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Wednesday, May 2, 2007 |
Robert Scheer: After Thousands Have Died, Tenet Comes Clean. The three short sentences at the beginning of Chapter 17 of former CIA Director George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," tell it all: "The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face that was put on it."
Consider the deep cynicism of that statement, playing as it does on the gravest threat to humanity's survival--an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration--to exploit the fears of a nation raw from the 9/11 attacks. The "mushroom cloud" over Manhattan that now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney warned against was nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick to justify an agenda of imperial intervention in the Middle East that long preceded the 9/11 attacks. The goal was to bamboozle Americans into supporting the restructuring of the politics of the Mideast to accord with the fantasies of a small band of neoconservative rogues who had insinuated themselves into the highest levels of the U.S. government.
That they were rogues was known to the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man rewarded by President Bush with the Medal of Freedom precisely because he provided respectable cover for the chicanery that drove the Iraq debacle. Pity that it took a $4-million book contract for Tenet to come clean.
While Tenet remained silent, he observed the neocon coup d'état up close. His most devastating revelations center on the antics of that neocon cabal in the Pentagon and its hit squad, dubbed "Team Feith" for Douglas Feith, a protégé of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and, through him, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Team Feith's main task was to create and maintain the fiction of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden when no solid evidence supported that assertion. The intelligence unit Feith headed set about discrediting the conclusions of every other intelligence operation while cherry-picking evidence to support the invasion of Iraq as a logical response to 9/11. Tenet's high crime--and it is just that--was that he knew of this treachery from the start, yet never exposed it to Congress or the public.
Take Tenet's description of the briefing, provided by Feith's office throughout the higher reaches of government, entitled "Iraq and al-Qaa'ida--Making the Case." As Tenet notes, Feith's briefer, Tina Shelton, "started out by saying that there should be 'no more debate' on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. 'It is an open-and-shut case,' she said. 'No further analysis is required.' This statement instantly got my attention. I knew we had trouble on our hands."
Shelton ran through a series of fraudulent claims, including one that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, which the CIA had previously investigated but found to be fraudulent. Tenet then adds: "I listened for a few more minutes trying to be polite, before saying, 'that's very interesting.' This was one of my rare moments of trying to be subtle. What I was really thinking was, this is complete crap, and I want this to end right now."
But he didn't say it. And the "complete crap" of Team Feith carried the day with the Bush administration, from Bush on down, not because they had facts or logic on their side, but because their intellectual bullying served the political agenda of the Karl Rove juggernaut. The bullying was effective only because Congress and the media were traumatized by 9/11 and because those who knew better, most prominently Tenet, failed to speak out. In the end, Tenet betrayed the bedrock freedom of representative democracy--the right of the people to be informed--and failed, when it mattered most, his sworn duty to honestly inform the government about issues of vital importance to its security.
Tenet, knowing the administration was willfully leading our nation into a horrific war in Iraq that would detract from the real fight against terrorism, had an obligation to resign and go public with his knowledge when the war could have been prevented. Tenet knew that the Bush administration had sold the public a package of lies, but he waited to reveal that truth until he could turn a hefty book profit.
Will Tenet share the book's royalties with the grieving families of the dead and wounded from this war that he concedes he could never honestly justify? Or with the U.S. taxpayers, who are stuck with the trillion-dollar bill for the never-ending occupation and reconstruction of Iraq? After one of his talk show appearances, will he be arrested for complicity in war crimes?
Originally posted at TruthDig.com
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10:51:14 AM 
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Katie Halper: Grandma Bea Gets Everything Right. The following is a true story, which happened last year.
When my grandma called my mom to tell her she was feeling dizzy and faint, we rushed out the door and hailed a cab to pick up Grandma Bea and take her to the hospital. The second she entered the cab, my mom struck her typical autophobic pose, her body twisted, her head facing backwards, her left hand clutching the door handle to her right. She occasionally looked forward, before wincing in fear and resuming her default passenger pose. Compared to the hysterics that possessed her when my father would, while driving, clap his hands to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or pick up a journal article, this was calm. Alert to the machismo that affected most men and most cab drivers, my mom had developed a technique to implore caution without emasculating speeding drivers or directly challenging automobile-related chauvinism: "Sir, can I ask you to slow down a bit?" she would ask. "I have a broken back." The cab was gaining speed, and I waited for her words.
But tonight was different.
Half way down my grandmother's block, my mother started shouting, "Look out, you're gonna hit that garbage bag." And sure enough, a full and shiny garbage bag was heaped in the middle of the street. My mom and I got out of the cab to move the bag to the curb so we could move on to Grandma Bea's. All of a sudden, in a Gabriel Garcia Marques moment, the garbage bag started to move. As we approached the mysterious receptacle, it started to speak! It said, "Where were you? I was waiting for you?" It was a familiar voice with a strong Bronx accent. And then we made out a familiar face. The garbage bag was Grandma Bea, of course.
Impatient and hyperactive, she had ignored my mother's instructions to wait in her apartment, choosing instead to ride the elevator to the lobby and then to stroll down the middle of the street to meet our cab. Dizzy and faint, she must have fallen. In the dark of night, even up close, the shiny puffy jacket covering the collapsed heap that was Grandma Bea bore a striking resemblance to a stuffed Hefty Bag.
In the hospital, my mother and I were nervous. Grandma Bea was 85. For fifty years, she smoked four packs of Camels every day. Did she have cancer or some other systemic disease that had weakened her enough to fall? When she fell, had she banged her head and suffered brain damage? Or had a stroke and brain damage caused her to fall? The doctor, clearly worried too, hit her with a barrage of questions. Her name? The date? Her address? The day of the week? Each question, Grandma Bea answered perfectly. Then the doctor said, "Let's ask her something a little harder." I grabbed my mom's hand, awaiting the tough question that would tell us Grandma Bea was slipping from us.
"Mrs. Eisenberg," the doctor said. "Do you know who the president is?"
"Oh, that's an easy one," my grandma said. "It's Shithead."
We hugged her tight.
She might be a little dizzy, but Grandma Bea got everything right!
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9:50:27 AM
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Philip Slater: The Founding Fathers' Agrarian Prejudice is Causing America's Decline. Our founding fathers hated cities. Many of them were slave-owners and felt that only people who had held this kind of responsibility should be allowed to vote. So they created--through the Electoral College system and the Senate--a semi-democracy that proportionally disenfranchises people who live in highly populated areas.
Cities are places where many different kinds of people encounter each other--where people are exposed to different ways of thinking, to new ideas. Our Founding Fathers didn't like that. To them, an agrarian society, where nothing ever changed, was the ideal society.
So what are the characteristics of agrarian societies, historically, and around the world? First of all, they oppress women. There is a very high correlation between agrarianism and the low status--often slave status--of women. It is only when urbanization and industrialization occur that the position of women improves. We in America are justly horrified by conditions in the sweatshops of Asia where so many of our clothes and shoes are manufactured, yet women in the Third World often view these atrocious working conditions as liberation, compared with slaving for nothing on a farm, bearing a child every year, and being beaten. They earn their own money, and are therefore more independent, have more power, more status, and bear fewer children.
The second characteristic of agrarian societies is that they are highly authoritarian. Husbands dominate wives, landowners dominate peasants, big landowners dominate smaller ones, and political leaders dominate everyone. All relationships tend to be hierarchical.
The third characteristic of agrarian societies is that they are warlike. War as we know it, with standing armies, pitched battles, the taking of land by force, etc. was an invention of the agrarian era. Hunter-gatherers had occasional skirmishes, but land ownership was a meaningless concept to them, and without herds and crops there was no need for armies. As Robert O'Connell observes in his definitive book on war, we were free of war for most of our existence on this planet, and "its onset and continuation were dependent on levels of ecological adaptation that were inherently transitory". Today, when corporations are global, the economy is global, environmental issues are global, and all major problems faced by humans are global, when the nation-state is rapidly becoming obsolete, warfare between armies is increasingly meaningless. Terrorists are not national. They are not armies. They are utterly decentralized international networks of murderers. Europeans, who have lived with terrorism a long time, actually capture and arrest terrorists, through efficient intelligence and police work, while our clueless president--still living in the past--makes war on Iraq, creating a bloody catastrophe in the Middle East while destroying democracy at home.
The United States is the only non-agrarian nation--the only nation outside of the Third World--that regularly makes war on other nations. Except for Russia it could also lay claim today to being the most undemocratic industrialized democracy in the world.
We can certainly blame the Bush administration and the neo-cons for this blind retreat into the past, but a portion of the blame must be assigned to the lack of foresight of our Founding Fathers, who partially disenfranchised the most cosmopolitan and aware voters while giving undue weight to those whose knowledge and experience of the world is most limited. A large number of our elected representatives don't even have passports. They boast about never having left the country, as they make decisions about foreign policy.
While Washington is living in the past, Europe, and parts of Asia, are moving toward the future--coping with global warming, investing in renewable energy, cooperating to catch terrorists. They have viable universal health care systems, they educate their children, they don't hand out assault weapons to every lunatic in the streets. They pay attention to what's going on in the world. They don't write blank checks for Big Brother.
Insularity is not a virtue. In today's world it's both criminal and suicidal.
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9:48:17 AM
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Steve Anderson: Small Gov't=Fewer FDA Inspectors=Tainted Imported Food: Thanks, Republicans.. Small government has been a mantra of the Right forever. The extremely tarnished Grover Norquist (R-Abramoff) famously said:
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Of course it's a complete lie, a convenient hypocrisy. The Right loves big government that hires and enriches friends, especially if your and my taxes pay for it.
As an example, here's a graphic from LA Free Net showing National Debt:
The only time they truly allow small government is when they just cannot profit from it. Thus the shrinkage of regulatory agencies. Like the FDA:
The ease with which an imported ingredient laced with industrial chemicals penetrated the pet food supply paints a "frighteningly easy" road map for would-be terrorists to strike America's food supply, said US Representative Janice D. Schakowsky , Democrat of Illinois . Schakowsky's comments came during sweeping and emotional testimony that linked faulty federal oversight to nationwide recalls of tainted peanut butter , suspect spinach, and lethal pet food .
While FDA inspections have steadily dropped in recent years, the proportion of imported food used in domestic manufacturing has skyrocketed. There is no requirement that the FDA conduct an in-person inspection before a foreign producer begins to ship ingredients to US suppliers seeking bargain-basement prices.
China has its own regulatory nightmares, however:
In China, hundreds of millions of farmers toil on small plots that are difficult to regulate. Poorly educated in agricultural science, Chinese farmers use more fertilizer and pesticides than American farmers do to coax growth from over-cultivated soil.
The result is that "China has one of the world's highest rates of chemical fertilizer use per hectare, and Chinese farmers use many highly toxic pesticides, including some that are banned in the United States," a U.S. Department of Agriculture report published last November stated.
While many of the whole foods exported from China to the United States come from farms under contract with foreign companies that are likely to maintain higher standards than small Chinese farms, "there's always risk that some products in the domestic market end up in the export stream," said Isabelle Meister, a Beijing-based pesticides expert for the environmental group Greenpeace.
Chinese exports to the United States have surged. China's agricultural exports to the United States reached $2.26 billion in 2006, up from $453 million in 1993, according to the USDA.
Globally, Chinese exports of wheat gluten, which is used in many products including cereals and pasta, have more than quadrupled since 2001 and demand currently exceeds supply, said Ren Yongzhen, a sales manager at Henan Lianhua Monosodium Glutamate Co., Ltd., an international trading company in Henan province.
Here's more detail about FDA inspections:
In the past five years, total food imports to the United States have risen by about 50 percent while the number of FDA food import inspectors has fallen by roughly 20 percent, said Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University.
The FDA is able to inspect less than 1 percent of imported foods they are tasked with monitoring, "and even then they're mostly just looking at paperwork," she said in a telephone interview.
At the same time, the agency has to cope with more varied contaminants, including many pesticides banned in the United States, unusual bacteria and falsely labeled products, Doyle said in a telephone interview.
More than 80 percent of the nation's seafood, 45 percent of fresh fruit and 17 percent of fresh vegetables are now imported, Doyle said.
So that's just some of what the 'Small Government' has brought to America. Here's a little more about Norquist, from Wikipedia:
Norquist has struck many people as a combative figure. Even within conservative circles, he has made some enemies, possibly due to what some describe as a combative personality. Writer and TV show host Tucker Carlson, in retaliation for Norquist's criticism of Carlson's father (Tucker's father served as Director of Voice of America in Europe, and then as President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), referred to him as a "mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep ... an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home...[he] is repulsive, granted, but there aren't nearly enough of him to start a purge trial".[14] In his book Blinded by the Right, former conservative David Brock revealed that even fellow right-wingers privately refer to him as "Grosser Nosetwist" and try to avoid being trapped in conversation with him at social gatherings because he never talks about anything other than politics.
Nice. Even a Right-wing poodle like Carlson finds him offensive. Too bad the White House doesn't:
Anti-tax advocate and lobbyist Grover Norquist visited the White House at least 74 times over the last five years, according to Secret Service logs released yesterday that illustrate the access that he and other Bush administration allies enjoyed.
Norquist was one of nine people with links to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff who were listed in the 1,646 pages of documents showing dates and times of appointments registered with the Secret Service.
But later in the same article we find:
Many of Norquist's visits may have been for large events. One visit on June 7, 2001, coincided with Bush's signing a $1.35 trillion tax cut. He was cleared to enter the White House grounds a total of 97 times, according to the administration official. His visits are noted in summary sheets included with the documents at least 74 times.
Popular dude.
So the Right-wing view of 'Small Government" brings us corrupt lobbyists, and tainted food.
Sounds about right.
Here's a place for more Norquist info: http://grovernorquistwatch.blogspot.com/
Update: An annoying commentor pointed out that my title was grammatically incorrect. It's now fixed, but I won't say thanks because your comment was needlessly rude. Engage me on issues, please.
SteveAudio.blogspot.com
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9:45:17 AM
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Chris Kelly: Medved Minute 5/2. In case you were wondering if Michael Medved thinks there's any need to apologize for Mission Accomplished, you can find the answer on his website, under the heading No Need to Apologize for Mission Accomplished.
You might think it looks bad for the President, that he did a victory lap two months into a war that's taken four more years, cost a half trillion dollars and killed thousands. But you're simply missing the point.
Here's why you're wrong:
1) Bush never actually said "Mission Accomplished." What he said was, "Major combat operations" have ended. The banner "originated" with the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln.
See, silly? It's like Bogie never saying "Play it again, Sam." The President never said the mission was over. He said combat was over. And he was so right, too. Since 2003, 130,000 US troops have been just kind of mopping up.
(The banner, by the way, may have "originated" with the crew, but days after the photo-op, Scott McClellan admitted, "We took care of the production of it. We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up.")
(He amended this later. White House staffers also put it up.)
(But aside from painting it and hanging it, it was totally the crew's project. So, as propaganda banners go, it was less like the big long red things in Nuremberg, and more like when dad builds your go-cart.)
(But everyone knows that. Even Michael Medved. Which is why he carefully wrote "originated" instead of "made." He's not lying, he's just giving you the opportunity to not know the truth.)
(Here's how you can tell when Michael Medved is lying: When his moustache moves.)
2) Bush's speech wasn't really full of lies and fantasies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. That's just a false impression you get from the places in the speech where Bush said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. What he meant was theoretical regimes with potential weapons of mass destruction. And Medved asks:
"Do any sane or reasonable Americans doubt the continued need to 'confront' - if not invade -- such regimes?"
This, of course, is a version of the logical fallacy argumentum ad hominem, the one that the kids in my neighborhood call "poisoning the well." A delicious blend of name-calling and circular reasoning: Only stupid people don't see I'm right.
For instance:
- No sane or reasonable person could disagree with invading Iraq. (Because disagreeing would mean they were insane and unreasonable.)
- You'd have to be some kind of idiot to not go to the bank and give me all your money.
- Who but a lesbian wouldn't have sex with me?
- Only a fool doesn't love it when I get drunk and do my John Huston impression.
- No one with a working sense of smell could deny that Michael Medved smells like pee.
3) There wasn't anything wrong with Bush throwing himself a one-man costume party at sea, because it honored the people who died to make it possible for... well, for Bush to throw a one-man costume party at sea. Their cause was just because they did it. And they literally fought for his right to party.
As Medved asks:
"Can anyone honestly disagree with this summary of their service and sacrifice?"
Before you answer, reread the question.
Remember: Only someone who isn't honest could disagree.
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8:50:08 AM
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Coleen Rowley: Tenet's Moment of Truth or Just More Sellout?. 
"Let's tell, let's everybody tell the truth," said our country's former Director of Central Intelligence during his interview on Sunday night's 60 Minutes. But George Tenet is over 5 1/2 years late and still seems to suffer from a terrible case of selective memory that even a $4 million book contract can't remedy. The bulk of the job of refuting and correcting Tenet's story will have to come from former CIA and other intelligence insiders who knew him and the whole of his situation better. (See "An Open Letter to George Tenet and Michael Scheuer's op-ed "Tenet Tries to Shift Blame. Don't Buy It.") I also have a little first-hand experience that contradicts what Tenet has pulled out to explain the post 9/11 need to torture.
In the interview, 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley, to his credit, asked Tenet over and over about his authorizing torture. The CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" that Tenet signed off on are said to include sleep deprivation, extreme cold and water boarding which causes a severe gag reflex, as water is continuously poured over the face. Tenet admitted losing sleep over his role in authorizing such "new territory" but refused to call it torture saying he didn't want to "engage in a semantic debate" with Pelley. (You know, trying to figure out what the meaning of the word "is" is or whether water boarding is torture, those type of semantic debates.) Anyway in the midst of their semantic debate, Tenet launched into an explanation of the "tension" he was under:
"The context is it's post-9/11. I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are gonna be blown up, planes that are gonna fly into airports all over again. Plot lines that I don't know - I don't know what's going on inside the United States. And I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur. Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through. The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know . . . 'Cause these are people that will never, ever, ever tell you a thing. These are people who know who's responsible for the next terrorist attack. These are hardened people that would kill you and me 30 seconds after they got out of wherever they were being held and wouldn't blink an eyelash. . . . You can sit there after, you can sit there five years later, and have this debate with me, all I'm asking you to do, walk a mile in my shoes when I'm dealing with these realities."
One little problem, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the person Tenet is discussing and who reportedly was water boarded, was not arrested until March 1, 2003, eighteen months after 9/11. His arrest and torture was post 9/11 like it will always be post 9/11. The actual context was that by March 2003, the bulk of our troops had already been diverted away from the war against Al Qaeda and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Our troops were already poised on Iraq's borders, awaiting Bush's order to commence the invasion of a country which didn't even have ties to Al Qaeda terrorism. That's the context of the actual "tension" under which Tenet signed off on torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others. When former Attorney General Ashcroft was questioned about the "post 9-11 round-up" of innocents in New York City--after the Department of Justice's Inspector General found that hundreds of innocent people had been improperly detained for 6 to 9 months--AG Ashcroft similarly refused to apologize "for protecting the American people." But at least AG Ashcroft's explanation fit better timing-wise with the confusion and fear that existed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 than the context Tenet said existed 18 months afterward.
It must also be remembered that we already had one actual 9/11 terrorist suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, in custody over three weeks before 9/11. And George Tenet was briefed on the facts of the investigation surrounding his detention in August 2001 with a powerpoint entitled something like "Fundamentalist Learns to Fly." At the time, DCI Tenet inexplicably took no action and did not even seek to confer with the Acting FBI Director about the case. But Tenet IS reported to have immediately linked Moussaoui to the Al Qaeda attack on 9/11 as soon as he was informed at breakfast of planes flying into the World Trade Center.
Moussaoui was not tortured however. Nor were "enhanced interrogation techniques" ever used on him. In fact FBI agents could not even get permission to attempt a plain interview of Moussaoui which permission I asked for on 9/11/01 and again on 9/12/01. I tried to argue with the Acting United States Attorney as well as with Department of Justice attorneys that the "public safety exception" to the Miranda rule pertained, not of course to engage in any "enhanced techniques" that might coerce a confession or produce unreliable information but just to circumvent the prophylactic component of the Miranda Rule so that he might be questioned about other Al Qaeda plans to hijack planes or attack U.S. citizens. But they all said no, there was no emergency. I argued harder on the morning of 9/12/01 when the full scope of what had happened was more apparent. This caused DOJ attorneys to discuss the situation a little longer than the U.S. Attorney had the day before, but I was ultimately told that whatever emergency had existed, it was over. We were so flabbergasted about the fact we were told no public safety emergency existed just hours after the attacks that my boss advised me to document it in a memo which became the first document in the legal subfile of the FBI's "Penttbom" case.
Nothing changed after Moussaoui's laptop and personal effects were searched revealing the fact that he had collected data on cropdusting and wind patterns and establishing his connections to the 9-11 masterminds. In early July 2002, when Moussaoui was making overtures that he WANTED to talk and was still the only 9-11 terrorist in custody--it would be months more before the real masterminds of the attack, either Ramzi Binalshibh or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were arrested--I called to both Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff's office as well as to FBI Director Mueller's office to renew the request to attempt a plain interview of Moussaoui. (At the time Chertoff, as head of the Justice Department's criminal division and one of the chief architects of the Bush Administration's legal strategies in the War on Terror, supervised the prosecution's case against Moussaoui. Chertoff also reportedly advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the outer limits of legality in coercive interrogation sessions.) I talked to assistants for both Chertoff and Mueller, trying to impress on them the need to interview Moussaoui, someone who would likely know of plans for a second strike. I pointed to the suspicious nature of the cropdusting information found (which of course they were well aware of) and argued we needed to find out more about that to possibly prevent future attacks. But by that time Moussaoui had been charged with the death penalty and I deduced that AG Ashcroft would not allow any potential for bargaining leverage to be injected into the case.
And so it rang hollow when these same officials, including Tenet, would constantly say they were doing everything in their power to prevent another terrorist attack, when they said in early 2003 that's why we needed, of all things, to launch a brand new pre-emptive invasion of Iraq; when I had been told there was no "public safety emergency" on the day of the attacks; and when it seemed that death penalty considerations outweighed the need to find out information about possible second strikes. It rang hollow then and it still rings hollow when Tenet pulls it out to try to explain that's why we needed to begin torturing people.
In contrast to what Tenet stated about the efficacy of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques," it's also worth repeating that the considered wisdom of expert FBI investigators is that torture doesn't work to produce reliable, timely information. Interviewing, on the other hand, is more likely to produce solid information. One of the FBI's most experienced agents in Al Qaeda terrorism and one of the few Arabic speaking ones has made this same point in discussing prior successful investigations of Al Qaeda operatives.
There are certainly other questions that arise if Tenet's description of "the palpable fear that we felt (post 9/11) on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know" did in fact drive his signing off--and presumably the new Director of Central Intelligence's continued signing off--on the use of torture and other illegal actions. For starters, if we allow that "palpable fear" to eliminate due process, we are opening ourselves up to real mistakes. For how do we even know we are torturing true terrorists? The use of torture or "taking the gloves off" was first suggested with regard to those swept up in the post 9-11 detentions who were later shown to be innocent. Already at least two individuals who were victims of the CIA's "extraordinary renditions" and who were subsequently tortured, Khalid El Masri and Maher Arar, have turned out innocent. CIA operatives have been or are to be indicted in both Germany and Italy for violating these allied countries' laws.
It's certainly safe to say that reversing the terrible mistakes of Bush, his neo-con ideologues and those like Tenet who knuckled under to their pressure, is going to require a lot more "truth" than George Tenet was willing to provide for $4 million and a presidential medal of freedom.
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8:39:25 AM
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David Sirota: "He Took On Some Lobbying Clients And Began Listening to Menudo". Why report real "news" when you can just make up screenplay-ready fiction? That's the question Beltway reporters seem to be asking these days - at least if the coverage of Washington politicians these days is any indication. Tough Questions? Nah. Serious reporting? Nope. Basic facts? Ha, are you kidding? Just check out two snippets of "news" this week to see what I mean.
First, various news outlets fawningly reported that Joe Lieberman was the featured speaker at a conference on "civility" in politics. None of the coverage mentioned that Lieberman is the man who said his opponents aid and abet terrorists.
Then, in a New York Times story about the possibility that Republican Fred Thompson will run for president, we get biographical revisionism worthy of a top-flight public relations/crisis management firm. Here's the excerpt:
"Mr. Thompson came into the public eye -- and ear, considering his distinctive voice -- in the early 1970s when he served as Republican counsel to the Senate Watergate committee. He then took on some lobbying clients, and was later asked to investigate a parole scandal in Tennessee. That episode led to a book and a movie, 'Marie,' in which Mr. Thompson played himself, kicking off his acting career. Elected to the Senate in 1994 to fill the remaining two years of Al Gore's term after he was elected vice president."
Notice anything smoothed over in there? Anything at all? Yes, that's right - there seems to be a strange-yet-massive 18 year gap in there between Watergate at his election to the Senate that is explained by a 6 word aside: "He then took on some lobbying clients." The throwaway nature of this line leads us to believe that Thompson's shilling for Big Money interests is just mildly interesting yet nonetheless extraneous narrative color - the kind of thing you might mention along with, say, someone's proclivities for a kind of music ("He then took on some lobbying clients and began listening often to Menudo"). Because in Washington, selling out to special interests isn't seen as controversial at all - it's just what you DO inside the Beltway. And reporters aren't about to - gasp! - point out that the latest presidential flavor of the month has spent far more time as a paid shill than as a public servant.
And boy was Thompson prolific. In the scant reporting that has even mentioned what Thompson has done for the majority of his political career, we find out the real story. Here's The Politico one month ago:
"Over about two decades of lobbying (during which he also acted and practiced law), Thompson made nearly $1.3 million and represented clients including a British reinsurance company facing billions of dollars in asbestos claims, Canadian-owned cable companies, and deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, according to government documents and media accounts from his first run for the Senate in 1994...'There's nothing wrong with lobbying. It's an honorable profession,' Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo said...A year after stepping down [from the Senate], he registered to lobby for British reinsurance company Equitas Ltd. The company paid him $760,000 to guard its interests against several bills seeking to protect businesses from asbestos lawsuits."
And here's New York Magazine:
"Critics point out that Thompson's aw-shucks, shit-kicker populism is more than a little bit phony. That he spent eighteen years as a registered Washington lobbyist, doing the bidding of such high-powered clients as General Electric and Westinghouse, pushing for the passage of the deregulatory legislation that led to the savings-and-loan crisis of the eighties."
So, let's recap. Joe Lieberman, the man who likens people who disagree with him to terrorists who want to kill thousands of Americans, is the shining example of "civility" in American politics. Meanwhile, a K Street insider who says it's "honorable" to have spent the majority of his time in politics lobbying for foreign governments, to protect companies from paying benefits to asbestos victims and to deregulate the financial industry is being profiled in the largest paper in the world without any of these details even being mentioned. How is this possible? Because Beltway reporters are too lazy or too deferential to power to do anything other than scribble out yet more false archetypes - in this case, the Civil Independent Senator and the Earnest Southern Actor-Turned-Statesman. After all, as I said at the beginning, Washington's new crop of "journalists" seem to be wondering why they should report real "news" when they can now just make up screenplay-ready fiction?
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8:26:28 AM
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Worst U.S. massacre?
Carla Blank
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
The mass media coverage of how 32 students and faculty members were fatally shot and at least 15 injured on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., is punctuated by phrases such as, "the worst massacre in U.S. history," or, as the New York Times put it, the "Worst U.S. Gun Rampage." CNN called it the "Deadliest Shooting Rampage in U.S. history." This was followed by San Francisco Bay Area's FOX affiliate KTVU Channel 2's claim that it was "the worst massacre ever in the United States."
TV commentary did not qualify these claims, and at least one Virginia Tech student, an Asian American himself, echoed the phrase when interviewed on national television, pondering his presence at the "worst massacre in U.S. history." In reality, an accurate investigation of mass killings of this magnitude would quickly reveal that the Virginia Tech massacre, as horrendous as it was, was not the worst massacre to occur on U.S. soil. There were much bloodier massacres before Blacksburg:
-- In 1860, Bret Harte, a well-known California writer, had just begun his writing career, working as a newspaper reporter in Arcata (known then as Union). Harte was expelled from Humboldt County because he recorded the Gunther Island Massacre of Wiyot Indians, committed on Feb. 26, 1860, when a small group of white men murdered between 60 and 200 Wiyot men, women and children. The massacre was encouraged by a local newspaper. Extermination was once the official policy of the California government toward Native Americans, as Gov. Peter H. Burnett stated in 1851: "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected..."
-- On April 12, 1864, at Fort Pillow, near Memphis, Tenn., Confederate troops under Gen. Nathan Forrest massacred 227 black and white Union troops with such ferocity that an eyewitness Confederate soldier said, "blood, human blood, stood about in pools and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity...Gen. Forrest ordered them shot down like dogs and the carnage continued. Finally our men became sick of blood and the firing ceased."
-- On April 13, 1873, 350 miles northwest of New Orleans in Colfax, Grand Parish, La., 280 blacks were victims of a group of armed white men that included members of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan. Known as the Colfax Massacre, it was said to be sparked by contested local elections, although more generally its cause was white opposition to Reconstruction, which in 1875 resulted in a legal ruling, United States vs. Cruikshank, an important basis of future gun-control legislation, because it allows that "the federal government had no power to protect citizens against private action (not committed by federal or state government authorities) that deprived them of their constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment."
-- In 1913, during another nationally publicized action known as the Ludlow Massacre, more than 66 people were killed, including 11 children, and two women who were burned alive. Sparked by a strike against the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation by the mostly foreign born Serb, Greek and Italian coal miners after one of their union organizers was murdered, it eventually involved the Colorado National Guard, imported strikebreakers and sympathetic walkouts by union miners throughout the state. The union never was recognized by the company, and a U.S. congressional committee investigation failed to result in indictments of any militiaman or mine guard.
-- In 1921, a year when 64 lynchings were reported, the African American Greenwood business district of Tulsa, Okla., was the site of shooting deaths of at least 40 people, most of whom were black, although the undocumented death toll is said to be closer to 300. This site was then known as the "Negro's Wall Street," and was home to 15,000 people and 191 businesses. The rampage took the form of a riot, and was caused by economic tensions, particularly sparked by an article in the Tulsa Tribune regarding an alleged rape incident between a black shoe shiner and a white elevator operator. Because of this riot, Tulsa became the first U.S. city to be bombed from the air, when police dropped dynamite from private planes to break it up. Whites took possession of most of the land, and the site has become part of Oklahoma State University's Tulsa campus.
The reporting of the Virginia Tech massacre reveals that an ignorance of American history is not only a problem affecting American students but extends to our most influential newsrooms, even those with archives extending back to the 1800s. A member of the New York Times' editorial staff is Brent Staples, a black writer who is an expert on the Tulsa massacre. There is no excuse for such historical amnesia on the part of those who have taken upon themselves the serious task of informing the public.
Carla Blank is the author of "Rediscovering America" (Three Rivers Press, 2003).
8:21:48 AM
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© Copyright 2007 Patricia Thurston.
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