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P3nt4gon Str!ke Presentation by a QFS member
Picture
of the Day
Web
of Deceit
©2004 Pierre-Paul
Feyte
p16
On a typical weekday evening, more than 29 million households
tune in for a half-hour news show on one of three national TV networks.
Most people tend to believe what comes across the luminous screen.
p17
Sam Donaldson to a Southern California newspaper
"... As a rule, we are, if not handmaidens of the establishment,
at least blood brothers to the establishment... We end up the day
usually having some version of what the White House...has suggested
as a story."
p17
Los Angeles Times staff writer David Shaw, a specialist in examining
media practices, has found that "reporters often call a source
because they want a quotation to illustrate a particular point,
and they are sure to get exactly what they want if they call a source
whose attitudes they already know."
p17
Professor Robert Entman observes in a 1989 book
"The elites who make most of the national news, are the ones
who control policy outcomes in Washington... News reports can advance
or undermine the policy proposals they want enacted or privileges
they want maintained. The information they provide is tainted."
p17
Walter Karp, Harper's Magazine, 1989
"The overwhelming majority of stories are based on official
sources-on information provided by members of Congress, presidential
aides, and politicians... The first fact of American journalism
is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually
powerful."
p17
... when covering highly-politicized matters of foreign policy,
NPR reporters at the State Department, Pentagon, Congress and White
House are prone to do little but raptly transmit the utterances
of politicians and their appointees. The tilt is against non-officials,
and against officials not on the president's team.
p18
Walter Karp, Harper's Magazine, 1989
"It is a bitter irony of source journalism, that the most
esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by
making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to
the 'best' sources."
p18
Walter Karp, Harper's Magazine, 1989
"So pervasive is the passivity of the press
that when a reporter actually looks for news on his or her own it
is given a special name, 'investigative journalism,' to distinguish
it from routine, passive 'source journalism.' It is investigative
journalism that wins the professional honors, that makes what little
history the American press ever makes, and that provides the misleading
exception that proves the rule: the American press, unbidden by
powerful sources, seldom investigates anything."
p18
Professor Robert Entman observes in a 1989 book
"Government sources and journalists join in an intimacy that
renders any notion of a genuinely 'free' press inaccurate."
p18
More than any other publications, the Washington Post and the
New York Times exert tremendous impact on American political life.
Every day these newspapers contain more comprehensive coverage than
any other U.S. media. While enjoying reputations for hard-hitting
journalism, both papers are integral to the prevailing political
power structure. They publish exclusive news stories and eminent
punditry that greatly influence the direction and tone of other
media. And their printed words carry heavy weight within the government's
"national security" leviathan.
The Media Elite
The Media Cartel: Corporate Control of the News
p 60
Dependent on corporate sponsors for financial sustenance, TV networks
and print media are under tremendous pressure to shape their product
in a way that best accommodates the needs of their advertisers.
"I would say they are always taken into account," Herman
Keld of CBS acknowledged. [...]
These days, no commercial TV executive in his or her right mind
would produce a program without considering whether it will fly
with sponsors. Prospective shows are often discussed with major
advertisers, who review script treatments and suggest changes when
necessary. Adjustments are sometimes made to please sponsors. This
riles a lot of TV writers, who complain of frequent run-ins with
network censors in the "program standards" department,
which monitors sex, violence and obscene language, as well as the
social and political content of dramatic programs. A poll of the
Writers Guild of America disclosed that 86 percent of queried members
said they knew from personal experience that entertainment programs
are raked over by censors.
It may come as a surprise to many Americans
that censorship is so prevalent on network television. But corporate
sponsors figure they are entitled to call the shots since they foot
the bill-an assumption shared by network executives, who quickly
learn to internalize the desires of their well-endowed patrons.
For starters, they are likely to frown upon programming that
puts a damper on the "buying mood" that advertisers require.
Network censors admit that loss of advertising revenue is one of
their main concerns. These are the principal guidelines, explicitly
spelled out by big-league sponsors, that TV censors follow:
* Make sure nothing in a script undermines
the sales pitch for the advertised product. For example,
a gas company sponsoring a TV version of Judgment at Nuremberg demanded
that producers delete references to "gas chambers" from
accounts of Nazi concentration camps. Pharmaceutical firms won't
tolerate scenes in which someone commits suicide by overdosing on
pills. On a lighter note, a writer was forced to delete the line
"She eats too much"-a concept anathema to the breakfast
food manufacturer that sponsored the show. This kind of script tampering
is endemic in television entertainment.
* Portray Big Business in a flattering
light. Sponsors are adamant about this. Procter & Gamble,
which spends over a billion dollars a year on advertising, once
decreed in a memo on broadcast policy: "There will be no material
that will give offense, either directly or indirectly to any commercial
organization of any sort." Ditto for Prudential Insurance:
"A positive image of business and finance is important to sustain
on the air." If a businessman is cast as the bad guy, it must
be clear that he is an exception, and the script must also include
benevolent business folk so as not to leave the wrong impression.
Corporate sponsors are unlikely to underwrite programs that engage
in serious criticism of environmental pollution, occupational hazards
or other problems attributable to corporate malfeasance.
Marshall Herskovitz, co-executive producer of ABC's thirtysomething,
had to knuckle under when censors insisted that a character embroiled
in a political discussion not say the government cut safety regulations
"so that car companies can make more money." Entertainment
programs aren't a forum for political debate, Herskovitz was told,
and besides it would upset advertisers. "One of the most dangerous,
subversive, destructive forces in our country today is advertising,"
said Herskovitz-not just its hold over commercial TV, but the ads
themselves. "I would rather have the messed-up and occasionally
confused motivations of television producers than I would to have
the very simple motivations of corporate sponsors making decisions
of what we should see on television."
* Cater to the upper crust. Sponsors
don't want just any audience; they want affluent viewers with buying
power. To impress potential sponsors, ABC once prepared a booklet
with a section called, "Some people are more valuable than
others." If the elderly and low-income counted for more in
the advertising department, their particular concerns would figure
more prominently in the tone and content of TV programming. But
the fixations of mass media are far more demographic than democratic.
* Steer clear of overly serious or complex
subjects and bleach out controversy whenever possible. DuPont,
a major advertiser, told the FCC that commercials are more effective
on "lighter, happier" programs. Comedy, adventure and
escapism are standard fare, as advertisers push mass media toward
socially insignificant content that offends as few viewers as possible.
"You can't take up real problems seriously," complained
Charles Knopf, a TV scriptwriter and former president of the Writers
Guild. Acutely sensitive to sponsor proclivities, many writers and
producers automatically avoid controversial topics. When a dicey
story is proposed, it is usually killed before it gets written.
Scripts that survive the editing process often bear little resemblance
to the original concept. [...]
p93
Flirting with fascists
Media owners have ways of making their presence felt among working
journalists. Time-Life publishing magnate Henry Luce, well-known
for his conservative politics, used to flood his editors with story
ideas. Prior to World War II, media critic
George Seldes took Luce to task for devoting "an entire issue
of Fortune to glorifying Mussolini and Fascism, and...permit[ting]
an outright pro-fascist, Laird Goldsborough, to slant and pervert
the news every week" in Time. Seldes also exposed a secret
$400,000-a-year deal between Hitler and press baron William Randolph
Hearst, which resulted in pro-Nazi articles in all Hearst papers.
As late as December 1940, Hearst was ordering his editors not to
include "unnecessarily offensive" cartoons of Hitler and
Mussolini in his papers.
Described as the founder of yellow journalism and a debaucher
of public taste, Hearst is perhaps the most notorious of the 20th
century press barons. Instead of telling the news, Hearst headlines
were intent on selling the news. He routinely invented sensational
stories, faked interviews, ran phony pictures and distorted real
events. Having begun his career as a reform-minded socialist, Hearst
ended up a right-wing megalomaniac whose papers carried on the most
sustained campaign of jingoism in U.S. history. Hearst propaganda
masquerading as journalism played a major role in starting the Spanish-American
War in 1898. His media empire also was instrumental in backing Senator
Joe McCarthy when he launched his anti-Red crusade in 1950.
Hearst wasn't the only media mogul who supported the anticommunist
witch-hunts during the Cold War. A majority of U.S. newspapers,
including the Scripps-Howard and Gannett chains, applauded McCarthy's
baseless diatribes about alleged communists in the U.S. government.
[...]
While a few courageous editors consistently denounced McCarthy,
it wasn't until he began attacking President Eisenhower that the
press turned against him. In a case of better late than never, CBS
aired Edward R. Murrow's TV documentary on McCarthy in 1954, and
then it was all downhill for Joe. By this time, thousands of patriotic
Americans had been hounded out of their jobs, and groups advocating
for civil rights and social justice were tarred as "subversive."
Nevertheless, certain media owners felt that McCarthy had served
a useful purpose by alerting the American public to the Red Menace.
"His methods have been bad," said Joseph Pulitzer, publisher
of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but "have not the results on
the whole been good?"
Annenberg's thugs
Another press magnate who favored the McCarthy witch-hunts was
Walter Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and, later,
TV Guide. Young Walter had inherited a formidable media empire from
his father, Moe, who began his newspaper career as circulation manager
of the Hearst daily in Chicago during the bloody news wars of the
early l900s. With a gang of street toughs on his payroll, Moe made
sure Hearst's product got maximum distribution. Trucks delivering
competing papers were wrecked and 30 newsboys were murdered, but
Annenberg's hoodlums escaped arrest.
Resorting to similar goon squad tactics while working for Hearst's
New York Daily Mirror, Moe solicited the services of fledgling gangsters,
including Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. "I used to think
of the Mirror as my kind of paper," Luciano fondly reminisced.
"I always thought of Annenberg as my kind of guy." With
the Mob's muscle at his disposal, Annenberg started to acquire his
own newspapers, eventually amassing what Fortune magazine called
the largest annual income in the U.S. When Annenberg went to jail
for tax evasion in the 1930s, his son, Walter, took over the family
business. [...]
Murdoch meddles
The Annenberg publishing dynasty came to an end in 1988 when Australian
media mogul Rupert Murdoch purchased TV Guide. With farflung media
operations spanning three continents, Murdoch's News Corporation
ranks fifth among the world's largest media conglomerates. As such,
it is part of an emerging international media cartel that includes
companies even bigger than Murdoch's-Time Warner, the German-based
Bertelsmann empire, CapCities/ABC, and Canada's Thomson newspaper
chain-along with publishing firms controlled by British tycoon Robert
Maxwell and French arms merchant Jean-Luc Lagardere. If predictions
by U.S. media executives are correct, these few gigantic corporations
will dominate the global communications market as we enter the 21st
century.
When asked why he kept buying up more media organs, Murdoch explained:
"It's the challenge of the game. It gives me a great thrill."
It was doubtless quite a thrill for Murdoch to have used his British
newspapers to help install Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and
keep her in power. News stories and editorials in Murdoch's drug-and-crime-crazed
New York Post were unabashedly slanted to please the likes of Mayor
Ed Koch and President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.
Murdoch's most ambitious project to date is the launching of a
fourth TV network in the U.S., Fox Broadcasting. [...]
An outspoken conservative, Murdoch doesn't try to hide his penchant
for editorial meddling. "To what extent do you influence the
editorial posture of your newspapers?" queried a reporter with
Cosmopolitan magazine. "Considerably," he responded. "The
buck stops on my desk. My editors have input, but I make final decisions."
Such candor is rare among media owners who seek to exert maximum
control over the news product with a minimum of direct interference.
Unlike the audacious press barons of old, today's news execs prefer
the velvet muzzle to the iron fist. They meet on a regular basis
with editors hand-picked to fulfill the role of loyal gatekeepers.
Editors decide what to feature on the front page, which articles
to assign and not to assign, whether to cut, rewrite or kill a story.
Ownership influence on the news
Former managing editor of the New York Times Turner Catledge noted
in his memoirs how he frequently conveyed publisher Arthur H. Sulzberger's
comments to his staff as if they came from himself in order to avoid
the impression that the top boss "was constantly looking over
their shoulders. In truth, however, he was."
Despite assurances to the contrary, media owners continue to promote
self-serving content into the news and banish subjects they dislike.
As Bagdikian, formerly national editor at the Washington Post, has
written, "When an editor makes a news
decision based on corporate commands, or knowledge of ownership
wishes, the editor seldom states the real reason." This
would "violate the prevailing dogma of American journalism
that serious news is the result of whatever is true and significant,
let the chips fall where they may."
The extent of ownership influence on the news was indicated by
a 1980 survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Thirty-three
percent of all editors employed by newspaper chains admitted that
they would not feel free to publish news stories that were damaging
to their parent firm. Years have passed since this survey
was taken, and the parent firms are now bigger and more powerful
than ever before. TV producers have expressed similar misgivings
about news broadcasts that might conflict with the economic or political
interests of their parent company. |
Disinformation
excerpted from the book Unreliable
Sources
a guide to detecting bias in news media |
by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon
A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990 |
p126
Editors don't make any bones about "the presidential factor."
"We've got to cover what the President says and does,"
is the common refrain. But what happens when the President and his
aides routinely lie as they try to sell their policies to the American
public? Then the presidential factor is a recipe for distortion.
"Lying to the press goes back to the beginning of the republic,"
says David Wise, a former New York Herald Tribune editor who has
authored a number of books on the American espionage establishment.
But institutional Iying took on a new dimension at the outset of
the Cold War, as clandestine operations began to multiply like rabbits.
The proliferation of covert actions required a plenitude of cover
stories-and cover stories, lest we forget, are lies. "It used
to be that policies were framed to fit events," Wise remarked
in a 1987 interview about Reagan-era disinformation. "Now events
are shaped and manipulated to fit policies."
Over the years, reporters have had to contend with a steady barrage
of deceptions, half-truths and blatant falsehoods emanating from
the White House. This deliberate perversion of the truth calls into
question the fundamental character of a democratic society, which
is supposed to be based on the consent of the governed. An ill-informed
public can't hold officials accountable for their policies.
"Every government is run by liars,
and nothing they say should be believed," said I.F. Stone.
But the Reagan era was unprecedented in that it marked the first
time government officials came right out and said that a president's
numerous misstatements of fact and his inability to grasp detail
didn't really matter. "We've been dealing with...an administration
that freely states-and stated early-that literal truth was not a
concern," said Bill Kovach when he was Washington news editor
of the New York Times.
U.S. officials openly flaunted their disregard for the facts during
the 1980s. "You can say anything you want in a debate and 80
million people hear it," George Bush's press secretary stated
shortly after the vice presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro
in October 1984. "If reporters then document that a candidate
spoke untruthfully, so what? Maybe 200 people read it."
p127
Austrian scholar Karl Kraus' dictum: "How is the world ruled
and led into war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those
lies when they see them in print."
p128
Following the lead of U.S. officials, mass media depicted the
Soviet Union as the prime mover of a worldwide terrorist network
that included Libyan leader Moammar Qadaffi as a key operative.
The demonizing of Qadaffi began in earnest shortly after Reagan
took office. First came the lurid tales (based on "unnamed
intelligence sources") of Libyan hit squads stalking President
Reagan. Later came the Berlin disco bombing, which killed two people,
including an American serviceman, and injured 200 in April 1986.
Citing "irrefutable evidence" that Qadaffi was behind
the bombing, Reagan ordered an air attack against Libya a week later.
It was, as Noam Chomsky observed, the first air raid in history
geared to preempt coverage on 7:00 p.m. prime-time news in the U.S.
As it turned out, the so-called "irrefutable evidence"
was hardly airtight. Manfred Ganshow, chief of the Berlin Staatsschutz
and head of the 100-person team which investigated the disco bombing,
told Stars and Stripes, a publication servicing the U.S. armed forces,
three weeks after the incident: "[I have] no more evidence
that Libya was connected to the bombing than I had two days after
the act. Which is none." This, however, did not dissuade the
American media, whose rush to judgment was as dramatic as Reagan's
rise in the popularity polls following the Libya raid. A New York
Times editorial claimed that proof was "laid out clearly to
the public... Even the most scrupulous citizens can only approve
and applaud the American attacks on Libya."
Months later, West German authorities concluded that if any country
was behind the Berlin disco bombing, it was Syria, not Libya. But
that hardly seemed to matter as U.S. news media continued to blame
the incident on Qadaffi. Soon another round of stories appeared,
warning of new plots by Libya. Replete with 42 references to unnamed
U.S. officials, a Wall Street Journal article by John Walcott and
Gerald F. Seib disclosed that Qadaffi was planning more terrorism.
This time the unnamed source turned out to be National Security
Adviser John Poindexter, who was promoting what Newsweek later called
a "disinformation program" aimed at destabilizing the
Libyan government. The propaganda operation was outlined in a three-page
memo, dated August 14, 1986, from Poindexter to President Reagan.
When details of the disinformation plot were leaked to the U.S.
press, Secretary of State George Schultz justified the deception
by quoting Winston Churchill: "In time of war, the truth is
so precious it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies." The
Reagan administration, Shultz said, was "pretty darn close"
to being at war with Libya. Reporters and editors cried foul, expressing
righteous indignation about being misled by the U.S. government-as
if they had suddenly discovered something new!
Indeed, journalists should have known that the Reagan administration
was Iying about Libya. Five years prior to the Poindexter revelations,
Newsweek reported on a CIA-run "disinformation program designed
to embarrass Qadaffi," along with covert operations to overthrow
and perhaps assassinate him.
U.S. actions-rhetorical and military-against Libya, and "counter-terrorist"
rhetoric in general, were geared largely toward converting public
anxiety over anti-Western political violence into support for an
aggressive American foreign policy and increased intervention in
the Third World. Exaggerating the threat of external demons in order
to whip up nationalist hysteria at home was nothing new in American
history. By focusing on Libya, the Reagan administration picked
a fight it knew it could win. Seen in this context, the bombing
of Libya was as much salutary medicine for Vietnam syndrome jitters
as it was a plot to kill Qadaffi.
Cloaked in fiction
Even when lies by the government are exposed, U.S. reporters dutifully
return to the same poisoned well, seeking information from official
sources that have been publicly discredited. Former Assistant Secretary
of State Elliott Abrams appeared frequently
as a guest on Nightline and other TV news shows, despite his admission
that he intentionally misled Congress regarding U.S. policy in Central
America. Abrams' confession aroused little skepticism among journalists
as to whether he could be trusted as a news source. Never once did
Ted Koppel, who fancies himself a tough interviewer, ask Abrams:
"Why, given your record of deceit, should we believe anything
you say about Nicaragua?" [...]
p143
The much-ballyhooed conclusion that journalists are of a predominantly
leftish bent failed to square with data compiled by researchers
without a strongly conservative agenda. A
Brookings Institution study, for instance, found that 58 percent
of Washington journalists identified themselves as either "conservative"
or "middle of the road."
A 1985 Los Angeles Times survey, comparing 3,000 journalists to
3,000 members of the general public, found that journalists were
more conservative when asked if the government should act to reduce
the gap between rich and poor. Fifty-five percent of the general
public supported such measures, compared to only 50 percent of the
"news staff" and 37 percent of the editors.
But all the heated number-crunching may be much ado about little.
The private opinions of media workers are much less important than
the end products. Mark Hertsgaard has astutely
pinpointed "the deeper flaw in the liberal-press thesis"-"it
completely ignored those whom journalists worked for. Reporters
could be as liberal as they wished and it would not change what
news they were allowed to report or how they could report it. America's
major news organizations were owned and controlled by some of the
largest and richest corporations in the United States. These firms
were in turn owned and managed by individuals whose politics were,
in general, anything but liberal. Why would they employ journalists
who consistently covered the news in ways they did not like?"
If there's a political tilt to news coverage,
it derives principally from mass media owners and managers, not
beat reporters. "Admittedly," said sociologist
Herbert Gans, "some journalists have strong personal beliefs
and also the position or power to express them in news stories,
but they are most often editors; and editors, like producers in
television, have been shown to be more conservative than their news
staffs." To the extent that personal opinions influence news
content, Gans added, "they are most often the beliefs of the
President of the United States and other high federal, state and
local officials, since they dominate the news."
However baseless, accusations by conservatives that the media
lean left have made many journalists compensate by tilting in the
other direction. In this sense, the liberal media canard has been
effective as a pre-emptive club, brandished to encourage self-censorship
on the part of reporters who "bend over backwards not to seem
at all critical of Republicans," commented Mark Crispin Miller.
"Eager to evince his 'objectivity,' the edgy liberal reporter
ends up just as useful to the right as any ultra-rightist hack."
[...]
In early 1989, columnist Jack Newfield counted
eight popular political opinion talk shows on national television.
"These shows all have certifiably right-wing hosts and moderators,"
wrote Newfield. "This is not balance. This is ideological imbalance
that approaches a conservative monopoly... Buchanan, who calls AIDS
a punishment from God for sin, and campaigns against the prosecution
of Nazi war criminals hiding in America, is about as far right as
you can get."
A fixture on CNN, and often made welcome on the biggest TV networks,
Buchanan has flaunted his admiration for
prominent fascists past and present, like the Spanish dictator Francisco
Franco (who came to power allied with Hitler) and Chile's bloody
ruler Augusto Pinochet. "A soldier-patriot like Franco, General
Pinochet saved his country from an elected Marxist who was steering
Chile into Castroism," Buchanan effused in a September 1989
column, going on to defend the apartheid regime in South Africa:
"The Boer Republic is the only viable economy in Africa. Why
are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy with sanctions?"
Sharing much of the remaining op-ed space are others from the
hard right, including former U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick;
William Safire (like Buchanan, an ex-speechwriter for the Nixon-Agnew
team); erstwhile segregationist James J. Kilpatrick; Charles Krauthammer;
former NBC News correspondent and Moral Majority vice president
Cal Thomas; neo-conservative prophet Norman Podhoretz, and Ray Price
(yet another Nixon speechwriter). Aside from a handful of left-leaning
liberals, most of the other op-ed mainstays are establishment-tied
middle-roaders such as Flora Lewis, David Broder, Jeff Greenfield,
Georgie Anne Geyer, and Meg Greenfield.
p145
By 1987, religious broadcasting had become a $2 billion a year
industry, with more than 200 full-time Christian TV stations and
1,000 full-time Christian radio stations. This means that evangelical
Christians control about 14 percent of the television stations operating
in the U.S. and 10 percent of the radio stations, which bombard
the American public with a conservative theo-political message.
TV ministries continue to thrive, despite the widely publicized
preacher sex and money scandals of the late 1980s.
Some journalists may reject the mythology about liberal prejudice,
but when addressing what is going on they're prone to denial. Instead
of identifying the thumbs on news-media scales, the preference is
to call the whole contraption neutral. "Everybody
talks about media biases to the right or the left," syndicated
columnist Ellen Goodman pooh-poohed in 1989. "The real media
bias is against complexity, which is usually terminated with the
words: 'I'm sorry, we're out of time." Of course, electronic
news media are surface-skimming operations. Views that seriously
challenge the status quo, however, have few occasions to be interrupted,
since they're so rarely heard at all. [...]
p153
Ten signs of an official scandal
The Iran-contra revelations shared ten common
characteristics of an official scandal:
1) The scandal comes to light much later than
it could have to prevent serious harm.
2) The focus is on scapegoats and fall guys,
as though remedial action amounts to handing the public a few heads
on a platter.
3) Damage control keeps the media barking but
at bay. The press is so busy chewing on scraps near the outer perimeter
that it stays away from the chicken house.
4) Sources on the inside supply tidbits of information
to steer reporters in certain directions-and away from others. With
the media dashing through the woods, these sources keep pointing:
"The scandal went that-a-way!"
5) After denials by government officials come
well-publicized admissions of "mismanagement," "mistakes,"
even "improprieties." The media take, and report, these
half-hearted confessions at face value.
6) The spotlight is on outraged officials-senators,
congressmen, special prosecutors, federal judges-asking tough questions.
(But not too tough.) As time passes, politicians and/or the judicial
system take the lead in guiding media coverage.
7) Despite all the hand-wringing, the press avoids
basic questions that challenge institutional power and not just
a few powerful individuals.
8) Even when the proverbial "highest levels"
are implicated, a journalistic fog sets in, obscuring trails that
could lead to more substantial revelations, or far-reaching solutions.
9) Protracted news coverage makes a big show
out of airing certain facts, over and over, but in the end the most
powerful and culpable oxen remain ungored.
10) Inevitably, media pundits emphasize that
despite all the past problems, the system is cleansing itself. "The
system works."
p154
Olliemania, Olliemedia
Unable to muster the resolve for a full-fledged investigative
assault, the press began to do the White House damage-control shuffle.
The plan for containing the scandal was set in motion at the very
moment Meese disclosed the diversion of Iranian "assets"
to the contras and fingered North and Poindexter as the higher-ups
responsible. Mass media picked up the cue and focused on the diversion
while ignoring other crucial issues, such as U.S. government complicity
in contra drug smuggling. The overriding question became, "What
did the President know, and when?" It all seemed to boil down
to this: If Reagan knew about the diversion, he was guilty; otherwise
he was innocent. And since North and his colleagues had already
shred key documents, the damage-controllers knew the paper trail
would stop short of Nice Guy in the White House. [...]
In devising covert operations, spymasters
create cover stories in advance to contain the damage should their
schemes be exposed. North's congressional interlocutors chuckled
when he revealed that his mentor, CIA director William Casey, had
told him that he might not be a big enough fall guy; North's immediate
superior, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, would probably
also have to take the rap if it came down to that. Poindexter was
a well-known dissembler on Capitol Hill, having planted disinformation
in the U.S. media about Libya. Yet when it came his turn to testify
about Iran-contra, he was pegged by reporters as the one person
who could prove or disprove that Reagan was privy to the diversion
scam. Poindexter said no. He also maintained it was his job to provide
the President with "plausible deniability."
In effect, Poindexter told Congress and the media that they had
been taken for a ride on a national security roller-coaster, and
now the ride was over. Since there was no way to refute Poindexter's
testimony, he would end up being the principal fall guy, just as
CIA director Casey had planned. The Democrats in Congress, still
refusing to act like an authentic opposition party, had little inclination
to pursue the matter further. And the Washington press corps, peering
through a cover story that had been rendered transparent, caught
a vivid glimpse of its own weakness, and moved on. A new political
season was about to begin. |
p103
Does the press function as an independent Fourth Estate or as
a fourth branch of government? Are media adversaries of the State
or its accomplice?
TV's top journalists are part of the wealthy and influential elite,
often socializing with people they're supposed to be scrutinizing.
At an awards banquet for the Radio & Television Correspondents
Association during Reagan's second term, Kathleen Sullivan (at the
time with ABC) was photographed on the arm of then-Defense Secretary
Caspar Weinberger, while CBS Face the Nation host Lesley Stahl greeted
the Republican Party's national chairman Frank Fahrenkopf with a
kiss. Vice President Bush serenaded the crowd with a speech and
journalists got prizes ostensibly for good reporting.
David Broder of the Washington Post, often described as the dean
of American political reporting, has won many awards in his day.
Upon accepting a prize for lifetime service to journalism at Washington's
National Press Club in 1988, Broder stated: "I can't for the
life of me fathom why any journalists would want to become insiders,
when it's so much fun being outsiders-irreverent, inquisitive, incorrigibly
independent outsiders, thumbing our nose at authority and going
our own way." Applauding Broder's remarks was an audience of
insiders, including James Baker, soon-to-be Secretary of State,
who got a flattering profile in Broder's column.
This kind of sycophantic behavior made investigative
reporter I.F. Stone's blood boil. Izzy, as his friends called him,
was a real outsider. He had one cardinal rule: don't pal around
with the folks you write about, don't fraternize with people in
power. That's what he always told young people who wanted to be
reporters. But his was a voice in a journalistic wilderness. When
he died in 1989, Stone was lauded by many high-profile journalists
who never listened to his advice.
THE MIGHTY PR ARSENAL
When we turn on the TV, we don't expect to see
a government spokesperson reading officially-sanctioned news reports.
Most U.S. citizens who hear about a state-controlled press think
of something that exists in faraway places, not in their own country.
Some of our political leaders, however, have a less sanguine view
of American journalism. "Reporters are puppets," said
Lyndon Johnson. "They simply respond to the pull of the most
powerful strings."
While claiming to be independent, U.S. journalists rely heavily
on official sources who don't necessarily deserve the credence they
are given. "For all its bluster and professed skepticism, the
press is far too willing to take the government at its word,"
said Newsday editor Anthony Marro. Consequently, mass media are
often little more than vehicles through which those in power pontificate
to the American public. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker has
described the dependence on official sources as "the gravest
professional and intellectual weakness of American journalism."
Bill Moyers, who has worked in the White House as well as in print
and broadcast media, emphasized a similar point: "Most of the
news on television is, unfortunately, what( ever the government
says is news." [...]
Vietnam: a patriotic spin
True to form, big-league reporters coddled official sources throughout
the Vietnam War. Producers at NBC and ABC had an explicit policy
of deleting graphic footage of the conflict from evening news broadcasts.
CBS played by similar rules, thereby helping to "shield the
audience from the true horror of the war," according to Fred
Friendly. "I must confess that in my two years as CBS News
president," said Friendly, "I tempered my news judgment
and tailored my conscience more than once." [...]
U.S. media often gave Vietnam War coverage a "patriotic"
spin. Typical was NBC's Huntley-Brinkley Report, which described
"the American forces in Indochina as 'builders' rather than
'destroyers"'-a "central truth" that "needs
underscoring." Much of the press was intent on underscoring
this "truth"-which explains why reporter Seymour Hersh
had to send his account of the My Lai massacre to the Dispatch News
Service, a little known media outlet, after wasting more than a
year trying to get the major media to cover the story. Hersh subsequently
won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for the My Lai revelations.
Journalists kept chomping at the government
bit, even when it should have been apparent that something was seriously
amiss about the official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident
in 1964, which served as a pretext for dramatically escalating the
war in Vietnam. Early calls for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam
by Senator Ernest Gruening, one of the two dissenting votes against
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, went unreported in the New York Times
and the Washington Post.
When the Times published Harrison Salisbury's 1966 year-end eyewitness
accounts of civilian devastation from the U.S. bombing of Hanoi,
the Washington Post railed at this momentary breach of state journalism.
On the Pentagon beat, Post reporter George C. Wilson informed readers
that Salisbury's statistics on casualties were "identical to
those in a communist propaganda leaflet." Post reporter Chalmers
Roberts described Salisbury as an accessory of North Vietnam and
its leader Ho Chi Minh-"Ho's chosen instrument." The Post
also condemned Salisbury editorially, as an unwitting tool of the
North Vietnamese. In spite of the vitriol, within weeks independent
verification forced the U.S. government to admit the truth of Salisbury's
articles.
Washington Post Company president Katharine Graham
counted among her best friends some of the key architects of the
Vietnam War, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (who later
joined the board of directors of the Washington Post Company). President
Lyndon Johnson appreciated all the gung-ho editorials about the
war that Post editor Russell Wiggins was writing. As an apt reward,
a presidential appointment made Wiggins the U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations the last few months of 1968-"a plum from Johnson
to a loyalist," recounts author Howard Bray. [...]
Right to the bitter end, major U.S. media supported additional
military aid for the tottering regime in Saigon. Even as the last
American forces made a hasty retreat in 1975, the U.S. press was
still serving as a credulous conduit for CIA news plants. "The
whole idea of a bloodbath was conjured out of thin air. We had no
intelligence to indicate that the South Vietnamese were facing a
bloodbath," said CIA operative Frank Snepp. But reporters played
it the way the government wanted-and rarely said a word about other
matters when the American government demanded silence. [...]
p114
THE CIA-MEDIA IMBROGLIO
... Manipulating the media for propaganda purposes has long been
a major aspect of clandestine operations conducted by the CIA, which
often doesn't have to use subterfuge to get news organizations to
do its bidding. Since the CIA was formed in 1947, publishers and
executive management have eagerly volunteered their services for
the benefit of the Agency.
"There is ample evidence that America's leading
publishers allowed themselves and their news organizations to become
handmaidens to the intelligence services," wrote investigative
journalist Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone. "American publishers,
like so many other corporate and institutional leaders at the time,
were willing to commit the resources of their companies to the struggle
against 'global communism.' Accordingly, the traditional line separating
the American press corps and government was often indistinguishable."
As far as America's spymasters were concerned, a natural affinity
existed between the cloak-and-dagger trade and the news business,
since both professions emphasize information gathering. Debriefing
journalists has always been one of the CIA's most effective ways
of getting intelligence. Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, a close
friend of CIA director Allen Dulles, was debriefed by the CIA after
traveling overseas, and he privately encouraged his correspondents
to cooperate with the Agency. Malcolm Muir, editor of Newsweek during
much of the Cold War, was also regularly debriefed after visits
abroad.
At times reporters, photographers and camera crews will visit
obscure locales that are off-limits to most people. A well-placed
journalist can act as the Agency's eyes and ears, obtaining hard-to-come-by
data. "One journalist is worth 20 agents,"
a high-level CIA officer told Bernstein. Former CIA deputy
director Ray S. Cline, now a mainstay at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington, called the American news
media the "only unfettered espionage agencies in this country."
In addition to swapping information, reporters
have killed or altered stories and disseminated propaganda at the
request of the Agency. The CIA, in turn, has given friendly journalists
career-enhancing scoops and leaks. When a correspondent for
the San Diego-based Copley chain learned that CIA-backed anti-Castro
Cubans were training for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, he
not only held the story but published misleading information fed
to him by the Agency that dismissed rumors of an impending attack.
As a gesture of gratitude, the CIA gave Charles Keely a big scoop
about Soviet missile bases in Cuba. Keely subsequently won an award
for breaking the Cuban missile story.
Foreign news bureaus provided excellent cover for full-time spies
posing as reporters. For a while, the CIA ran a formal training
program to teach agents how to act like (or be) reporters. Not everyone
needed tutoring; Richard Helms, CIA director in the mid-1960s and
early 1970s, had previously worked as a UPI correspondent. And the
revolving door turned both ways, as CIA agents like William F. Buckley
burrowed into media niches after their stint with U.S. intelligence
formally ended.
Bernstein estimated in 1977 that at least
400 journalists had lived double lives, maintaining covert relationships
with the CIA that went beyond the normal give-and-take between reporters
and their sources. Media professionals occasionally were
paid for their CIA-related services. Some even signed secrecy agreements
while they performed non-journalistic tasks for the Agency, such
as keeping an eye out for potential recruits and passing messages
or money to CIA contacts. Trusted reporters were dispatched on special
undercover assignments, almost always with the consent of their
editors. As former CIA director William Colby stated, "Let's
not pick on some poor reporters. Let's go to the managements. They
were witting."
Old boy networks
The CIA cultivated high-level contacts within
the most prestigious media in the U.S., including the three TV networks
and the newspapers of record. More than 20 other American news organizations
occasionally shared a bed with the CIA, including AP, UPI, Scripps-Howard,
the Hearst papers, Reader's Digest, Wall Street Journal, Christian
Science Monitor and the Mutual Broadcasting System.
Relationships between CIA officials and media execs were often
social, dating back many years. For instance, Washington Post owners
Philip and Katharine Graham were best friends with Frank Wisner,
a pivotal figure in the Agency's worldwide propaganda apparatus.
Wisner ran CIA covert operations from the early days of the Cold
War until shortly before he committed suicide in 1961
The CIA's global propaganda operation was headed initially by
Tom Braden. After leaving the Agency, Braden worked as a syndicated
columnist and co-host of CNN Crossfire (representing "the left").
Braden once wrote a piece in the Saturday Evening Post called "Why
I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral." One of Braden's CIA proteges,
Philip L. Geyelin, eventually became editor of the Washington Post
editorial page. At times critical of the Reagan administration for
squandering its credibility because it lied so much about Central
America, Geyelin nonetheless affirmed the virtue of official deception:
"We will get nowhere without first stipulating that, while
circumstances alter almost any case you can think of, the President
has an inherent right-perhaps an obligation in particular situations-to
deceive."
Oftentimes the lie is in the omission-and the
Post has been a willing participant in keeping the lid on touchy
disclosures. "There have been instances," admitted publisher
Katharine Graham, "in which secrets have been leaked to us
which we thought were so dangerous that we went to them [U.S. officials]
and told them that they had been leaked to us and did not print
them."
The CIA's most important print media asset has been the New York
Times, which provided press credentials and cover for more than
a dozen CIA operatives during the Cold War. Arthur Hays Sulzberger,
publisher from 1935 to 1961, was a close friend of CIA director
Allen Dulles. After Dulles' successor John A. McCone stepped down
as CIA chief in the mid-1960s, the Times continued to submit articles
to McCone for vetting and approval. McCone removed certain elements
of stories before they went to press. Such groveling by the Times
suggests that instead of "All the News That's Fit to Print,"
perhaps its motto should be "Print to Fit."
p119
Nazi assets
On the international front, the CIA operated Radio Liberty and
Radio Free Europe (aimed at the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe)
throughout the Cold War. With several former Nazis and fascists
on staff, these were among the largest and most expensive psychological
warfare operations ever undertaken by the U.S. government. They
generated an onslaught of virulent anti-Red propaganda, at times
lifting fraudulent material straight from Hitler's security services
in an effort to rouse the Central and East European masses against
the Soviets. One Nazi-inspired propaganda piece-"Document on
Terror"-did the near-impossible, accusing Stalin of crimes
he hadn't actually committed.
Back in the United States, the CIA set in motion the Crusade for
Freedom, a multimillion-dollar PR project which served as a domestic
counterpart to the Agency's global propaganda effort. As such, it
constituted a violation of the National Security Act of 1947, which
explicitly prohibited the CIA from engaging in domestic propaganda
activity. Designed to mobilize public opinion in support of the
government's Cold War policies, this exercise in mind control depended
on the cooperation of big media personalities in the United States.
It was rather convenient that people like Henry Luce of Time-Life,
C.D. Jackson of Fortune, and Eugene Lyons of Reader's Digest sat
on the board of directors of the National Committee for a Free Europe
(NCFE), which functioned as a thinly-veiled private-sector cover
for channeling funds to neo-Nazi emigre groups intent on "liberating"
their homeland. Other NCFE board members included CIA director Allen
Dulles and former OSS chief William "Wild Bill" Donovan.
Small wonder that U.S. journalists rallied to the cause, even
though several countries represented in the CIA-sponsored "captured
nations" coalition were fictitious entities ("Cossackia,"
"Idel-Ural") that had been invented by the Nazi propaganda
ministry during World War II. The U.S. media repeated the Big Lie,
whitewashing the brutal, anti-Semitic nature of the CIA's East European
proxies with heroic accounts of anticommunist "freedom fighters"
sustained by nickel-and-dime donations from ordinary Americans.
A similar ruse was later invoked by U.S. officials to explain how
the Nicaraguan contras persisted when the Boland Amendment forbade
military aid. [...]
p124
Thought police
The FBI's assault on free speech during the Nixon presidency included
a systematic attempt to cripple the "underground press,"
which Hoover found loathsome because of "its depraved nature
and moral looseness." Under the auspices of the FBI's Counterintelligence
Program (COINTELPRO), the Bureau harassed leftist and counterculture
publications that sprang up across the country during the late 1960s.
Local police, right-wing vigilantes and the CIA also participated
in this attack on the First Amendment. Newspaper staffs were infiltrated
by spies; journalists were busted on trumped-up drug or obscenity
charges; offices were broken into, ransacked and bombed; equipment
was stolen and telephones tapped.
At the same time, the FBI was busy planting stories in "friendly
news media" in an effort to undermine the New Left, civil rights
and antiwar movements. A frequent conduit for raw and unverified
FBI data was the San Diego-based Copley press, which published Bureau-inspired
editorials about the Black Panthers and other groups. Some Copley
employees were chagrined to learn that their executive staff was
supplying the FBI with photographs, reporters' notes and other information
on local antiwar, black and Latino activists. Dubbed "the little
FBI" inside Copley (which also worked closely with the CIA),
this nest of media spies gathered articles and pictures for exclusive
use by the Bureau, rather than for publication.
Photographers who once worked at Copley say they were asked to
make blowups of demonstrators so that faces could be identified.
Robert Leam, a former Copley photographer, remembered how he took
"pictures of demonstrators, and they would never run in the
papers. We shot rolls and rolls of film and would never see the
photos in print." Said Leam: "Word finally filtered down
that the stuff was going to government agencies. I got fed up..."
FBI snooping on law-abiding Americans continued long after J.
Edgar Hoover died. During the Reagan administration, there were
revelations of a major FBI spying campaign that initially targeted
the anti-intervention group Committee in Solidarity with the People
of El Salvador (CISPES) and soon grew to encompass a hundred other
organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(founded by Martin Luther King Jr.), National Council of Churches,
United Auto Workers, and the Women's Rape Crisis Center in Norfolk,
Virginia. Yet when FBI officials claimed the surveillance of CISPES
was an aberration attributable to a few rogue agents, the newspapers
of record accepted this explanation at face value, despite a long
history of FBI corruption and political sabotage.
A New York Times editorial stated that the FBI's
probe of CISPES "seems to have begun prudently enough [but]
some agents and supervisors lost their direction." The probe
"went astray," the editorial concluded, even though a
Times news story had reported a week earlier that then-FBI-director
William Webster personally overruled local field agents who sought
to terminate surveillance of peace groups in their area. |
p278
When a Soviet interceptor plane blew up a South Korean passenger
jet in September 1983, U.S. media immediately condemned it as a
heinous act. Editorials denouncing the KAL shootdown were filled
with phrases like "wanton killing" and "reckless
aerial murder The day after the incident, a New York Times editorial,
titled "Murder in the Air," was unequivocal: "There
is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless
airliner... No circumstance whatever justifies attacking an innocent
plane."
But when Iran Air Flight 655 was blown out of the sky by a U.S.
cruiser in July 1988, excuses were more than conceivable-they were
profuse. Confronted with the sudden reality of a similar action
by the U.S. government, the New York Times inverted every standard
invoked with righteous indignation five years earlier.
Two days after the Iranian passenger jet went down in flames killing
290 people, the Times editorialized that "while horrifying,
it was nonetheless an accident." The editorial concluded, "The
onus for avoiding such accidents in the future rests on civilian
aircraft: avoid combat zones, fly high, acknowledge warnings."
A similar double standard pervaded electronic media coverage.
In the aftermath of the KAL tragedy, America's airwaves carried
ritual denunciations by journalists. On CBS, for example, Dan Rather
called it a "barbaric act." No such adjectives were heard
from America s TV commentators when discussing the U.S. shootdown
of a civilian jet.
The Reagan administration exploited KAL 007 for all it was worth.
As Nightline host Ted Koppel admitted years later, "This was
at a period when the President was very much interested in portraying
the Russians as being a bunch of barbarians, was very much interested
in getting the Strategic Defense Initiative program going. It all
fit very nicely, didn't it, to have this image of the Russians at
that time knowingly shoot down a civilian airliner?"
The Soviet shootdown inspired a single-issue focus unparalleled
on Nightline since the Iran hostage crisis had given birth to the
show in 1979. Nightline aired eight consecutive programs on the
story, with titles such as "Korean Air 'Massacre'-Reagan Reaction"
and "Punishing the Soviets-What U.S. Options?" On one
show, host Ted Koppel was remarkably candid: "This has been
one of those occasions when there is very little difference between
what is churned out by the U.S. government's propaganda organs and
by the commercial broadcasting networks."
Nightline's programs on KAL 007 featured a steady parade of hawks
like Richard Viguerie, William Buckley, George Will, William Safire
("a brutal act of murder"), Jesse Helms ("premeditated,
deliberate murder") and John Lofton ("sever diplomatic
relations with the Soviet Union"). Koppel himself stated there
wasn't "any question that the Soviet Union deserves to be accused
of murder, it's only a question of whether it's first degree or
second degree."
On Nightline "007 Day Three," Koppel promoted an on-air
telephone poll asking viewers whether the administration "should
take strong action against the Soviets." Over 90 percent said
yes. On the same show, right-wing leader Terry
Dolan stated that "anyone who would suggest that the U.S. would
ever consider shooting down an unarmed civilian plane is downright
foolish and irresponsible."
When the U.S. shot down a civilian plane
five years later, Nightline's hometeam bias was evident. Instead
of eight consecutive shows (followed by two more later in the month),
there were only three Nightline programs focusing on the U.S. shootdown.
No American foreign policy critics denounced the U.S. for murder;
instead the discussion focused on "somber questions" about
"the tragedy," occasionally implying that Iranians were
to blame.
What can explain the disparity in coverage? In each case, Nightline
meshed with the propaganda needs of the U.S. government: the Soviet
action was hashed and rehashed as evidence against the Evil Empire;
the U.S. action was deftly handled as a tragic mistake.
Debunking relevant comparisons
As soon as the Iranian Airbus crashed into
the Persian Gulf, the Reagan administration set out to discourage
what should have been obvious comparisons with the KAL incident.
The New York Times and other media uncritically quoted the President's
July 4 resurrection of his administration's timeworn deceit: "Remember
the KAL, a group of Soviet fighter planes went up, identified the
plane for what it was and then proceeded to shoot it down. There's
no comparison."
Virtually ignored was a key finding of Seymour
Hersh's 1986 book The Target Is Destroyed-that the Reagan administration
knew within days of the KAL shootdown that the Soviets had believed
it to be a military aircraft on a spy mission. Soviet commanders
had no idea that they were tracking a plane with civilians on board.
The Times acknowledged this years later in an editorial, "The
Lie That Wasn't Shot Down"; yet when Reagan lied again, the
Times again failed to shoot it down. ,
Instead, Times correspondent R.W. Apple weighed in with an analysis
headlined, "Military Errors: The Snafu as History." In
his lead, Apple observed that "the destruction of an Iranian
airliner...came as a sharp reminder of the pervasive role of error
in military history." The piece drew many parallels to the
Iran jetliner's tragic end-citing examples from the American Revolution,
World War II and Vietnam-while ignoring the most obvious analogy.
About the KAL 007 shootdown, Apple said not a word.
In certain ways, the Iran Air tragedy was less defensible than
the KAL disaster. The Iran Air jet went down in broad daylight,
well within its approved commercial airline course over international
waters, without ever having strayed into unauthorized air space.
In contrast, the KAL jet flew way off course deep into Soviet territory
above sensitive military installations, in the dead of night.
But, as with Washington's policy makers, journalists were intent
on debunking relevant comparisons rather than exploring them. [...]
WHO'S A TERRORIST, AND WHO'S NOT?
Over the years, U.S. media have promoted a simplistic view of
the world, where North Americans in white hats police the globe
of black hats-usually worn by Arab terrorists. By applying the terrorism
label only to anti-Western political activity and violence, mass
media foster the illusion that "terrorism is alien to American
patterns of conduct in the world, that it is done to us, and that
what we do violently to others is legitimate counter-terrorism,"
said Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton
University.
The U.S. government's selective definition of terrorism is echoed
throughout the media. In January 1989 the Pentagon released a slick,
130-page report-with photos and bar charts-called Terrorist Group
Profiles. Praising it as "an effort to raise public awareness,"
CBS Evening News correspondent Terrence Smith noted that the Pentagon
spent $71,000 to produce and distribute the report. "Cheap
by Pentagon standards," Smith concluded, "and few are
likely to question its value."
The CBS segment featured a sound bite from "terrorism expert"
Ray Cline, who endorsed the Pentagon's "consciousness raising
among our own people." Cline, a former CIA deputy director,
is a close associate of the World Anti-Communist League, whose Latin
American affiliates include unsavory characters linked to death
squads and neo-Nazi violence.
A.M. Rosenthal puffed the Pentagon report as a compilation of
"all known terrorist groups" in his New York Times column.
But a cursory glance at the report's table of contents should have
been enough to discern the Pentagon's slant. The section on African
terrorism lists only one organization: the anti-apartheid African
National Congress. Latin American terrorists are all left-wing revolutionaries;
right-wing death squads aren't mentioned. The roster from Western
Europe features the defunct Direct Action from France (supposedly
a leftist group), while omitting any reference to numerous neo-Nazi
terror gangs that are still active on the Continent. And El Fatah,
the main PLO faction, is included among Mideast terrorist organizations,
despite Yasir Arafat's renunciation of terrorism.
That major U.S. news media should give their stamp of approval
to such a blatantly biased Pentagon report underscores an essential
point. "The American understanding of terrorism," said
Professor [Richard] Falk, "has been dominated by recent governmental
efforts to associate terrorists with Third World revolutionaries,
especially those with Arab countries... The media have generally
carried on their inquiries within this framework of selective perception.
As a result, our political imagination is imprisoned, with a variety
of ugly and unfortunate consequences."
p 288
As told by mass media, only America's enemies practice terrorism.
When the battleship New Jersey lobbed mortars into Lebanese villages
in 1984, causing numerous civilian casualties and arousing intense
anti-American feelings, few journalists suggested that this was
also a form of terrorism. The idea that terrorist
attacks against Americans might be a response to actions by the
U.S. government seemingly never crosses the minds of most reporters.
Instead, news stories depict terrorism as random madness, with neither
roots nor origin. In so doing, mass media promote the officially
sanctioned view that the U.S. is unfairly targeted by bloodthirsty
fanatics who deserve swift retribution.
Terrorism and counter-terrorism are often two ways of describing
the same activity. As Richard Falk wrote in Revolutionaries and
Functionaries: The Dual Face of Terror, "The terrorist is as
much the well-groomed bureaucrat reading the Wall Street Journal
as the Arab in desert dress looking through the gunsights of a Kalashnikov
rifle." Indeed, the activities of both are symbiotically linked,
with U.S. officials invoking the specter of revolutionary violence
in Third World countries as a pretext to preserve "national
security" through state terrorism.
Selective definitions of terrorism
Because the U.S. government dominates the media agenda, Third
World revolutionary violence continues to exert a distracting hold
on the American imagination, while U.S.-backed state terrorism in
countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, the Philippines and Indonesia
is downplayed. Consider the headline of a December 1988 New York
Times article by Lindsey Gruson: "Salvador Rebels Step Up Terrorism."
The lead reported on the leftists' "use of terrorism"-a
reference to the killing of eight mayors in the previous eight months.
One learned only in the last paragraph (of a 22-paragraph story)
that Americas Watch, an independent human rights organization, found
the U.S.-backed government was responsible for two out of every
three civilian deaths in El Salvador during this period.
When tracking abuses of civilians by rebel groups in Central America
independent human rights organizations long identified the Nicaraguan
contras as the worst offenders. A once-secret 1982 Pentagon report
explicitly described the contras as a "terrorist" group.
A CIA-authored assassination manual actually instructed the contras
to target elected mayors in Nicaragua. Despite this evidence, the
New York Times never referred matter-of-factly in a news story to
"contra terrorism" or ran a headline like "Nicaraguan
Rebels Step Up Terrorism"-a blatant double standard in light
of Times reporting on El Salvador. Instead, an October 1989 Times
editorial used the word "pinpricks" to describe contra
terrorist attacks, which had killed over 140 Nicaraguan civilians
since a cease fire supposedly went into effect 18 months earlier.
As government-allied death squad murders escalated in El Salvador,
the Times whitewashed U.S. responsibility for the violence. "Despite
U.S. training programs," read a Times editorial, "the
Salvadoran military played into leftist hands with indiscriminate
attacks on peasants [emphasis added]." As Allan Nairn documented
in The Progressive, it was U.S. intelligence that organized and
tutored the Salvadoran security forces involved in death squad activity
that killed tens of thousands since the 1960s.
Jude Wanniski, former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal
and author of the annual Media Guide, is an ardent defender of Salvadoran
death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, widely believed to be the
mastermind of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.
Wanniski dismissed the notion that D'Aubuisson has anything to do
with the death squads, calling it "one of the most successful
hoaxes of the decade." Those like former U.S. ambassador Robert
White and ex-Salvadoran President Jose Napoleon Duarte, who have
linked D'Aubuisson to the death squads, were guilty, in Wanniski's
words, of "a McCarthyist tactic, pure and simple." Wanniski
didn't mention D'Aubuisson's admiring comment about Adolf Hitler
told to a German reporter and another European journalist: "You
Germans were very intelligent. You realized that the Jews were responsible
for the spread of communism, and you began to kill them."
The kind of terrorism the U.S. media pay most
attention to is committed by small groups on planes, ships, or at
airports-what Edward S. Herman has described as "retail terror"-compared
to "wholesale terror" that occurs with U.S. financial
assistance and military support in countries like Guatemala, El
Salvador, and the Philippines (where human rights abuses have persisted
under Corazon Aquino's government at a level rivaling, if not exceeding,
the Marcos era). Although their numbers are much smaller, the victims
of Third World revolutionary violence often receive far more news
coverage than victims of U.S.-backed state terror.
A notable exception occurred when Salvadoran soldiers murdered
six Jesuit priests and two associates in November 1989. Although
depicted as an aberration, this incident was actually part of a
long-standing pattern of religious persecution by U.S.-backed regimes,
which have kidnapped, tortured and murdered scores of progressive
church activists in Latin America during the past decade. |
[...]
Linguicide
The intersection of Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Pennsylvania
Avenue is a heavily-trafficked zone, where lies and facts cohabitate
as convenience and opportunism dictate. With reporters serving mainly
as messengers for corporate PR reps and government officials who
try to fog up reality, it's no wonder "the news" leaves
so many people feeling confused
The world according to mass media is not supposed
to make sense; it is supposed to make money. When we watch news
on television, Mark Crispin Miller has written, "we come to
feel, not only that the world is blowing up, but that it does so
for no reason, that its ongoing history is nothing more than a series
of eruptions, each without cause or context. The news creates this
vision of mere anarchy through its erasure of the past, and its
simultaneous tendency to atomize the present into so many unrelated
happenings, each recounted through a sequence of dramatic, unintelligible
pictures. In short, the TV news adapts the world to its own commercial
needs, translating history into several mad occurrences, just the
sort of 'story' that might pique the viewer's morbid curiosity...
And so we have the correspondent, solemnly nattering among the ruins,
offering crude 'analysis' and 'background,' as if to compensate
us for the deep bewilderment that his medium created in the first
place.
The resulting renditions of the world-from special reports about
earthshaking events to local TV news happy-talk-are disorienting,
which suits backers of the status quo just fine. Confusion "keeps
us powerless and controllable " psychotherapist Anne Wilson
Schaef notes. "No one is more controllable than a confused
person; no society is more controllable than a confused society.
Politicians know this better than anyone, and that is why they use
innuendos, veiled references, and out-and-out lies instead of speaking
clearly and truthfully."
While sometimes echoing public skepticism or even disdain toward
politicians, news media grant them continuous access-endlessly featuring,
quoting, summarizing and propagating their opinions. As with histrionic
wrestlers on TV, journalists and political players make various
noises, encouraging viewers to mistake the embraces for mortal combat.
But when the President wants reporters to jump for a story, they
are much less interested in asking "Why?" than "How
high?"
The symbiotic relationship between officialdom and the press has
debased public discourse. We could call this process "linguicide"-the
ongoing destruction of language as an instrument of meaning. Linguicide
occurs when journalists say "tax reform" but actually
mean huge giveaways to the wealthy. It occurs when an economic system
dominated by gigantic monopolies is erroneously described as "free
enterprise." Or when building new weapons of mass destruction
is called "modernization" of a "deterrent."
Or when a Central American government murders 50,000 of its own
people, including priests and human rights monitors, but is routinely
sanctified as a "democracy"-that, too, is an example of
linguicide.
Ultimately, the denuding of issues is what linguicide is about:
"news" as a hazy defoliant, stripping away substance.
"Covering" current events, the media blanket is more opaque
than translucent-smothering issues rather than ventilating them.
Like the prisoners in Plato's cave who can see only flickering shadows
on the wall, our picture of the world is filtered through the mass
media and we are apt to mistake this distortion for reality.
p334
Media governance
... A central function of the American press is to keep legitimizing
the country's most powerful institutions, as exemplified by that
post-Bush-inaugural headline on the front page of the New York Times-"The
People, the Thousands, Get a Look at Their House." In this
respect, certain "noncommercial" news programs provided
by PBS and NPR can be particularly insidious, posing as alternatives
without really fulfilling that function.
In projecting elite opinion, the U.S. press plays a crucial role
in molding popular opinion; it serves as a channel that converts
the former, however imprecisely, into the latter. And while mass
media can't always dictate our political and social attitudes, they
never stop telling us what our views supposedly are-or should be.
USA Today has popularized the royal "We" in news headlines-"We
like..." "We support..." "We're happy about..."
etc.-keeping the public informed about the outlooks that constitute
being in step.
American media are perhaps best understood as institutions of
governance that have broken new ground in addressing what Aldous
Huxley described as "the problem of making people love their
servitude." That so many of us take for granted the freedom
and independence of the U.S. press is an index of the extent to
which we've become accustomed to a subtle kind of oppression.
If we're looking only for hard-as-nails prohibitions usually associated
with despotism, we may not recognize the spikes being driven by
familiar forces. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky have pinpointed
the dilemma in their book Manufacturing Consent: "In countries
where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy,
the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official
censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant
elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work
where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This
is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically
attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively
portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general
community interest."
p334
Oligarchy made easy
"The news media in America do not tell the American people
that a political whip hangs over their head. That is because a political
whip hangs over their head."
So wrote Walter Karp shortly before his death in 1989. He named
mass media's most forbidden topic: "In the American republic
the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and
our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the
press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves
the greatest of political blessings-Gyges' ring of invisibility.
And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their
own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm
lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news."
What Karp called the "invisibility" of American political
power is a ghostly shield guarding against exposure and deflecting
critical attacks. Major media steadfastly refuse to acknowledge
what underlies so many reported events-"the fact of oligarchy."
When brought to light, specific abuses come across as episodic-perhaps
attributable to corrupt individuals in high places, but not the
result of overall corporate domination.
Eager to please their bosses in an era of staff cutbacks and bottom-line
budget slashing, journalists are integral to the closed loops of
social denial. Thus we hear precious little about the fact that
one percent of the population in the U.S. owns nearly one-half of
the country's wealth, and one percent of all industrial corporations
in America account for nearly 90 percent of total sales. It is seemingly
taboo for journalists to examine the implications of such figures.
"Financial accumulation is admired," political scientist
Paul Goldstene points out. "That it influences politics is
dimly understood and vaguely resented: that economic concentration
is, in fact, political power is understood by modem liberals hardly
at all." But it is surely understood by today's media owners
and their wealthy corporate brethren. Beholden most of all to big
business, mass media mystify who controls what, how and why, taking
people on detours every day-away from clarity about power in our
society.
As Ben Bagdikian observed, "Monopolistic power dominates
many other industries, and most of them enjoy special treatment
by the government. But media giants have two enormous advantages:
They control the public image of national leaders who, as a result,
fear and favor the media magnates' political agendas; and they control
the information and entertainment that help establish the social,
political and cultural attitudes of increasingly larger populations."
This built-in institutional bias "does more than merely protect
the corporate system. It robs the public of a chance to understand
the real world."
Rather than probing the extent to which U.S. corporations influence
foreign policy, American media typically cover political developments
abroad (revolutionary movements, military coups, etc.) as if they
were divorced from economics. On the home front, there is hardly
any in-depth reporting about what has caused the widening gap between
rich and poor, of which millions of homeless Americans are only
the most glaring symptom. And when the roots of social ills are
obscured, people have a tendency to blame the victim or look for
scapegoats; inevitably this fuels xenophobia and racial hatred.
"There is a fundamental contradiction between a corporately
owned press and a press fulfilling its duties as a critical social
institution," said Alexander Cockburn. But reporters are loath
to explore this contradiction, preferring safer controversies that
usually amount to pseudo-tempests in media teapots. |
[...] If you think about it, conspiracy
is a fundamental aspect of
doing business in this country.
Take the systematic and cooperative censorship of the Persian Gulf
War by the Pentagon and much of the news media (*24).
Or the widespread plans of business and government groups to spend
$100 million in taxes to promote a distorted and truncated
history of Columbus in America (*25). along the lines of the
Smithsonian Institution's "fusion of the two worlds",
(*26).
rather than examining more realistic aspects of the Spanish
invasion, like "anger, cruelty, gold, terror, and death"
(*27).
Or circumstances surrounding the U.S. Justice Department theft
from
the INSLAW company of sophisticated, law-enforcement computer
software which "now point to a widespread conspiracy
implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of
INSLAW's technology", says former U.S. Attorney General Elliot
Richardson (*28).
Or Watergate.
Or the "largest bank fraud in world financial history"
(*29), where
the White House knew of the criminal activities at "the Bank
of
Crooks and Criminals International" (BCCI) (*30), where U.S.
intelligence agencies did their secret banking (*31), and where
bribery of prominent American public officials "was a way of
doing business" (*32).
Or the 1949 conviction of "GM [General Motors], Standard Oil
of
California, Firestone, and E. Roy Fitzgerald, among others, for
criminally conspiring to replace electric transportation with
gas- and diesel-powered buses and to monopolize the sale of
buses and related products to transportation companies
throughout the country" [in, among others, the cities of New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake
City, and Los Angeles] (*33).
Or the collusion in 1973 between Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT).
and the U.S. Department of Transportation to overlook safety
defects in the 1.2 million Corvair automobiles manufactured by
General Motors in the early 60's (*34).
Or the A. H. Robins Company, which manufactured the Dalkon Shield
intrauterine contraceptive, and which ignored repeated warnings
of the Shield's hazards and which "stonewalled, deceived,
covered up, and
covered up the coverups...[thus inflicting] on women a
worldwide epidemic of pelvic infections." (*35).
Or that cooperation between McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company
and the FAA resulted in failure to enforce regulations regarding
the unsafe DC-10 cargo door which failed in flight killing all
364 passengers on Turkish Airlines Flight 981 on March 3, 1974
(*36).
Or the now-banned, cancer-producing pregnancy drug
Diethylstilbestrol (DES). that was sold by manufacturers who
ignored tests which showed DES to be carcinogenic; and who
acted "in concert with each other in the testing and marketing
of DES for miscarriage purposes" (*37).
Or the conspiracies among bankers and speculators, with the
cooperation of a corrupted Congress, to relieve depositors of
their savings. This "arrogant disregard from the White House,
Congress and corporate world for the interests and rights of
the American people" will cost U.S. tapayers many hundreds
of
billions of dollars (*38).
Or the Westinghouse, Allis Chalmers,Federal Pacific, and General
Electric executives who met surreptitiously in hotel rooms to
fix prices and eliminate competition on heavy industrial
equipment (*39).
Or the convictions of Industrial Biotest Laboratories (IBT).
officers for fabricating safety tests on prescription drugs
(*40).
Or the conspiracy by the asbestos industry to suppress knowledge
of
medical problemsrelating to asbestos (*41).
Or the 1928 Achnacarry Agreement through which oil companies "agreed
not to engage in any effective price competition" (*42).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. Government agencies and the Congress
to cover up the nature of our decades-old war against the people
of Nicaragua
a covert war that continues in 1992 with the U.S. Government
applying pressure for the Nicaraguan police to reorganize into
a more repressive force (*43).
Or the conspiracy by the CIA and the U.S. Government to interfere
in
the Chilean election process with military aid, covert actions,
and an economic boycott which culminated in the overthrow of
the legitimately elected government and the assassination of
President Salvador Allende in 1973 (*44).
Or the conspiracy among U.S. officials including Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby to finance
terrorism in Angola for the purpose of disrupting Angola's
plans for peaceful elections in October 1975, and to lie about
these actions to the Congress and the news media (*45). And CIA
Director George Bush's subsequent cover up of this
U.S.-sponsored terrorism (*46).
Or President George Bush's consorting with the Pentagon to invade
Panama in 1989 and thereby violate the Constitution of the
United States, the U.N. Charter, the O.A.S. Charter, and the
Panama Canal Treaties (*47).
Or the "gross antitrust violations" (*48) and the conspiracy
of
American oil companies and the British and U.S. governments to
strangle Iran economically after Iran nationalized the
British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. And the
subsequent overthrow by the CIA in 1953 of Iranian Prime
Minister Muhammed Mossadegh (*49).
Or the CIA-planned assassination of Congo head-of-state Patrice
Lumumba (*50).
Or the deliberate and wilful efforts of President George Bush,
Senator Robert Dole, Senator George Mitchell, various U.S.
Government agencies, and members of both Houses of the Congress
to buy the 1990 Nicaraguan national elections for the
presidential candidate supported by President Bush (*51).
Or the collective approval by 64 U.S. Senators of Robert Gates
to
head the CIA, in the face of "unmistakable evidence that Gates
lied about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal" (*52).
Or "How Reagan and the Pope Conspired to Assist Poland's Solidarity
Movement and Hasten the Demise of Communism" (*53).
Or how the Reagan Administration connived with the Vatican to ban
the use of USAID funds by any country "for the promotion of
birth control or abortion" (*54).
Or "the way the Vatican and Washington colluded to achieve
common
purpose in Central America" (*55).
Or the collaboration of Guatemalan strong-man and mass murderer
Hector Gramajo with the U.S. Army to design "programs to build
civilian-military cooperation" at the U.S. Army School of the
Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia; five of the nine
soldiers accused in the 1989 Jesuit massacre in El Salvador are
graduates of SOA which trains Latin/American military personnel
(*56).
Or the conspiracy of the Comanche Peak Nuclear Plant administration
to harass and cause bodily harm to whistleblower Linda Porter
who uncovered dangerous working conditions at the facility
(*57).
Or the conspiracy of President Richard Nxion and the Government
of
South Vietnam to delay the Paris Peace Talks until after the
1968 U.S. presidential election (*58).
Or the pandemic coverups of police violence (*59).
Or the always safe-to-cite worldwide communist conspiracy (*60).
Or maybe the socially responsible, secret consortium to publish
The
Satanic Verses in paperback (*61).
Conspiracies are obviously a way to get things done, and the Washington
Post offers little comment unless conspiracy theorizing threatens
to expose a really important conspiracy that, let's say, benefits
big business or big government. |
Another
story that doesn't make the media
The
"Third Worldization" of America
from the book - Dark Victory |
by Walden Bello
published by
Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), 1994 |
The 1980s ended with the top
20 per cent of the population having the largest share of total
income, while the bottom 60 per cent had the lowest share of total
income ever recorded. Indeed, within the top 20 per cent, the gains
of the Reagan-Bush period were concentrated in the top 1 per cent,
whose income grew by 63 per cent between 1980 and 1989, capturing
over 53 per cent of the total income growth among all families.
Meanwhile, the bottom 60 per cent of families actually experienced
a decline in income.
The same radically regressive trends were evident in wealth holdings,
which were even more concentrated than income:
[I]n l989, the top 1 percent of families earned 14.1% total income,
yet owned 38.3% of total net worth and 50.3% of net financial assets.
The wealth distribution has also become more unequal over time.
The wealth holdings of the richest 0.5% of families grew by one
percentage point over the entire 21-year period, 1962-83, but grew
by four times as much in just six years between 1983 and 1989. Meanwhile,
the bottom 60% of families had lower wealth holdings in 1989 than
1983.35
The trends revealed a middle class that was losing ground. Median
family incomes for 1990 and 1991 dropped to their levels of the
late 1970s when adjusted for taxes and inflation. But even more
alarming was the fact that these trends translated into greater
poverty and hunger among the more vulnerable sectors of the population.
The percentage of whites living in poverty rose from 9 per cent
in 1979 to 10 per cent in 1989. In the case of Hispanics, the increase
was from 22 to 26 per cent, while black poverty remained steady
at 31 per cent. While the ratio of black to white incomes did not
change much, with black median income remaining at 60 per cent that
of whites, the ratio of Hispanic to white median income fell from
69 per cent in 1979 to 65 per cent in 1989. Despite the differences
in racial impact, it is clear that the most prominent feature in
the Reagan rollback was its class character.
That their circumstances had not declined further with respect
to whites according to some social indicators was, of course, cold
comfort for blacks, for the inequalities that remained the same
or became only slightly more pronounced are nevertheless stark:
average black per capita income is now less than 60 per cent that
of whites; 13 per cent of blacks are jobless compared with 6 per
cent for whites; and the life expectancy of black males is seven
years less than that of white males.
By the end of the Republican era, the United States, a congressional
study asserted, had become 'the most unequal of modern nations.'
Some 20 million Americans were said to be experiencing hunger; 25
million of them - some one in every 10 - were receiving federal
food stamps. The child poverty rate, which had risen from 18 per
cent in 1980 to 22 percent in 1991, was the highest among the industrialized
countries. Among children in minority groups, the poverty rate was
even higher, at almost 50 per cent.
Indeed, structural adjustment Republican-style was beginning to
give the US a Third World appearance: rising poverty, widespread
homelessness, greater inequality, social polarization. But perhaps
it was the condition of infants that most starkly captured the 'Third
Worldization' of America. The infant mortality rate for African
Americans now stands at 17.7 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
This figure compares unfavorably not only to those for most other
industrial countries but even to figures for some of the developing
countries of the Caribbean, such as Jamaica (17.2 per 1,000), Trinidad
(16.3), and Cuba (16).
from the book
Dark Victory by Walden Bello
published by
Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First)
398 60 th Street, Oakland, CA 94618 |
INEQUALITY
* Divisions of wealth and power have reached unprecedented levels
in America. While wages and welfare have stagnated or declined,
the superrich have got immeasurably richer. The 'gini co-efficient'
contrasts the income of the richest 10% of the population with the
poorest 10%. Zero represents perfect equality and 100 perfect inequality.
In the late 1990s the US was the 71st most unequal out of 112 countries
- the same as Turkmenistan.
POVERTY
* More than 31 million Americans live in poverty. The number fell
sharply from 1959 to the early 1 970s, then rose again until the
early 1 990s. The rate then fell gradually until 2000 when it began
to rise again - it rises rapidly during economic recession, which
has prevailed in the US since 2000. Very little progress has been
made on tackling poverty since the early 1970s.
* Second Harvest, the largest network of Food Banks in the US, fed
nearly 10% of the population in 1998 - and still had to turn away
several million people.
* In California, only 56% of tenants can afford the official Fair
Market Rent.
* Real wages in the US are now 12% less than they were in 1973.
* Half the working population has no pension provision.
HEALTH
* In 1998, combined public and private expenditure on health in
the US was $4,180 per person. That was $1,441 more than its nearest
rival, Switzerland, and by far the highest in the world. Despite
this:
* 38.7 million people- including 8.5 million children - were without
health insurance in the year 2000
* When unemployment rose from 6 million in March to 7.7 million
in October 2001, 725,000 workers lost their health insurance,
* In March 2002,1.36 million healthcare workers (including some
doctors) had no health insurance: an increase of 98% since 1 998
THE DOLLAR
* What's good for the dollar and the US economy is good for the
world. That is the principle on which the global economic system
is based. So Americans must keep on consuming come what may - including
escalating public and personal debts.
* Consumer debt (mostly credit cards) in the US more than doubled
between June 1992 and June 2002, when it reached $1,71 3 billion
($1.7 trillion). This represents roughly 5B,000 for every man, woman
and child in the country. It is increasing at a rate of $90 billion
a month.
* On 1 3 August 2002, the US national debt stood at $6,161 billion
($6.1 trillion). This makes the US the world's largest debtor by
a very long way - more than $20,000 per head of the US population.
It increases by about $1 billion every day.
* The annual trade deficit (the amount by which imports exceed exports)
grew from $29.5 billion in 1991 to $450 billion in 2000 - the largest
in US history.
* By way of contrast, in 1 999 the US devoted just 0.1 % of its
Gross National Product to overseas aid: by far the smallest of any
of the 28 members of the rich-country club, the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); the US owes the UN
$1 billion.
PRISONS
* The US and the Russian Federation incarcerate more people than
anywhere else in the world - by a huge margin.
* In February 2000, the US prison population reached 2 million.
This represents 25% of the entire prison population of the world
- from just 5% of the world's population.
* More than 500,000 people are employed by the prison system - running
close to the two largest private employers, WalMart and General
Motors.
THE MILITARY
The US spends more on its armed forces than the rest of the world
put together.
* The military accounts for $343 billion of the total Federal budget
of $1,900 billion in 2002.
* Since 11 September 2001 the military budget has jumped by $46
billion.
* In 2000 the number of active military personnel was 1.4 million,
down from a 'peacetime' peak of 2.2 million in 1987 - but still
making the military the largest single employer in the US.
* Between 1 995 and 1 999 the US accounted for 48% of all conventional
arms exports - compared with its nearest rivals Russia (13%), France
(11 %) and Britain (7%). |
OTTAWA - U.S. Homeland Security
Secretary Tom Ridge said in Ottawa on Thursday that people with ties
to terrorism are being blocked at border points from entering the
U.S. every day.
"There isn't a day that goes by, literally, where a couple
of people aren't turned away from our borders because they are associated
in some manner, shape or form with terrorists or terror-related
organizations," said Ridge, who made the remarks during a meeting
with Public Safety and Security Minister Anne McLellan. [...]
U.S. officials said later that between January and September 2004,
1,100 people have been turned away: some of them for having criminal
records, some of them because they had potential links to terrorists.
Ridge said U.S. border guards don't have the authority to arrest
those who are considered dangerous unless they are wanted in the
United States.
But those who live close to the border say the threat to American
security is being exaggerated. Roger Gallaway, a Liberal MP who
represents Sarnia – one of the busiest crossings between Canada
and the U.S. – says many who try to enter the U.S. are recorded
as having ties to terrorism when such ties don't exist.
Gallaway gave the example of a local engineer who was recently
turned back. "He was strip-searched, he was handcuffed, and
an hour-and-a-half later he could go. But, indeed, his name was
similar to someone on a terrorist watch list."
Huge lineups are clogging Canadian checkpoints right now, partly
due to a strike by Canadian border officials. But Ridge and McLellan
say they're making progress in speeding the passage of commercial
and private travellers and goods.
"This is indeed a signal that both countries remain committed
to working in partnership in order to secure our borders,"
said McLellan.
Some changes are in the works. For example, truck drivers will
soon be pre-screened at the Fort Erie, Ont., crossing in a plan
that will later extend to other checkpoints.
And at the Vancouver airport, a new pilot project will see low-risk
travellers conduct their own self-screeing using iris scans or fingerprints.
The so-called biometric identification is controversial because
of fears over privacy violations. |
MONTREAL (CP) - Airport employees will soon
have their biometric data scanned before gaining access to restricted
areas, Transport Canada and the Canadian Air Transport Security
Authority announced Friday.
A new restricted-area card will include either
the fingerprint or iris measurement of the cardholder.
The new cards are now being tested at international airports in
Vancouver and Kelowna, B.C.
"The Government of Canada is committed to continuously enhancing
the security of our aviation system," Transport Minister Jean
Lapierre told a news conference at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International
Airport, where the cards will next be tested. "These projects
will continue to ensure Canada's place as one of the world leaders
in aviation security."
The cards will also be tested in Charlottetown.
Transport Canada and CATSA also announced Friday a pilot project
to use document screening equipment to detect explosives at pre-boarding
checkpoints.
The new identification equipment will test for traces of explosives
on passenger documents such as boarding passes.
"If a person touches the explosives,
no matter when, we're going to be able to detect it with this piece
of state-of-the-art equipment," said Jacques Duchesneau,
the head of CATSA.
Document screening trials will begin in Ottawa next week.
Lapierre praised Canada's airport security, but said the same
attention had to be paid to securing the country's other means of
transport.
"We still have lots to do," Lapierre said. "It's
OK here for aviation, but we have to do more in ports, with railways .
. . the whole aspect of security is becoming important for
us all.
"I'm very preoccupied by the fact that we cannot neglect
anything of the security aspect. We have to be able protect our
citizens and our borders." |
The next US administration's foreign
policy will not be decided simply by the outcome of the race between
George W Bush and Senator John Kerry.
Would a re-elected President Bush keep Rumsfeld and Rice?
Even if Mr Bush were to be re-elected, the direction of US foreign
policy is by no means clear.
Would it be business as usual in Washington? Or, would a significant
change in the foreign policy line-up lead to a shift in Washington's
approach towards the world?
Even from within Republican ranks, strong criticism has been directed
at Mr Bush's handling of foreign affairs, most recently by Brent
Scowcroft.
When George W Bush's father was president, Mr Scowcroft was the
White House national security adviser. And now he has had some unpleasant
things to say about the younger Bush's stewardship over US foreign
policy.
Mr Scowcroft told the Financial Times newspaper that George W is
mesmerised by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon; that the
Bush administration's current efforts to enlist UN and Nato help
in Iraq and Afghanistan are a desperate move to "rescue a failing
venture"; and that America's unilateralist stance had contributed
to the decline of the Atlantic alliance.
Tarnished ideology
Mr Scowcroft's blunt remarks are a reminder that there is a very
different strand of foreign policy-making in the Republican Party
that is struggling to re-emerge.
It could be dubbed the realist or pragmatic wing - the foreign
policy establishment of Henry Kissinger, James Baker and others
- that has dominated Republican thinking on foreign affairs for
much of the past 30 or so years.
This tradition was eclipsed once the younger Mr Bush came to power
by a new ideologically tinged grouping of intellectuals - the so-called
"neo-cons" or "neo-conservatives" who, especially
after the events of 9/11, seized upon the opportunity to push US
foreign policy in a new and more unilateralist direction.
However the neo-cons have been tarnished by America's mistakes
in Iraq.
And their programme to bring democracy to the wider Middle East
looks increasingly over-ambitious if not utopian.
There is no doubt that the neo-conservatives are under something
of a cloud. But equally it is far from clear that, if Mr Bush were
returned to the White House, they would necessarily be shifted to
the margins.
What post might Condoleezza Rice be offered? Would she stay as
national security adviser? Mr Bush certainly values her skills but
many experts question whether she has provided the cohesion and
co-ordination to foreign policy that is a key element of this job.
Would there be any post for Donald Rumsfeld's controversial deputy
in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz? And what of Mr Rumsfeld himself?
Return to past?
In some ways, for all of the focus on foreign policy in this campaign
- by which Americans really mean security - the various statements
and pronouncements mean little.
What matters is who wins in November and then who gets the key
jobs when the new administration takes office next January.
It is clear, for example, that the Pentagon has eclipsed the State
Department in the handling of critical areas of foreign policy like
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Will the more traditional relationship between these two great
departments be restored even if Mr Bush wins the race for the White
House?
In short, Mr Scowcroft's comments are a signal that even if Mr
Bush wins in November, there are those within his party who wish
to re-assert a more traditional Republican view of America's engagement
with the world.
They will be bolstered by many of the president's key domestic
political advisers who are reportedly seething that the neo-conservatives'
"adventurism" abroad, as they see it, has turned what
should have been a Bush walk-over into an electoral race that is
still too close to call. |
Back in late November, 2002, it was reported
that Chairman Dan Burton's House Government Reform Committee investigators
had discovered the possible whereabouts of video tapes and photographs
of the Murrah Building before an alleged truck bomb exploded on
April 19, 1995. The existence of these videos was acknowledged in
the Final Report of the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee.
The Department of Justice under Janet Reno refused to release these
videos and John Ashcroft has carried that position forward to this
day, despite efforts by Congressman Dan Burton. Past efforts to
get key documents and information, have been stone walled and the
cover up continues under the Bush Administration.
As someone who has followed and researched that act of terrorism
from day one, I also believe, based on all my research and discussions
with individuals deeply involved in trying to expose the on-going
cover up about who actually planned and executed that bombing, that
the video tape from the security camera positioned on the Southwestern
Bell building directly across the street from the Murrah building
exists and that the feds are hiding it. Why? The answer is obvious:
If that video does not show Timothy McVeigh and an accomplice in
front of that building right before it was blown from inside, it
would raise far more questions than the government wants answered.
If that video shows what really happened - the building was blown
from inside, the American people will go ballistic.
If there was nothing to hide, that Southwestern Bell building
video would have been plastered over every TV network ad nauseum
as we saw with the Rodney King tape. The continued refusal of Ashcroft
to release all videos in possession of the FBI/Department of Justice
showing the actual bombing of the Murrah Building does nothing but
reinforce charges of a cover up.
9-11
The release of a video titled In Plane Sight has generated a firestorm
of interest in what really happened on September 11, 2001. Like
tens of millions of Americans, I believed the official story line
until about a year and a half ago when I finally came to the painful
conclusion that Flight 93 over Pennsylvania was probably shot down
by a National Guard unit. While it was also very difficult for me
to accept, I also finally came to the conclusion that there was
something very wrong with the commercial air liner flying into the
Pentagon story.
Too many Americans with credentials qualifying them to analyze
something so horrific as a commercial air liner plowing into a building
like the Pentagon, have been insisting for three years that it simply
didn't happen. The science and mathematics when you're applying
them to a jet smashing into a building, i.e. size of the aircraft,
jet fuel in the tanks at the time of impact and physical damage
to the area surrounding the point of impact don't lie.
As with the OKC bombing when Brigadier General Ben Partin, U.S.A.F.
(Ret) stepped forward with his expert analysis debunking the governments
truck bomb theory, aerospace engineers, scientists, structural engineers,
environmental engineers and countless other professionals with no
political ax to grind have been coming forward debunking the commercial
jet crashing into the Pentagon story. Should all these concerned
Americans simply be written off as kooks and "right wingers?"
Only if one's blind loyalty is to a political party they want to
protect or because too many people can't handle the truth. It may
shock Bush apologists, but there are actually good, decent Americans
in this country, who when they see something isn't right or doesn't
make sense, they attempt to find out the truth for no other reason
than just that - finding the truth.
Three separate crime scenes
When conducting an investigation into a crime, there are certain
procedures used to begin unraveling what happened. One always has
to ask the question, "Who benefits?" The Bush administration
says Ussamah Bin Laden. Investigative bull dogs like Michael Ruppert
bring forth a compelling case that says hard evidence proves something
different. Follow the money trail.
In the case of 9-11, there are three separate crime scenes: the
Pentagon, the World Trade Center towers and a field outside Shanksville,
Pennsylvania. Let's just look at the Pentagon for this article.
Anyone who has seen the media feed from that day and from 9-11 In
Plane Site will immediately have questions just from a layman's
perspective:
Why is there no debris in front of the building at the point of
impact? Why are there unbroken windows at the point of impact from
an 80-ton aircraft traveling at a minimum of 400 mph? Why are there
books sitting on desks fluttering in the wind at the point of impact
when less than an hour before, an 80-ton aircraft with a full fuel
supply, supposedly plows directly into the offices where those items
are located, yet paper books didn't burn? How is this possible?
Before the employees at the Pentagon gas station and the Sheraton
National Hotel could even rewind their security camera film which
was pointed right at the point of impact at the Pentagon, the FBI
swooped down and confiscated all videos. They have them and they
will not release them. Same as the videos taken by the FBI from
the Virginia Department of Transportation which will also show exactly
what flew into the Pentagon. The FBI has them and they won't release
them. Why not?
There is one way to end all the speculation and put this matter
to rest permanently. Do you remember back on June 12, 1987 when
Ronald Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbechev, tear down that wall!"
in Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin, Germany? I say, Mr. Ashcroft:
Release all the videos of the Pentagon attack! If those videos clearly
show Flight 77 going into the Pentagon, that will end all this speculation
on that crime scene. There is no national security issue here. This
event is now over three years old. There is no reason for Ashcroft
to refuse to release all the videos confiscated that day. Yes, it
would be painful for the families of those who were on Flight 77
- if the videos show Flight 77 plowing into the Pentagon. If the
videos show otherwise, then those families are going to bring down
the roof demanding to know what really happened to Flight 77. If
my loved one had been on Flight 77, I would move heaven and earth
to get those videos released so we can see what really happened
in real time. America deserves the truth and releasing those videos
will give us the truth about what hit the Pentagon.
Web sites on 9-11
There are dozens of them and I have spent conservatively, probably
more than 100 hours painstakingly going through them, link by link,
section by section. Some are so silly or scream such bigotry, it
makes me ill, but others are extremely credible. I'm providing a
few links below for anyone interested in looking at what is causing
so many people to question the official story about 9-11. It will
be up to the reader/viewer of these sites to decide if the photographs
and videos mean nothing or do they raise more questions that need
answers.
1 Research
Link
2 Research
Link
3
Research Link
4
Research Link
5
Research Link
6
Research Link
In closing, I hope Americans who seek the truth and want all this
speculation to end, begin demanding: Mr. Ashcroft - Release all
the videos of the attack on the Pentagon! Let's make this outcry
so loud and persistent that it brings this issue at least to cable
news networks and open a reasonable dialogue. The longer Ashcroft
refuses to release all the confiscated videos of what hit the Pentagon,
the more the American people will become convinced that there is
a conspiracy to cover up the truth and it isn't going to sit well
- especially regarding the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Ashcroft: Release all the videos of the attack on the Pentagon
now! |
As I reported in the summer of 2003, US and
British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11
attacks was a well-known agent of the Pakistani intelligence service
ISI, Mohammed Sheikh Saeed. There was even a brief period in which
it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of
the then ISI Chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad.[1]
The London Guardian reported on October 1, 2001, that US investigators
believe they have found the "smoking gun" linking Osama
bin Laden to the September 11 terrorist attacks, ... The
man at the centre of the financial web is believed to be Sheikh
Saeed, also known as Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, who worked as
a financial manager for Bin Laden when the Saudi exile was based
in Sudan, and is still a trusted paymaster in Bin Laden's al-Qaida
organisation.[2]
This story was corroborated by CNN on October 6, citing a "a
senior-level U.S. government source" who noted that "Sheik
Syed" had been liberated from an Indian prison as a result
of an airplane hijacking in December 1999.
The man liberated in this way was Mohammed Omar Saeed Sheikh,
a notorious kidnapper raised in England, and widely
reported as a probable agent of ISI, the Pakistani military intelligence
service.[3] One newspaper, the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review, suggested he may even have been a double agent,
recruited inside al-Qaeda and ISI by the CIA.[4]
Subsequent newspaper stories reported on the undisputed relationship
of Saeed to ISI, to FBI claims that he wired $100,000 to Atta's
bank account,[5] to a CNN report that these funds came from Pakistan,[6]
and the uncontested statement that "Mustafa Ahmed," having
concluded his 9/11 financial business in Dubai, flew on September
11 to Pakistan.[7]
These alarming charges are ignored in the
Report. The Appendices note, in a list of names, a "Sheikh
Saeed al Masri" as an "Egyptian; head of al Qaeda finance
committee."[8] But the only reference to any Sheikh Saeed in
the text says that Sheikh Saeed al Masri "argued that al Qaeda
should defer to the Taliban's wishes" and not attack the United
States directly.[9]
Instead, following a previous reversal
in the US media, the financial role attributed earlier to Sheikh
Saeed is now given to "Mustafa al Hawsawi," the name (or
pseudonym) used for the financial transactions. The
Report treats Shaikh Saeed and al-Hawsawi as two people, whereas
earlier they had been identified as the same.[10]
(Update, 10/11/04) The arrest of al-Hawsawi was reported in March
2003 in Rawalpindi, along with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. However as
I wrote in Critical Asia Studies, the official report contained
so many problems and convictions that a Guardian reporter commented,
"The story appears to be almost entirely
fictional" (Guardian, 3/6/03) Problems with the story
were summarized by Paul Thompson at http://www.911review.org/Wget/
www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essayksmcapture.html
In an even more bizarre development, http://www.terrorismcentral.com/Newsletters/2003/033003.html
, reported in its Newsletter of 3/30/03 that "Mustafa al-Hisawai
is on bail in Pakistan and will face charges with financing of al
Qaida. He was arrested with al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."
Al-Hawsawi alias al-Hisawai is supposedly an Arab born in Jeddah,
not a Pakistani. It is hard to imagine why
the man once considered the "smoking gun" in the al Qaeda/
9/11 case would be granted bail, when even minor foot-soldiers in
al Qaeda have been whisked immediately to Guantanamo.
The alleged financing story is still unfolding, or unraveling.
[1] Peter Dale Scott, "The CIA's Secret
Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America's Most Dangerous Enemy."
Critical Asian Studies, 35:2 (2003), 233-258.
[2] Cf. Griffin, 109-10. The investigators were later identified
as the FBI (Wall Street Journal, 10/10/01, CNN, 10/28/01, Times
[London], 11/16/01).
[3] E.g. Newsweek, 3/13/02: US officials suspect "that Sheikh
has been a 'protected asset,' of Pakistan's shadowy spy service,
the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI." The story was enhanced
by Indian intelligence sources with a more sensational claim: that
Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General
Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence
(ISI) at the time (Wall Street Journal, 10/10/01). Indian sources
later downplayed this anti-Pakistani allegation by suggesting that
the money came instead from a ransom paid through a 'hawala' channel
to another terrorist, Aftab Ansari in Dubai, when the Kolkata businessman
was kidnapped in July 2001 (The Hindu, 2/13/02).
[4] Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 3/3/02: "There are many in Musharraf's
government who believe that Saeed Sheikh's power comes not from
the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA. The theory is
that with such intense pressure to locate bin Laden, Saeed Sheikh
was bought and paid for." The twisted story of Saeed Sheikh
in the US press has been documented by Paul Thompson in his excellent
time-line of 9/11 events: http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay.jsp?article=saeedsheikh.
[5] London Sunday Times, 4/21.02; London Daily Telegraph, 7/16/02.
[6] CNN, 10/1/01: "As much as $100,000 was wired in the past
year from Pakistan to Mohamed Atta." Subsequent developments
lent weight to the Pakistani connection, such as the arrest of Atta's
alleged controls, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in
Pakistan.
[7] Newsday, 10/3/01: "Mustafa Ahmad... left the emirates for
Pakistan on the day of the attacks." Cf. New York Times, 10/15/01:
"A man thought to be one of the financial chiefs for Mr. bin
Laden, Shaykh Said... flew to Karachi, Pakistan."
[8] Report, 436.
[9] Report, 251.
[10] Cf. e.g. MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/modules/wtc/wtc_globaldragnet/sought_uae.htm
: "Mustafa Ahmed al-Hasawi [sic] was named as a "supporting
conspirator" in an Dec. 11 indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui,
a French citizen of Moroccan descent who U.S. authorities say was
"an active participant" in the Sept. 11 plot. The indictment
alleged that al-Hasawi, a Saudi native, received more than $18,000
from three suspected hijackers in the days before the attack, then
cleared out bank accounts he had control over in the United Arab
Emirates and fled the country on Sept. 11. U.S. investigators suspect
that al-Hasawi, whom the FBI originally identified as Mustafa Ahmed,
was actually Shayk Saiid, a key figure in the financial side of
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network. In documents sent to
banks seeking to freeze terrorist assets, the government uses the
names Ahmed and Saiid interchangeably." |
It is happening on a daily basis; as if the
Israelis have a hunting season. It is so easy to imagine that the
commanders are telling the soldiers not to come back without killing
a substantial number of Palestinians, and not to hesitate in assassinating
children in their schools and not to think twice about the "purity
of arms" because they have been desecrated since the establishment
of the Jewish State and not to be held back by any "morality"
because the essence of that army was terrorist militias that operated
before the Middle East knew terrorism in its current form.
The ruling gang in Israel, the army and the government, consider
that itself and the Americans to be in the same position and that
the battle against terrorism is one and the same in Gaza and Fallujah.
The Americans are not hesitant to provide that gang with support,
from the veto in the Security Council, which means nothing more
than encouraging Israel to continue the killings, the destruction
and detainment, to the televised presidential debates when the contrast
between the candidates vanishes as soon as they start talking about
the "fields of killings" where the Israelis flourish;
all of them, Bush and Kerry, Cheney and Edwards, are with the killers
against the victims.
We must see a distinction in Iraq even if it is still ambiguous
and in the experimental stage. The occupation army has set up a
government and wants it to rule the country, at least to lift some
of the burdens off its shoulders. The occupation army also wants
to see elections and a parliament even with some intervention on
its part in the benefit of its supporters. It also wants to see
an army and a police that would take responsibility for the security
even if it led them to violate privacy and the Iraqi values, which
are not those of the Baath or of Saddam. On the other hand, Sharon's
gang is only satisfied with brutality and is only convinced if it
was in power and does not see any necessity for elections in addition
to not dealing with the Palestinian authority except as a hanger,
on which the hat of "terrorism" could be hung.
What is happening today in Palestine is expected because the United
States chose to unshackle the hands of Sharon's gang and did not
listen to European and Arab calls to control the situation until
the American elections are over. Yet, Israel, since the beginning
of Bush's (first) term, hijacked the American sense of initiation;
furthermore, it confined American policy in a tiny square that it
turns as it pleases. One time it calls it "Arafat's failure"
another time it presents it as a "necessity for reform"
and it always places it in the context of the "war on terrorism".
In this way, the Americans relieved themselves from any responsibility
and conceive the only solution to be whatever Sharon and his gang
sees fit, which is killing, killing and killing until the senior
advisor of Sharon uttered the truth, which is that the real goal
is to kill the "peace process" first and foremost.
Not one wise man in Washington thought that Israel's inclusion
in the war on terrorism is harming that war. For it took away any
morality from it and changed the course of its goals until capturing
Osama bin Laden dead or alive became a synonym to getting rid of
Arafat dead or alive. More importantly, the issue of "reform,"
which emerged from the debris of the war on terrorism was born with
the condition of American indifference towards the crimes that the
Israelis are committing in Palestine, perhaps true democracy requires
them to applaud and bless them.
Finally, after the bombings in Taba, Israel tried to drag Egypt
into "its war on terrorism" despite the fact that the
bombings offered an opportunity to notice the difference between
terrorism and "terrorism". Consequently, the importance
of distinguishing between resistance to an occupation and terrorism,
which targets tourists in hotels, should be noted. However, Sharon's
gang deals with the terrorist attacks as a tool it could take advantage
of in promoting its brutality against the people under occupation.
It is for this reason that there is always doubt, even when most
of the victims are Israelis, for no one believes it to be a victim
as long as it rushes to sell the corpses of its victims in the auction
market of the American elections. |
BEIRUT: Four Arabs have been detained in
Syria over a plot by Israel's Mossad spy agency to assassinate Khaled
Meshaal, the Damascus-based politburo chief of Hamas, a Hamas official
said Tuesday.
"We have been recently informed that four Arab members of
an Arab security service from a country neighboring Syria, and who
are collaborating with the Mossad, have been detained in Syria over
the plot," said Ali Barakeh, head of Hamas' political relations
affairs in Lebanon. "They include a woman."
Barakeh said he did not wish to name the third country, but said
"they belong to the same country that has presented information
to Israel about Hamas officials. It is very regretful that an Arab
country is helping Israel instead of backing the Palestinians,"
he said.
A Hamas militant was killed Sept. 26 when his car blew up in Damascus
in what Syria and the hard-line Palestinian movement said was an
assassination by Mossad.
Syria's official media said the killing was carried out by Israel
with the collaboration of "Arab security services." Officials
in Jerusalem have privately confirmed to the Israeli media that
the Jewish state was behind the car bombing.Israel has repeatedly
threatened to strike Hamas militants at home and abroad, including
Damascus, where a number of the movement's senior officials are
based.
Israel says Hamas's strategic planning is now being almost totally
conducted in Damascus, although a handful of autonomous cells still
exist in the West Bank and Gaza.
Khaled Meshaal has emerged as overall Hamas leader after Israel
assassinated two other top figures earlier this year.
On Sept. 25, 1997, Mossad agents bungled an attempt to assassinate
Meshaal on a street in Amman by injecting him with poison.
Jordanian authorities deported Meshaal and four other Hamas leaders
five years ago amid allegations of illegal activities.
Meshaal now divides his time among Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf
countries, but he has rarely been seen in Damascus since the Hamas
offices were closed amid U.S. pressure.
Meshaal turned up in Cairo last month. |
VIENNA — Missing nuclear-related equipment
in Iraq was removed by experts working systematically over an extended
period, diplomats said Thursday.
Their comments contradicted assertions from Baghdad that high-precision
equipment removed from Iraq's nuclear facilities was stolen haphazardly
immediately after the U.S. invasion last year.
The diplomats, who are familiar with the work of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, suggested that it was concerned that the equipment
could be sold to so-called rogue governments or terrorist groups
interested in making nuclear weapons.
In a letter Monday to the U.N. Security Council, IAEA chief Mohamed
ElBaradei said satellite photos and follow-up investigations showed
"widespread and apparently systematic
dismantlement" at sites once related to Iraq's nuclear
program.
Iraq's interim science and technology minister, Rashad Mandan
Omar, said Tuesday that the missing equipment — which the
IAEA says includes milling machines and electron beam welders —
was taken in the looting spree that followed the U.S. invasion.
The sites were quickly secured by coalition forces before they were
turned over to Iraqi authorities in June, he said.
But one of the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
said, "Our assumption is that this had
to have been an organized effort by professionals who had to have
had heavy lifting equipment and big trucks." He said
the operation to take the equipment and materials probably began
after May 2003 and ended sometime this year.
Although some industrial material that Iraq sent overseas has
been located, ElBaradei said in his letter that no
high-precision items, which can be used both commercially and for
nuclear weapons, have been found. |
BAGHDAD - A few Iraqis have spotted them speeding
towards death before they disintegrate in a bloody fireball, but
little is known of Iraq's suicide bombers
except that the supply seems endless.
Suicide bombers are the biggest security nightmare in Iraq, terrorising
the streets up to three times a week with huge blasts that have
killed more than 1,000 people.
In the first such attack inside the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad,
two Jordanians carrying bags on Thursday calmly ordered tea at a
cafe minutes before explosions there and at a nearby bazaar killed
at least five people, a waiter said after surviving one of the blasts.
'Two people came in. They had two handbags,' said Mr Abdul Razak
Mohammed, a waiter at the so-called Green Zone Cafe, one of two
places frequented by foreigners and targeted in the attacks.
Mr Mohammed said one man ordered tea. When
he was asked by another cafe employee if they were Iraqis, the man
answered: 'No, we are Jordanians.'
He described the men as being in their mid-20s. He
said that five minutes after one of
the men got up and left, an explosion
took place at the bazaar.
The US military said the cafe bomb went off five minutes after
the blast at the bazaar.
But Iraq's interim government, struggling to stabilise the country
before elections planned for January, still
has few clues as to who such suicide bombers actually are.
'Either they are foreigners so you don't hear anything about them
or they are Iraqis and their families just keep quiet out of fear
of being arrested,' said Mr Ghassan Al-Attiyah, executive director
of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy.
Whether they are foreign militants inspired by Osama bin Laden's
Al-Qaeda or Iraqis swept up in anti-US fury after the occupation,
suicide bombers show no sign of letting up.
Their gory ritual is simple, and impossible to prevent.
They just pack any car or truck with explosives, drive towards
a building or a crowd and blow up the vehicle, scattering flesh
in every direction.
A few strapped explosives to their bodies.
Iraq's US-backed interim government has blamed mostly foreign fighters
for suicide missions. But the authorities
have never delivered on promises to televise the scores of foreign
fighters they say have been captured.
Before the Green Zone Cafe bombing, the only hard evidence has
come from a video distributed by followers of Jordanian militant
Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
Militants from countries including Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Jordan
and Syria were filmed making pronouncements in the video just before
their suicide bombing of 'infidels'.
Traumatised Iraqis often express disbelief
that their countrymen would do such a thing. They always
say the bomber must be an outsider, probably someone inspired by
Saudi Arabia's hardline Wahhabi sect of Islam.
It is a murky picture in Iraq, unlike in Palestinian areas where
suicide bombers are hailed as 'martyrs' by their families.
Suicide bombings were unknown under toppled Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein. The suicide carnage began 14 months ago and now all Iraqis
know the bombers can strike any time. |
A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops
from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under
arrest for refusing a "suicide mission" to deliver fuel,
the troops' relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday
to go to Taji, Iraq — north of Baghdad — because their
vehicles were considered "deadlined" or extremely
unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.
Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County Detention Center, and
the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock
Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks
into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked
phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday.
The platoon could be charged with the willful
disobeying of orders, punishable by dishonorable discharge, forfeiture
of pay and up to five years confinement, said military law
expert Mark Stevens, an associate professor of justice studies at
Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C.
No military officials were able to confirm or deny the detainment
of the platoon Thursday.
But today, Sgt. Salju Thomas of the Combined Press Information
Center in Baghdad issued a statement saying that an investigation
has begun.
"The Commander General of the 13 Corps Support Group has
appointed a deputy commander to lead an investigation into allegations
that members of the 343 Quartermaster Company refused to participate
in theri assigned convoy mission on Oct. 13," Thomas' statement
said.
The investigation team is currently in Tallil taking statements
and interviewing those involved, Thomas said in the statement.
U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson said he plans to submit a congressional
inquiry today on behalf of the Mississippi soldiers to launch an
investigation into whether they are being treated improperly.
"I would not want any member of the military to be put in
a dangerous situation ill-equipped," said Thompson, who was
contacted by families. "I have had similar
complaints from military families about vehicles that weren't armor-plated,
or bullet-proof vests that are outdated. It concerns me because
we made over $150 billion in funds available to equip our forces
in Iraq.
"President Bush takes the position
that the troops are well-armed, but if this situation is true, it
calls into question how honest he has been with the country,"
Thompson said.
The 343rd is a supply unit whose general mission is to deliver
fuel and water. The unit includes three women and 14 men and those
with ranking up to sergeant first class.
"I got a call from an officer in another unit early (Thursday)
morning who told me that my husband and his
platoon had been arrested on a bogus charge because they refused
to go on a suicide mission," said Jackie Butler of Jackson,
wife of Sgt. Michael Butler, a 24-year reservist. "When
my husband refuses to follow an order, it has to be something major."
The platoon being held has troops from Alabama, Kentucky, North
Carolina, Mississippi and South Carolina, said Teresa Hill of Dothan,
Ala., whose daughter Amber McClenny is among those being detained.
McClenny, 21, pleaded for help in a message left on her mother's
answering machine early Thursday morning.
"They are holding us against our will,"
McClenny said. "We are now prisoners."
McClenny told her mother her unit tried to deliver fuel to another
base in Iraq Wednesday, but was sent back because the fuel had been
contaminated with water. The platoon returned to its base, where
it was told to take the fuel to another base, McClenny told her
mother.
The platoon is normally escorted by armed Humvees and helicopters,
but did not have that support Wednesday, McClenny told her mother.
The convoy trucks the platoon was driving had experienced problems
in the past and were not being properly maintained, Hill said her
daughter told her.
The situation mirrors other tales of troops being sent on missions
without proper equipment.
Aviation regiments have complained of being
forced to fly dangerous missions over Iraq with outdated night-vision
goggles and old missile-avoidance systems. Stories of troops'
families purchasing body armor because the military didn't provide
them with adequate equipment have been included in recent presidential
debates.
Patricia McCook said her husband, a staff sergeant, understands
well the severity of disobeying orders. But he did not feel comfortable
taking his soldiers on another trip.
"He told me that three of the vehicles they were to use were
deadlines ... not safe to go in a hotbed like that," Patricia
McCook said.
Hill said the trucks her daughter's unit was driving could not
top 40 mph.
"They knew there was a 99 percent
chance they were going to get ambushed or fired at,"
Hill said her daughter told her. "They would have had no way
to fight back."
Kathy Harris of Vicksburg is the mother of Aaron Gordon, 20, who
is among those being detained. Her primary concern is that she has
been told the soldiers have not been provided access to a judge
advocate general.
Stevens said if the soldiers are being confined, law requires
them to have a hearing before a magistrate within seven days.
Harris said conditions for the platoon have been difficult of
late. Her son e-mailed her earlier this week to ask what the penalty
would be if he became physical with a commanding officer, she said.
But Nadine Stratford of Rock Hill, S.C., said her godson Colin
Durham, 20, has been happy with his time in Iraq. She has not heard
from him since the platoon was detained.
"When I talked to him about a month ago, he was fine,"
Stratford said. "He said it was like being at home." |
JACKSONVILLE, Ore. - Police in riot gear fired
pepperballs Thursday night to disperse a crowd of protesters assembled
in this historic gold mining town where President Bush was spending
the night after a campaign appearance.
Witnesses said Bush supporters were on one side of California
Street chanting "Four more years," and supporters of Democratic
presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry were on the other chanting
"Three more weeks." Police began moving the crowd away
from the Jacksonville Inn, where the president was to arrive for
dinner and to spend the night following a speech.
"We were here to protest Bush and show our support for Kerry,"
said Cerridewen Bunten, 24, a college student and retail clerk.
"Nobody was being violent. We were out
of the streets so cars could go by. We were being loud, but I never
knew that was against the law."
Bunten said she was pushed by police as she held her 6-year-old
daughter.
Jeff Treadwell, 37, an auto mechanic from Medford who joined the
protesters, estimated about 500 people were assembled, counting
both Bush and Kerry supporters.
Jacksonville City Administrator Paul Wyntergreen said the protest
was peaceful until a few people started pushing police. Police
reacted by firing pepperballs, which he described as projectiles
like a paintball filled with cayenne pepper. Two people were
arrested for failing to disperse. There were no reports of injuries.
Protester Richard Swaney, 65, of Central Point, said he was walking
with the crowd away from the inn when he
was hit in the back with three separate bursts, one of which knocked
him down. |
Large parts of Sydney were left without power
for a night after a substation overheated in an unseasonal heatwave,
the electricity supply firm said.
Power was restored early Thursday to the roughly 22,000 homes
and businesses affected, Energy Australia spokeswoman Sandy Olsen
said.
The blackout began late Wednesday on a searingly hot day when
temperatures reached 38.2 degrees Celsius. Company officials said
they did not believe the substation failure was directly related
to the heat, although it came hours after a fire at an underground
transformer of a separate substation in Sydney.
Olsen said power was restored around 4:30 a.m. (1830 GMT Wednesday).
The unusually hot weather in the southern spring has also raised
fears of a new wave of bushfires. Dozens of fires have broken out
across Australia's densely populated eastern states in the last
few days and a fire ban has been imposed in the northeastern state
of Queensland. |
A minor earthquake and two aftershocks rattled
Littleton and shook houses as far away as Maynard and Harvard Thursday
night last week, scientists reported. At 10:23 p.m., the small tremor
struck 2.2 miles southeast of Littleton Common and registered 1.8
on the Richter scale, according to Boston College's Weston Observatory.
Two aftershocks were recorded shortly afterward: one at approximately
11:21 p.m., and the second at 8:38 a.m. on Friday.
The quake, which could also be felt in Acton, Bolton, Boxborough,
Harvard, Maynard and Stow triggered a flurry of phone calls to the
police dispatch centers from residents reporting that they had heard
a loud explosion. Some complained that their houses were shaking.
The United States Geological Survey recorded 86 reports from residents
and measured the quake a three on an intensity scale where 10 is
the highest. No damage or injuries were reported, according to John
Ebel, the director of the Weston Observatory and a BC professor
of geophysics.
"It's just basically a small bump with a shake that lasts
two, three, four or five seconds at the very most," Ebel said.
"People close to the epicenter would probably hear a boom and
may have even mistaken it for a sonic boom or an explosion going
on underground."
New England averages about a half-dozen small tremors a year, and
the area around Harvard and Bolton has experienced similar rumbles
in the past. In June of 2000, a small quake measuring 1.4 on the
Richter scale rumbled through Littleton, and in October of 1999,
a 2.6 tremor struck Boxborough.
And Massachusetts has seen its share of damaging earthquakes, as
well. In 1755, a powerful quake registering 6.0 on the Richter scale
shook Boston and destroyed chimneys.
Thursday's tremors paled in comparison to the larger ones experienced
on the West Coast. The earthquake that devastated San Francisco
in 1906 registered 7.8, while the 1994 quake in Northridge, Calif.
measured 6.7. |
Fifteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake
stunned the Bay Area, a rocky economy and the drive to prevent terrorist
attacks are hurting our ability to get ready for the Big One.
Federal funding to reduce the damage from future quakes is roughly
half of what it was a few years ago. The state Seismic Safety Commission,
which offers independent, expert advice, is marked for elimination
as part of a massive restructuring of state government.
As people grow complacent -- and perhaps less able or willing to
pay -- the proportion of California homes insured against earthquake
damage has fallen by half, from 30 percent to 15 percent.
"All around we're in worse shape. We have lots more people living
here, lots more people at risk. And we have all these things that
are undone, or halfway done, or just beginning to be done,'' said
Susan Tubbesing, executive director of the Earthquake Engineering
Research Institute in Oakland. "That's not to say we haven't learned
a great deal. But some of the things we learned underscore that
the risk is greater than we thought it was.''
The potential damage from a major Bay Area quake is staggering.
The Association of Bay Area Governments estimates that 155,000 families
would be left homeless and more than 1,700 roads would close. Other
projections say hundreds would die, with thousands of seriously
injured people swamping hospitals that may also have severe damage.
Economic losses could rival the $150 billion seen in the 1995 Kobe
quake in Japan.
The Oct. 17, 1989, Loma Prieta quake, a magnitude 6.9 that struck
far from urban centers in the Santa Cruz Mountains, killed 63 people
and did $6 billion in damage. Yet some of the wreckage still isn't
fixed: Work continues on the Central Freeway in San Francisco, and
dozens of broken buildings in the city's South of Market district
were never mended.
Potential dangers
Not only has the Bay Bridge retrofit been held up by political
squabbling and unexpectedly high costs, but it turns out that BART's
Transbay Tube needs a retrofit, too. Measures on the November ballot
in San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa counties would raise
nearly $1 billion for the work.
And while about two-thirds of the state's 25,500 unreinforced
masonry buildings have been adequately strengthened, little has
been done to address other known killers. They include multi-story
apartments with parking on the ground floor -- the same type of
"soft story'' buildings that collapsed and killed 16 people in
the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California.
A survey last year showed that more than one out of 10 apartment
units in Santa Clara County, occupied by nearly 83,000 people, fall
into this category.
While San Jose has a program to help apartment owners reinforce
their buildings by providing some basic designs and cost estimates,
it is voluntary and almost no one has taken advantage of it.
"There's just tons of these left all over California that haven't
been strengthened. That's probably going to be a big mess,'' Tubbesing
said.
Schools are still vulnerable despite the protection of the Field
Act, which requires that they be built to higher standards than
other structures. A 2002 survey by the state architect's office
found that 7,500 school buildings -- 14 percent of the total --
are of a potentially hazardous type of construction, and should
be inspected by engineers to see if they need strengthening.
Water supply risks
In 2002, San Francisco voters approved $1.6 billion in bonds to
help repair and retrofit the aging Hetch Hetchy system, which supplies
water to much of the Bay Area. But the repairs will take 13 years.
And the old, fragile levees of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
are vulnerable to damage in a major earthquake. Their failure would
jeopardize the water supply to two-thirds of the state.
"The reality is, the vast majority of single-family homes are
going to come through an earthquake in a habitable state, but we
may be without water for a considerable period of time,'' said John
D. Osteraas, principal engineer for Exponent Failure Analysis Associates
in Menlo Park.
Funding for the state's network of seismometers is barely enough
to maintain it, not enough to expand. Many of these machines are
old and cannot communicate with researchers immediately via radio
or satellite links. That means they can't be used to generate instant
maps of shaking that are used to guide emergency crews to the hardest-hit
areas.
The recent San Simeon and Parkfield quakes exposed gaps in the
coverage of the more modern and useful seismic instruments. There
are not nearly enough of them in central California, San Diego and
Santa Barbara, among other places, and it would take about four
times as many to blanket the state completely.
There are bright spots, however. And we have Loma Prieta to thank
for some of the advances that made us better prepared.
The quake helped spur formation of a national network of urban
search-and-rescue teams, each of which can send 70 people to the
scene of a natural disaster or terrorist attack to pull people out
of buildings. Thanks to a recent influx of homeland security money,
those teams are in better shape than ever, with more funds for equipment
and training, said Harold Schapelhouman, a division chief for the
Menlo Park Fire Protection District and leader of one of two Bay
Area teams. Three more teams were added, bringing the total to 28
nationwide.
State and county disaster officials now have a quake-hardened
system for communicating with each other via satellite, no matter
how bad the damage.
"We couldn't do that in 1989,'' said Richard Eisner, regional
manager for the state Office of Emergency Services. "So these events
tend to push us forward.''
Each major quake in California has led to significant improvements
in building codes and infrastructure, Eisner said. The 1971 San
Fernando quake, which collapsed a modern hospital, led to tougher
standards for hospitals and freeways.
And Loma Prieta, in which 42 people died in the collapse of an
Oakland freeway viaduct, led to a massive statewide effort to reinforce
freeways.
'Better prepared now'
In general, "I would say we are much better prepared now than
we were 20 years ago. There is no doubt about that,'' said Guna
Selvaduray, executive director of the Collaborative for Disaster
Mitigation at San Jose State University.
"What I'm constantly trying to do is to let people know we don't
have to take a completely fatalistic attitude. We can do a lot to
reduce our risk,'' Selvaduray said. "People are always talking
about where the casualties come from. They never talk about where
they could have come from but didn't''-- because someone took steps
to reduce the danger beforehand.
Bay Area counties and cities are putting together a regional plan
to head off damage from all sorts of disasters, from wildfires to
flooding and earthquakes.
As part of that effort, they will be updating the inventory of
the region's dangerous structures, from older brick buildings to
commercial buildings with prefabricated concrete walls that are
tilted into place, and developing lists of what needs to be done.
A new Web site gives people access to more hazard maps than ever
before, including a new set that shows areas vulnerable to wildfires,
said Jeanne Perkins, earthquake and hazards programs manager for
ABAG. And the plan spells out how much land in each city and county
is exposed to natural hazards. It shows, for instance, that 78 percent
of the urban land in Santa Clara County is subject to strong shaking
from earthquakes.
"As we know from Loma Prieta, earthquakes know no boundaries,''
said Frances Edwards, director of emergency preparedness for the
city of San Jose. "The more we can know about our communities ahead
of time and know the limitations our neighbors may be facing, the
better we can prepare. We're hoping some of this information will
get people thinking: What does this mean for my life?'' |
CHICAGO (AP) — A fish known for its voracious
appetite and ability to wreak havoc on freshwater ecosystems has
been found in Chicago's Burnham Harbor, alarming state biologists.
An angler caught the 45-centimetre fish last weekend and thought
it looked peculiar, so he posted a picture of it on the Internet.
Scientists recognized it as a northern snakehead, a native of China,
Korea and Russia.
Officials said Thursday they would scan the harbour near Lake
Michigan with electronic equipment to verify whether other northern
snakeheads are present. If so, they are concerned the fish could
multiply and gobble up native fish.
"I'm hoping this is just a random fish dumped out of an aquarium
by somebody who didn't know what to do with it," said Tom Trudeau,
head of the Lake Michigan fisheries program at the state Department
of Natural Resources. "The fear is seeing their young in the
lake. If that happens, we're in trouble."
The northern snakehead can grow to a metre in length and has large
teeth and a voracious appetite for other fish. It is usually imported
for food or aquariums.
Scientists call it a "frankenfish"
for its ability to survive in oxygen-depleted water, move over land
from one pond to another, and devour other fish.
Chicago imposed a ban on northern snakeheads two years ago after
an angler discovered one in Maryland. The fish have also been spotted
in Philadelphia and Wisconsin. |
MONTREAL - A job hunter who hoped his resumé
would land him an interview was instead taken in for questioning
by Montreal's bomb squad.
The 24-year-old man was arrested and charged with public mischief
after he submitted his resumé in a ticking package left in
a marketing firm's washroom last month, the Montreal Gazette reported.
It was his way of drawing attention to his application, one among
400 sent in by applicants competing for six paid internships at
Cossette Communication Group.
On Sept. 15, police said, he handed the receptionist an Arabic
newspaper and a note alerting her to the ticking parcel in the men's
washroom.
Police evacuated the company's downtown offices and the neighbouring
Ritz-Carlton Hotel.
The package contained a metronome – a device musicians use
to help them maintain rhythm and tempo – along with the man's
resume.
Internship manager Ghislaine Fallu said candidates were encouraged
to be creative, not criminal.
"In the application we say, 'Send us your CV, include a letter
of intent and explain your motives to us in an original manner,'"
Fallu said. "But we don't usually expect crazy things like
what happened this year." |
OTTAWA - The federal government
passed legislation Friday that will authorize judges to order people
convicted of child pornography to submit DNA samples.
"This legislation would make it possible for more DNA samples
to be collected from more convicted offenders," said Minister
of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Irwin Cotler.
The current national DNA databank holds samples from people who
have been convicted of serious crimes.
If the legislation becomes law, DNA from people convicted of 28
other Criminal Code offences will also be included in the databank.
The list would include Internet luring; child pornography; sexual
exploitation of a person with a disability; and offences related
to prostitution involving persons under 18.
Judges would also be able to ask for DNA samples from people convicted
of criminal harassment; offences related to organized crime; uttering
death threats; and intimidation.
|
CORNWALL -- A magnitude 2.7 earthquake
in the Hudson Highlands was felt as far away as Beacon early Thursday
morning.
The epicenter of the earthquake was nearly four miles southwest
of Cornwall. Reports of minor shaking also came from Cold Spring
and Highland Mills, the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake
Information Center said. {...]
This region is riddled with faults from hundreds of millions of
years of geologic activity, so it's hard to pinpoint which fault
caused this earthquake, Kim said.
Because the eastern United States lies at the center of a vast
tectonic plate stretching from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean
to North America's West Coast, earthquakes here are much less severe
than those in California, where two plates collide.
Thursday's earthquake was little noticed or talked about at the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point, said Maj. Kent Cassella, spokesman
for the academy. The academy is about three miles from the earthquake's
epicenter. |
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