SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (4352)2/27/2004 2:51:17 PM
From: Thomas M.  Respond to of 22250
 
Had to Google that. LOL!

Yes, Barak, the man who spoke peace all the while building more settlements

And while dispatching the jellydonut cop Sharon to the Muslim holy site.

Tom



To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (4352)2/28/2004 12:55:24 PM
From: Crimson Ghost  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 22250
 
Good article on the disgraceful performance of the media during the months leading up to the Iraq war. Does miss the most crucial fact of all though -- the mainstream media is largely Zionist owned and controlled.

Floating With the Tide

by Scott Sherman

Print this article
E-mail this article
Write to the editors
he conduct of our major newspapers in the run-up to the Iraq war calls to mind William Hazlitt's famous appraisal of the Times of London. "It floats with the tide," Hazlitt wrote in 1823. "It sails with the stream." Two new studies--one by Michael Massing in the February 26 New York Review of Books, which surveys news articles; the other by Chris Mooney in the March/April Columbia Journalism Review, which examines unsigned editorials--document the extent to which our elite press sailed with the stream in the decisive months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Together, these articles paint a disconcerting portrait of a timid, credulous press corps that, when confronted by an Administration intent on war, sank to new depths of obsequiousness and docility.

Embedded in Massing's prosecutorial brief against the press are the following charges: the dissemination of White House misinformation on Iraq; the embrace of dubious Iraqi defectors and exiles as sources; a lack of curiosity about debates in the intelligence community concerning US allegations about Iraq's WMD capabilities; and a cavalier disregard for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Much of Massing's firepower is directed at the New York Times in general and one reporter--Judith Miller--in particular. It was Miller (with Michael Gordon) who produced, on September 8, 2002, an article titled "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," which reported that Iraq had tried to import thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes with the purpose of producing enriched uranium and, eventually, an atomic weapon. Bush Administration "hard-liners," according to Miller and Gordon, feared nothing less than "a mushroom cloud." The same day the article appeared, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice parroted the charges about the tubes on the Sunday-morning chat shows. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," Rice intoned on CNN.

"In the following months," Massing writes, "the tubes would become a key prop in the administration's case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it." A crucial element of the legitimation process was the Times's disregard for experts who didn't share the White House's dark view of Saddam's WMD capabilities. The only national news organization that emerges unscathed from Massing's inquiry is the low-profile Washington bureau of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain--which includes the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News--whose hard-hitting stories were based on the doubts and fears of military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, many of whom believed that the White House was misinterpreting and fabricating evidence about Iraq's bellicosity.

Miller has been the subject of much scrutiny [see Russ Baker, "'Scoops' and Truth at the Times," June 23, 2003], but Massing has produced the most authoritative account of her deferential posture vis-à-vis the Bush Administration. Massing asked Miller why her stories did not generally include the views of skeptical WMD experts; her reply is jaw-dropping: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself," Miller averred. "My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought of Iraq's arsenal." Massing adds, with appropriate gravity: "Many journalists would disagree with this; instead they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities."

Miller, it turns out, has no monopoly on docility. CJR's survey of editorials makes it distressingly apparent that our top newspapers did not abstain from the chance to inform their readers about "what the government thought" of Iraq's supposed arsenal. Mooney examined more than eighty editorials in half a dozen papers--the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune--for a six-week period, starting with Colin Powell's February 5 speech to the United Nations and concluding with the onset of hostilities on March 19. It's worth noting that Mooney, a freelance writer in Washington, had no ideological ax to grind. In the months leading up to the war, he was a "liberal hawk" who expressed prowar sentiments on his blog. To a certain extent, his piece is a reckoning with himself. (Full disclosure: I was a CJR staff member from 2001-03 and remain on the magazine's masthead in an advisory capacity.)

The CJR report is largely about the reaction to Powell's speech, which was rapturously received by editorialists. "Irrefutable," proclaimed the Washington Post. Powell "may not have produced a 'smoking gun,'" ventured the New York Times, but the speech left "little question that Mr. Hussein had tried hard to conceal one." International newspapers--including the British Guardian--treated the speech as one side of an ongoing UN debate about Iraq's WMD capacities and gave ample coverage to the opposing views of Hans Blix and the IAEA's Mohammed ElBaradei, who maintained that Iraq did not have them. "Without appearing to weigh such contrary evidence," Mooney writes, "the US papers all essentially pronounced Powell right, though they couldn't possibly know for sure that he was. In short, they trusted him. And in so doing, they failed to bring even an elementary skepticism to the Bush case for war."

Mooney was struck by the "strongly nationalistic character" of the editorials under review and the "almost knee-jerk tendency to distrust international perspectives"--a sentiment that, in many cases, led editorialists to minimize and dismiss the findings of Blix and ElBaradei. In March 2003, the latter informed the UN that there was little evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program, but the prowar newspapers in the CJR study simply "shrugged off" ElBaradei's critique. At least one of them--the Wall Street Journal--heaped scorn on the inspectors. When Saddam Hussein insisted that he did not possess WMDs, the Journal sneered, "If you believe that, you are probably a Swedish weapons inspector."

What do the editorial page editors say in their own defense? "We don't discuss the process that goes into writing the editorials," the New York Times's Gail Collins told CJR. "I will go off my normal rule to say I wish we'd known there were no weapons of mass destruction." Said Janet Clayton of the Los Angeles Times: "I do wish we'd been more skeptical of Powell's WMD claims before the UN." Others remain faithful to their own discredited narratives. "I'm not going to second-guess what we wrote," said the Chicago Tribune's Bruce Dold. "If indeed [Saddam] did not have weapons--and I think it's all still an open question--the fact was that he didn't comply, and the UN had looked the other way while hundreds of thousands of people had died in Iraq."

In the months after the war ended, major US newspapers--especially the Washington Post--recovered their skepticism and began to challenge aggressively the Administration's justifications for war. But it was too little, too late: When we needed them most, they weren't there. CJR gave the last word to the intelligence writer Thomas Powers. "All these papers are on notice," Powers said. "They've seen what happened. They were hustled."



To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (4352)2/29/2004 10:23:57 PM
From: Emile Vidrine  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 22250
 
[The American government is riddled with Jewish American spies for Israel. More evidence below. We cite part of this long article below. It is an especially damning one and the article should be read in its entirety at its source.]

Serving Two Flags Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration,
By STEPHEN GREEN, CounterPunch, February 28-29, 2004
"Since 9-11, a small group of "neo-conservatives" in the Administration have effectively gutted--they would say reformed--traditional American foreign and security policy. Notable features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations and the principle instruments and institutions of international law....all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security. Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons' past academic and professional associations, writings and public utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is the alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing. The administration's new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that, as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and funds, of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent neo-con campaign against the other two countries which constitute a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the region--Iran and Syria. Have the neo-conservatives--many of whom are senior officials in the Defense Department, National Security Council and Office of the Vice President--had dual agendas, while professing to work for the internal security of the United States against its terrorist enemies? A review of the internal security backgrounds of some of the best known among them strongly suggests the answer. Dr. Stephen Bryen and Colleagues In April of 1979, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Robert Keuch recommended in writing that Bryen, then a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, undergo a grand jury hearing to establish the basis for a prosecution for espionage. John Davitt, then Chief of the Justice Department's Internal Security Division, concurred. The evidence was strong. Bryen had been overheard in the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop, offering classified documents to an official of the Israeli Embassy in the presence of the director of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. It was later determined that the Embassy official was Zvi Rafiah, the Mossad station chief in Washington. Bryen refused to be poly-graphed by the FBI on the purpose and details of the meeting; whereas the person who'd witnessed it agreed to be poly-graphed and passed the test. The Bureau also had testimony from a second person, a staff member of the Foreign Relations Committee, that she had witnessed Bryen in his Senate office with Rafiah, discussing classified documents that were spread out on a table in front of an open safe in which the documents were supposed to be secured. Not long after this second witness came forward, Bryen's fingerprints were found on classified documents he'd stated in writing to the FBI he'd never had in his possession....the ones he'd allegedly offered to Rafiah. Nevertheless, following the refusal of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to grant access by Justice Department officials to files which were key to the investigation, Keuch's recommendation for a grand jury hearing, and ultimately the investigation itself, were shut down. This decision, taken by Philip Heymann, Chief of Justice's Criminal Division, was a bitter disappointment to Davitt and to Joel Lisker, the lead investigator on the case, as expressed to this writer. A complicating factor in the outcome was that Heymann was a former schoolmate and fellow U.S. Supreme Court Clerk of Bryen's attorney, Nathan Lewin. Bryen was asked to resign from his Foreign Relations Committee post shortly before the investigation was concluded in late 1979. For the following year and a half, he served as Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and provided consulting services to AIPAC. In April, 1981, the FBI received an application by the Defense Department for a Top Secret security clearance for Dr. Bryen. Richard Perle, who had just been nominated as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, was proposing Bryen as his Deputy Assistant Secretary! ... The DOD [Department of Defense] office involved in control of defense technology exports was the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) within Richard Perle's ISP office. The Director (and founder) of DTSA was Perle's Deputy, Dr. Stephen Bryen. In May of 1988, Bryen sent a standard form to Richard Levine, a Navy tech transfer official, informing him of intent to approve a license for Varian Associates, Inc. of Beverly, Massachusetts to export to Israel four klystrons. This was done without the usual consultations with the tech transfer officials of the Army and Air Force, or ISA (International Security Affairs) or DSAA (Defense Security Assistance Agency. The answer from Levine was "no". He opposed granting the license, and asked for a meeting on the matter of the appropriate (above listed) offices. At the meeting, all of the officials present opposed the license. Bryen responded by suggesting that he go back to the Israelis to ask why these particular items were needed for their defense. Later, after the Israeli Government came back with what one DOD staffer described as "a little bullshit answer", Bryen simply notified the meeting attendees that an acceptable answer had been received, the license granted, and the klystrons released. By now, however, the dogs were awake. Then Assistant Secretary of Defense for ISA, (and now Deputy Secretary of State) Richard Armitage sent Dr. Bryen a letter stating that the State Department (which issues the export licenses) should be informed of DOD's "uniformly negative" reaction to the export of klystrons to Israel. Bryen did as instructed , and the license was withdrawn. ... In April 2001, with the support of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) Bryen was appointed a Member of the Commission by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Last August, his appointment was extended through December of 2005. Informed that Bryen had been appointed to the Commission, the reaction of one former senior FBI counter-intelligence official was: "My God, that must mean he has a "Q clearance!" (A "Q" clearance, which must be approved by the Department of Energy, is the designation for a Top Secret codeword clearance to access nuclear technology.) Michael Ledeen, Consultant on Chaos If Stephen Bryen is the military technology guru in the neo-con pantheon, Michael Ledeen is currently its leading theorist, historian, scholar and writer. It states in the website of his consulting firm, Benador Associates, that he is "...one of the world's leading authorities on intelligence, contemporary history and international affairs" and that...."As Ted Koppel puts it, 'Michael Ledeen is a Renaissance man....in the tradition of Machiavelli.'" Perhaps the following will add some color and texture to this description. In 1983, on the recommendation of Richard Perle, Ledeen was hired at the Department of Defense as a consultant on terrorism. His immediate supervisor was the Principle Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs, Noel Koch. Early in their work together, Koch noticed with concern Ledeen's habit of stopping by in his (Koch's) outer office to read classified materials. When the two of them took a trip to Italy, Koch learned from the CIA station there that when Ledeen had lived in Rome previously, as correspondent for The New Republic, he'd been carried in Agency files as an agent of influence of a foreign government: Israel. Some time after their return from the trip, Ledeen approached his boss with a request for his assistance in obtaining two highly classified CIA reports which he said were held by the FBI. He'd hand written on a piece of paper the identifying "alpha numeric designators". These identifiers were as highly classified as the reports themselves....which raised in Koch's mind the question of who had provided them to Ledeen if he hadn't the clearances to obtain them himself. Koch immediately told his executive assistant that Ledeen was to have no further access to classified materials in the office, and Ledeen just ceased coming to "work". [This article goes on and on and it is horrifying: See the source.]
counterpunch.org