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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (127583)	3/28/2004 1:00:04 PM
From: carranza2	Respond to of 281500

Look, John, it's very clear that Clarke's book is going to occupy a place of honor in your household. Not in mine. I detest the guy, I think he's making money on the backs of 9/11's victims while engaging in a bit of political payback at the Bush Administration for not letting him have the run of things within his sphere as Clinton did. In other words, a detestable, twisted guy. My view is succinct. Neither Clinton's nor Bush's Administrations can be faulted. One has to assume treason or colossal incompetence in order to find fault under these circumstances. I see nothing of the kind. I do see political harping. It's a debate created by your new hero. If he gets hurt in the blowback, too bad. Couldn't happen to a more deserving person.

To: JohnM who wrote (127583)	3/28/2004 1:00:27 PM
From: Rascal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

A few years ago I asked FADG posters to explain the difference between "Marketing" and "Propaganda". My short, sarcastic answer has always been, it depends whether it is war-time or peace-time. Guess I can toss that quip out!... ...To shore up the Rove version of 9/11 once Richard Clarke went public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on all five morning news shows the next day. The administration is confident that it can reinstate its bogus scenario — particularly given that Ms. Rice, unlike Mr. Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it under oath to the 9/11 commission. After 9/11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The run-up to the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern public information tools," including 16 words of Tom Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union. John Burns of The Times, speaking by phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage sponsored by the University of California journalism school in Berkeley this month, said of the real press back then: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war." What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min, where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and National Security Adviser Rice in 125 separate public appearances." Once the war began, the Defense Department turned a warehouse in Qatar into a TV studio, where it installed a $250,000 Central Command briefing stage, shipped from Chicago by FedEx for an additional $47,000. The set was lent authority by a real-news set designer, whose previous credits included ABC's "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America." As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the Marine Corps, also speaking at Berkeley 10 days ago: "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. . . . Overall, we were very happy with the outcome." The "news" of the war included its fictionalized Rambo, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, and its fictionalized conclusion, the "Mission Accomplished" celebration led by the president on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. (Mr. Bush said that the premature victory banner was the handiwork of the ship's crew when in fact it was the product of the White House scenic shop.) But for all that fake news, we still don't know such real news as how many Iraqi civilians were killed as we gave them their freedom. We are still shielded from images of American casualties, before or after they are placed in coffins. Now that the breakdown in pre-9/11 security is threatening to dominate the real news, the administration is working overtime to overwhelm it with its latest, thematically related fake story line. Time magazine reports that employees of the Department of Homeland Security have been given the goal of providing the president "with one homeland-security photo-op a month." The Associated Press reports that the department is also hiring a "liaison to the entertainment industry" — with a salary as high as $136,000, plus benefits — "to make sure that dramatic portrayals of it are as accurate as possible." (The deadline for applications, do note, is tomorrow.) Of course "accurate" in that job description should be read as "inaccurate," since the liaison's real task, like that of the intrepid reporter Karen Ryan, will be to make sure that any actual news of our homeland security's many holes is kept on the q.t. According to E! entertainment news, we can even expect a new TV show, "D.H.S. — the Series," to which both Mr. Bush and Tom Ridge will contribute endorsements and sound bites.... Full article here: nytimes.com Rascal @WeToldYouSo.com