I do not except myself from this criticism.”

This is what’s so frustrating about Dan Rather. He’s two people: a real journalist locked inside a television news-actor begging for air-time. Indeed, disgustingly, in his law suit, he conceals his inner reporter by claiming he only “narrated” the draft dodge story. For shame.

But what about all those other preening birds on the chicken ranch known as US television news? Rather tells us he wasn’t alone in failing to ask tough questions. Not one damn US reporter asked Bush at a press conference, “Yes or no, Mr. President: Did your daddy call Ben Barnes to get you out of the war in Vietnam?”

[For the record, BBC did ask for the President’s denial or admission. We got none. And when Dan’s CBS boss, Leslie Moonves, said Dan’s story, “ignored information that cast doubt” on the revelation that Bush Sr. put in the fix to get his son into the Air Guard, I asked Moonves to provide that information. In fact, I offered him $100,000 for his info which would have shown Dan’s story false. He never produced it.]

The same week Dan confessed that he agreed to shut up, a journalism student, Andrew Meyer of Florida, insisted on asking tough questions of the man Bush defeated, John Kerry. For Andrew’s impertinence, he was hit with 50,000 volts from a taser.

Andrew is just a student and still needs a couple of lessons in posing questions properly. (Lesson One: “Wear a grounding wire.”) But Andrew has the next lesson down pat: ask the question they don’t want to hear when they don’t want to hear it. Rather could use a few lessons in journalism himself - from Andrew - about taking the heat for the story.

Seeing Andrew’s arrest and Dan’s complaint, I was thinking that perhaps, instead of tase-ing those reporters who ask questions, we might tase those who don’t.

******************

Greg Palast is the author of “The Necklace-ing of Dan Rather” in the New York Times bestselling book, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans - Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (Penguin 2007).

Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at www.GregPalast.com, check out the whole story in the documentary Bush Family Fortunes support the Palast Investigative Fund here.

Dan Rather: DEMOCRACY CAN NOT SURVIVE in America if government and corporations CONTROL the news....

DAN RATHER HITS THE NAIL ON THE HEAD: Democracy CAN NOT SURVIVE in America, when EVERY MAJOR "news" OUTLET is CONTROLLED by large corporations working closely with the government, in order to secure corporate goodies - tax cuts, license for consolidation, access to government sources - to broadcast's the government's choosen narrative.

The text-book example, of course, is Adolf Hitler whipping the German population into a frenzy to "DEFEND GERMANY!" even when "Defending Germany" meant attacking hapless Poland or Germany's other hapless neighbors.

Dan Rather is correct today.... but he was part of the problem. Mr. Rather and CBS ran their "George W. Bush went AWOL (absent without leave) from the Texas Air National Guard, during the Vietnam war" story in 2002 - TWO YEARS AFTER Mr. Bush had become president.

Rather and CBS _SHOULD_ have run the story in 2000.... when many (if not millions) of Americans believed the bought-and-paid-for Bush campaign narrative that then Texas Governor Bush was a "STRAIGHT SHOOTER."

IF Mr. Rather and CBS had done their job in 2000 instead of 2002, much of the totalitarian government-corporate nightmare that Mr. Rather correctly details in his comments (article below) would be greatly reduced today, as President Al Gore would be finishing the 2nd of his two terms, undoubtably under a constant barrage of vocal and coordinated, billionaire oil-baron think-tank (corporate) funded Republican criticism.

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Rather Decries Corporate Control Of News
Ex-CBS Anchor Says Government And Corporate Influence Over Newsrooms Spurred Lawsuit
By CBS, New York, Sept. 21, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/21/business/main3284810.shtml

(AP) Former network news anchor Dan Rather says the undue influence of the government and large corporations over newsrooms spurred his decision to file a $70 million lawsuit against the CBS TV network and its former parent company.

"Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news," he said on CNN's "Larry King Live."

In the suit, filed a day earlier in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, Rather claimed CBS and Viacom Inc. used him as a "scapegoat" and intentionally botched the aftermath of a discredited story about President George W. Bush's military service to curry favor with the White House. He was removed from his "CBS Evening News" post in March 2005.

"They sacrificed support for independent journalism for corporate financial gain, and in so doing, I think they undermined a lot at CBS News," he told King.

Rather did not mention other instances in which he believed news organizations bowed to corporate and government pressure.

CBS spokesman Dana McClintock did not return an after-hours call seeking comment Thursday. He has called Rather's complaints "old news" and said the lawsuit was "without merit." A spokesman for Viacom declined to comment.

Journalism ethics scholar Bob Steele said Rather would have a difficult time proving that the White House or other political operatives exerted undue influence on CBS.

"It would be naive for us to believe that there was no influence from powerful institutions and individuals on journalism," said Steele, a scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism foundation in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Still, he said: "For the most part, the journalists who run news organizations and who report the news fight hard to protect the independence of the journalism, and most of the time succeed."

Rather narrated the September 2004 report that said Mr. Bush disobeyed orders and shirked some of his duties during his National Guard service. It also said a commander felt pressured to sugarcoat Mr. Bush's record.

The story relied on four documents, supposedly written by Mr. Bush's commander in the Texas Air National Guard, the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Critics questioned the documents' authenticity and suggested they were forged.

A panel selected by the network to investigate the story determined that it was neither fair nor accurate. CBS fired the story's producer and asked for the resignations of three executives because it could not authenticate documents used in the story. Rather was forced out of the anchor chair he had occupied for 24 years.

On CNN, Rather dismissed the panel's review, claiming it was not impartial.

"This was in many ways a fraud. It was a setup," he told King.

Louis D. Boccardi, the retired chief executive of The Associated Press who made up the two-man investigative panel with Richard Thornburgh, the former U.S. attorney general, defended the panel's work Thursday night.

"Our report was independent, and it speaks for itself," he said, echoing comments made by Thornburgh on Wednesday. Both declined to comment further.

Dan Rathr SUES CBS for $70 million for bowing to White House, QUASHING Rather's "Bush AWOL from Texas ANG during Vietnam war" story...

YOU GO, DAN! YOU WERE SCAPEGOATED, CBS _DID_ bow to White House pressure to fire you and kill the story, and your reputation HAS been trashed by the corporate media bosees who take it as their license to LIE to, CHEAT and STEAL from the AMERICAN public.

BUT the lesson here, Mr. Rather, is TIMING: YOU SHOULD HAVE RUN THE NVESTIGATION on George W. Bush's AWOL - ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE, bordering on DESERTION IN TIME OF WAR from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War story DURING ELECTION SUMMER 2000, NOT after Mr. Bush had the power and influence of the White House - the unholy combination of corporate billions and federal government power and billions - behind him.

Specifically, then Texas ANG Lt. George W. Bush NEVER REPORTED FOR DUTY at the Alabama ANG airbase he had been assigned to as a means of getting him out of Texas in 1971, so as to avoid a COURT MARTIAL that would have greatly embarrassed his Republican Congressman and oil business father, (future Republican National Committtee Chair, future CIA Director, future Vice President, and future President George H.W.Bush (Sr.).
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Rather Sues CBS, Saying It Made Him a ‘Scapegoat’
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: September 20, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/business/media/19cnd-rather.html

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.

TV Decoder Blog: Rather Charges That CBS Wanted to ‘Curry Favor’ With White House
Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”

The suit, which seeks $70 million in damages, names as defendants CBS and its chief executive, Leslie Moonves; Viacom and its executive chairman, Sumner Redstone; and Andrew Heyward, the former president of CBS News.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ”

He also continues to take vehement issue with the appointment by CBS of Richard Thornburgh, an attorney general in the administration of the elder President Bush, as one of the two outside panelists given the job of reviewing how the disputed broadcast had been prepared.

In a statement CBS said, "These complaints are old news and this lawsuit is without merit." Mr. Heyward said he would not comment beyond the CBS statement. A Viacom spokesman said he had no comment.

For both Mr. Rather and CBS, the filing of the suit threatens to once again focus attention on one of the darker chapters in the history of the network and its storied news division, at a moment when it is already reeling. Mr. Rather’s permanent successor as evening news anchor, Katie Couric, has languished in third place in the network news ratings since taking over the broadcast a year ago, behind not only Charles Gibson of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC, but also the ratings performance of the “CBS Evening News” in Mr. Rather’s final years.

The portrait of Mr. Rather that emerges from the 32-page filing bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, seemingly fearless anchor who for two decades shared the stage with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings as the most watched and recognizable journalists in America.

By his own rendering, Mr. Rather was little more than a narrator of the disputed broadcast, which was shown on Sept. 8, 2004, on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” and which purported to offer new evidence of preferential treatment given to Mr. Bush when he was a lieutenant in the Air National Guard.

Instead of directly vetting the script he would read for the Guard segment, Mr. Rather says, he acceded to pressure from Mr. Heyward to focus instead on his reporting from Florida on Hurricane Frances, and on Bill Clinton’s heart surgery.

Mr. Rather says in the filing that he allowed himself to be reduced to little more than a patsy in the furor that followed, after CBS — and later the outside panel it commissioned — concluded that the report was based on documents that could not be authenticated. Under pressure, Mr. Rather says, he delivered a public apology on his newscast on Sept. 20, 2004 — written not by him but by a CBS corporate publicist — “despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

He now leads a weekly news program on HDNet — an obscure cable channel in which he is seen by only a small fraction of the millions of viewers who once turned to him in his heyday to receive the news of the day.

In filing his suit now — three years after the now-disputed report was first broadcast, and more than a year after he reluctantly left CBS, as his last contract wound down — Mr. Rather is following, by a matter of weeks, the announcement by CBS that it had settled a similar lawsuit by Don Imus.

Mr. Imus had sued CBS over his firing in the aftermath of derogatory remarks he made about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. While some Imus associates suggested last month that his final payment was at least $20 million, CBS Radio has characterized that figure as too high.

Mr. Rather’s suit seeks $20 million in compensatory damages and $50 million in punitive damages.

Among the pivotal points of contention in Mr. Rather’s suit are the definitions of the words “full-time” and “regular.” As quoted in the filing, Mr. Rather’s contract — which he signed in 2002, and which called for him to be paid a base salary of $6 million a year as anchor — entitled him to a job as a “full-time correspondent” with “first billing” on the midweek edition of “60 Minutes,” should he leave the anchor chair before March 2006, his 25th anniversary in the job.

As it turned out, Mr. Rather would leave the anchor chair a year early, and would indeed be reassigned to the midweek edition, known as “60 Minutes II.” When that broadcast was canceled a few months later, Mr. Rather’s contract called for him to be reassigned to the main “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday evening, where he would “perform services on a regular basis as a correspondent.”

Over the next year, Mr. Rather would have eight segments broadcast on the main “60 Minutes” — including reports that took him to North Korea, China and Beirut. While that would seem to be a substantial portfolio of work, Mr. Rather notes that other correspondents had more than twice as many reports appear on the program during the same period, and that several of his reports had been effectively buried, broadcast on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day when far fewer people than usual were likely to tune in.

“He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the filing contends.

Among the most egregious indignities he suffered, Mr. Rather says, was the network’s response to his request to be sent as a correspondent to the scene of Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005.

“Mr. Rather is the most experienced reporter in the United States in covering hurricanes,” his lawyers write in the suit. “CBS refused to send him,” thus “furthering its desire to keep Mr. Rather off the air.”

"FREEDOM" and "DEMOCRACY" in America: UF student TASERED for ASKING TOUGH QUESTIONS the MEDIA WHORES are too cowardly to ask...

Massachusetts Senator, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate JOHN KERRY does NOTHING as campus police ARREST and HAUL AWAY a student asking Kerry tough but legitimate questions in a Monday, September 17 2007 Town Hall meeting with students at the University of Florida. Watching the video, it is clear that the student is INTERRUPTED BY THE POLICE at 35 seconds - THIRTY-FIVE SECONDS - into his questions of Senator Kerry. And.. the police officer tries to INTERRUPT that student exactly when he mentions "DISENFRANCHISED BLACK VOTERS," asking Senator Kerry why Kerry conceded election 2004 so quickly when there were widespread reports of Black voter disenfranchisement, even though Kerry had pledged all through his lackluster campaign "I won't stop fighting to count your votes, until the last vote has been counted!"
University Florida Journalism/Communications student ANDREW MEYER had waited through two hours of Kerry's speech to get an opportunity to ask Senator Kerry some REAL questions, and prefaced his questons to Kerry with a passsionate (loud) exposition that according to Gregg Palast's book, "Armed Madhouse" Kerry had WON election 2004, but for systematic, massive, and chronic disenfranchisement of legal minority votes. But merely 35 seconds in to his questioning, he is interrupted. Becoming more agitated, he continued to say that he had two more questions: Did Senator Kerry belong to the same "Skull and Bones" secretive fraternity that President Bush belonged to?" (The proper question to Kerry would have been "Did your membership in the same fraternity with the president somehow minimize your campaign's opposition function to the president's otherwise abysmal record?") The student's third question to Senator Kerry was "if you are so oppposed to the possible US invasion of Iran, why are you not now advocating the IMPEACHMENT of President Bush now, BEFORE he starts a third, wider war?"
THESE are QUESTIONS the US media corporate meda GLOSSES OVER, INGORES, and WHITEWASH.

Senator Kerry took Democratic donor's money in 2004, PROMISED TO FIGHT TO HAVE VOTES COUNTED, then treacherously and cowardly CONCEDED THE ELECTION IMMEDIATELY.

And now, America, "the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" is a nation where FIVE COWARDLY POLICE OFFICERS _TASER_ a single student, FOUR TIMES, for asking the quesions the MEDIA WHORES are TOO COWARDLY to ask.

NY Times War-pimp TOM FRIEDMAN auditions for the "Stupidest, most inane, most ghoulish Neo-Con" video....

ANOTHER post documenting ANOTHER journalistic ATROCITY of the New York Times!

In this case, their 'star' op-ed columnist and author, telling Iraq and the world to (literally, from Mr. Freidman's comments!) "SUCK ON THIS" !!

NEW YORK TIMES, Mr. Arthur Sulzberger... because of your entire decade of GROSSLY ATROCIOUS "reporting," on FAKE scandals from "Travel-office-gate" to "Lincoln bedroom" to "Hillary stole White House furniture" to "White House Trashing" to "Al Gore is a serial liar" to "IRAQ HAS WMDs!" - you are now the very embodiement of the ABJECT DISGRACE and slavish devotion to the corporatcracy military-industrial-complex imperialist-unilateral-aggression cheerleaders that American 'journalism' has degenerated to.

This video of "expert" commentator, author, and text-book Neo-Con war cheerleader THOMAS FRIEDMAN telling the people of Iraq "We (Americans) ATTACKED YOU because YOU WERE THE WEAKEST TARGET, and we needed to 'even the balance' [by attacking some country somewhere in the Mideast]" is just about the most despicable comment any neo-con has yet put to paper or video, in a field of champion ghouls, liars, and pasty-faced Chickenhawks who cheer, clap, and applaud every time an errant US bomb wipes out a wedding party.

And as one YouTube commenter posted, BOGGING DOWN THE ENTIRE US MILITARY in a war of grinding attrition, where a teenage street punk with a grenade or command-detonation mine ("IED"), paid $50 by his local guerrilla leaders, is ABLE TO TAKE OUT A TRAINED and equipped US infantryman (or entire Humvee squad), is committing that CLASSIC MILITARY MISTAKE of committing a small professional army to a large Asian land war - of making the enemies soldiers 1,000 times more potent than they were before the US invasion.

Chickenhawk Neo-con Cowards of DC press corps (Washington Post) advocate more war... and SLASHING Veteran Rehab funding!

THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN! The curse of the ALWAYS WRONG neo-cons, banging the drums of the DC presses for WARS OF CONQUEST, INVASION, AGGRESSION, and CORRUPT neo-con sponsored OCCUPATIONS, are at it again. (Not that they ever stopped promoting expanding wars in the Middle East.)

The WASHINGTON POST, FOX 'news,' and DC press-corps Chickenhawk COWARDS, who always SUPPORT new American wars but never put their own bodies (or their children) on the firing line, are not only championing and supporting the escalating destruction and death toll of the Bush-Cheney (Iraq) war, but are now... working to eliminate Senator James Webb's bill to provide recovery time at home in America for troops who have spent extended time in Iraq, coupled with better rehabilitation and mental healthy services to those returning, war traumatized troops.

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American war culture in a nutshell
by Glenn Greenwald
Saturday September 15, 2007

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/15/war_culture/index.html


Jim Webb is a combat veteran and a war hero. His family has a long tradition of volunteering for military service, and his son, until several months ago, was deployed in Iraq. Sen. Webb wants to relieve a small portion of the shattering strain on our troops through legislation "requiring that active-duty troops and units have at least equal time at home as the length of their previous tour overseas." As Webb put it:

"Now in the fifth year of ground operations in Iraq, this deck of cards has come crashing down on the backs of soldiers and Marines who have been deployed again and again, while the rest of the country sits back and debates Iraq as an intellectual or emotional exercise. . . .

Troops currently face extended deployments with insufficient "dwell time" to rest with families and friends, retrain, and re-equip before they are redeployed. The effects have been seen in rising mental health problems among service members serving multiple tours and falling retention rates for mid-grade officers and non-commissioned officers."

FRED KAGAN, along with his writing partner BILL KRISTOL, specializes in planning and advocating more wars, always from afar. His family has a tradition of doing the same. His dad, whose career he has copied, is Donald Kagan, whom The Washington Post described as "a beloved father figure of the ascendant neoconservative movement." Several years ago, Fred co-wrote a book with his dad arguing that America is too afraid to fight wars and "that it will be in the world's ultimate interest for the United States to remain militarily strong and unafraid of a fight." Neither has ever fought anything.

Donald's other son -- Fred's brother -- is ROBERT, who founded [the] PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY with Bill Kristol and is a fanatical, resolute supporter of the Iraq War (from the pages of The Washington Post).
Fred's wife, Kimberly Kagan, regularly types about how great the Iraq War is in The Weekly Standard and other places. None has any military service. They have no need for the troop relief provided by the Webb bill (which Fred opposes) because they are already all sitting at home.

Fred Kagan yesterday went to National Review -- home to countless tough guy warriors like him who fight nothing -- to argue against Senator Webb's bill. There is no need to give our troops more time away from the battlefield, Kagan types. Besides, doing that would be too administratively difficult ("this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home").

If troops want more time at home, Kagan says, there is an easy way to achieve that: "win the war we're fighting." Of course, that would not even work, because Kagan and his friends at the Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute have many more wars planned beyond Iraq for other families' sons and daughters to fight. For that reason, Kagan actually had the audacity several months ago to type this:

The president must issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this generation.
That's the history of our country for the last six years at least. The Fred Kagans and his dad and his brother and his wife and his best friend Bill Kristol sit back casually demanding more wars, demanding that our troops be denied any relief, demanding that the President call for other families to volunteer to fight in their wars -- all "as an intellectual or emotional exercise," as Webb put it.

That's all revolting enough. But to then watch Fred Kagan sit around opposing Senator Webb's attempts to relieve some of the strain on our troops -- all because it would require too much paperwork to figure out and because they haven't yet won Fred Kagan's war and thus deserve no breaks -- is almost too much to bear. But it is worth forcing oneself to observe it, as unpleasant as it might be, because within this ugly dynamic lies much of the explanation for what has happened to our country since the 9/11 attack, and the personality type that continues to drive it today.

Jewish Owned New York Times led the march to hell in Iraq.. now tries to blame conduct of war on Democrats....

The Jewish-owned New York Times, alone, which wrote this article, is one of the most strident "MORE WAR, NOW!" organizations in America. They led the 8 year media campaign (white-collar lynching) to lynch President Clinton with their entirely atrocious "Whitewater" 'reporting' and slavish devotion to Ken Starr's "Monica" leaked Grand Jury testimony. After the impeachment they then seamlessly shifted to portraying Al Gore as a serial liar while neglecting to cover the failures, lies, corruption, and budget deficits of Texas Governor George W. Bush. The NY Times then helped the Republicans SUPPRESS the story of Stolen Election 2000. They then helped the Bush Administration whitewash the gross Dereliction of Duty that allowed 9-11 to happen WITHOUT ONE SINGLE MEASURE TAKEN to prevent or deter a hijacking; and then, of course, the NEW YORK TIMES _LED_ the press-media march to the Iraq war, with Judith Miller's atrocious LIES about aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, radio control airplanes, and other BOGUS reports about Iraq's alleged WMD program which effectively instilled FEAR in the American public, and forced Congress to OVERLOOK THE BOTCHED HUNT for Osama bin Laden in favor of BOMBING, INVADING, and OCCUPYING IRAQ.

Now, in typical WHORE fashion, the NEW YORK lying TIMES is trying to portray the Democrats as managing the war - a war that would never have come about if not for an entire DECADE OF LIES and GROSSLY CORRUPT 'reporting" by the New York Times.

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Disappointed Democrats Map Withdrawal Strategy
By CARL HULSE
September 13, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/washington/13policy.htm

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — Senate Democratic leaders on Wednesday called the administration’s plan to keep 130,000 or more troops in Iraq through mid-2008 unacceptable and promised to challenge the approach through legislation next week.

Several proposals were being weighed, including one requiring the American military role to be shifted more to training and counterterrorism, in order to reduce the force by more than President Bush is expected to promise on Thursday. Another would guarantee troops longer respites from the battlefield, effectively cutting the numbers available for combat.

Even if those proposals draw the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster — a level that has eluded Democrats this year — any real strictures on the president would face a veto, frustrating war critics and raising the prospect that roughly as many American troops might be in Iraq a year from now as were there a year ago.

Still, the Democrats tried to get ahead of President Bush’s planned speech on Iraq on Thursday night, and to press what they see as a political advantage in opposing the war in the months before the 2008 elections.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and two party leaders on military issues accused Mr. Bush of embracing “more of the same” and of trying to pass off a routine troop reduction as a significant shift in policy.

“That is unacceptable to me, it is unacceptable to the American people,” said Mr. Reid, who was flanked by Senators Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a West Point graduate.

Democratic presidential contenders also assailed the administration’s plan.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois called for the withdrawal of one or two combat brigades a month, starting immediately.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said taking credit for the force reductions that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, was recommending, and that Mr. Bush appeared ready to accept, was “like taking credit for the sun coming up in the morning.”

With Democrats intensifying their attacks on the strategy outlined this week by General Petraeus, the administration is setting in motion its plans with a prime-time speech by the president on Thursday, a subsequent visit to a military base and continued appearances by General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador in Baghdad.

At a news conference on Wednesday, General Petraeus reiterated that he was unwilling to commit to troop cuts beyond a five-brigade reduction by mid-July, a level he described as prudent. There are 20 combat brigades in Iraq.

He also took issue with claims that such a reduction would not be significantly faster than what had already been scheduled. Combat forces in Iraq serve up to 15-month tours. Under that limit, part of the Pentagon’s broad effort to lessen the strains on the military, General Petraeus would not have had to pull out any combat units until April, instead of removing the first brigades in mid-December, he said.

“We are coming out quicker than we had to,” he said.

The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, in his last news briefing before leaving the job, rejected Democrats’ complaints that the administration’s plan was simply a return to the level that existed before more than 30,000 additional troops were sent into Iraq this year, a buildup that the administration pointedly referred to as a surge, suggesting its temporary nature.

“It’s a different country,” said Mr. Snow of Iraq. “You have the ability to reduce the numbers because there have been changes that reduced the necessity of American involvement.”

Senator Reid would not provide details of the legislative proposals that Democrats will pursue. But Mr. Levin and Mr. Reed have been working with some Republicans on a measure that would focus the military mission on counterterrorism, training Iraqis and protecting forces already there — a switch intended to allow large numbers of combat troops to be withdrawn by next spring.

“We have to go ahead and recognize the strain on the military forces and give them the tasks that they can do so well,” said Mr. Reed, a former Army captain, “but within the capability of their resources and the best interests of the United States.”

They have been exploring the idea of making the withdrawal more of an objective than a requirement in order to attract Republican votes, but that approach could cause defections by Democrats.

Democrats have been picking up new Republican support for a measure that requires troops to spend at least the same amount of time at their home bases as they did in Iraq before returning — a requirement that could reduce troop numbers because the Pentagon would not have as many eligible for deployment.

“I think that might be a good way to accelerate a troop reduction,” said Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, who noted that it was also popular with strained military families.

That measure attracted 56 votes this summer, and some Republicans who opposed it then, including George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, have expressed new interest. Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Wednesday that he was considering the proposal, and Democrats were also trying to persuade Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska.

Mr. Reid said Democrats also planned to vote on more aggressive legislative challenges to the war, which could help appease critics who are demanding that Democrats take tougher action.

Democrats say they may also be more willing to try to attach conditions to coming Pentagon spending requests. (Democrats have been reluctant to limit money for the war unilaterally.) “I think the American people are getting tired of sending the money with no end in sight,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

The struggle to settle on a party alternative illustrates the problems Democrats are having finding a way to take on the president that unites their party and avoids criticism that they are weak on national security.

As Democrats huddled Wednesday to prepare for the floor debate, a group of leading House Republicans arrived in Iraq to demonstrate their backing for the president. The lawmakers, led by Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, had been in Iraq less than five hours, but in a conference call with reporters they said their initial briefings had already confirmed improvements.

“Clearly what’s happened over the last three months has been real success,” said Mr. Boehner, who previously visited Iraq in July 2006.

In an interview on “The Today Show” on Wednesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said stabilizing Iraq was part of “a long process of dealing with what the president called a long time ago a generational challenge to our security brought on by extremism, coming principally out of the Middle East.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said Ms. Rice’s comment represented an acknowledgment that the United States would be engaged in Iraq for “years to come.”

“We need a new direction that redeploys our troops from Iraq, rebuilds our military and refocuses on fighting terrorism across the world,” Ms. Pelosi said.

David M. Herszenhorn and David S. Cloud contributed reporting.