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Politics : Bush Administration's Media Manipulation--MediaGate? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (3345)	5/24/2005 9:28:28 PM
From: Skywatcher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9838

The Stench of Deceit by Susan Lenfestey A recent article about the study of pheromones, the powerful sex attractants believed to be picked up through scent, mentioned a curious bit of human evolution that may help explain the sleep-walking demeanor of so many Americans in the face of so much that smells. It seems the tiny sensor in the nose that picks up pheromones has become largely inactive in humans. It barely connects to the brain at all. What else could explain why the pungent smells emanating from the Bush administration, though certainly not sex attractants, get such a little rise out of the celebrity-sniffing media or the comatose public? Take the recent ho-hum response to the hypocrisy, slapped on like cheap cologne by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld and Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan as they spoke mournfully about the lives lost and the damage to America's popularity caused by . . . the trumped-up invasion of Iraq? No, by Newsweek's retracted story about the desecration of the Qur'an, which came from a source who later backed away from his story. Wait a minute. Smell-sensor to brain: Does the name Ahmed Chalabi ring a bell? He's the Iraqi exile who fed Rumsfeld and his Neocon pals the faux intelligence for the war they were itching to have, while spoon-feeding the same lies down the open throat of the New York Times - which ran them as fact on the front page. It was this toxic collaboration of phony sources and a compliant press that helped Bush and the Neocons sink America's future into a quagmire called Iraq, where at last count over 1600 Americans have died, thousands have been maimed, and an estimated minimum of 20,000 Iraqis, most of them civilians, have been killed. Add to that a "few bad apples" frolicking in places called Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base and you get the fine spit-polish on America's image that we see around the world today. Blaming Newsweek for lost lives and a tarnished reputation is like blaming the kid who steals a hubcap after a deadly 12-car pile-up for causing the crash. And then there's the acrid musk of collusion and crude surrounding Ahmed Chalabi and his recent rise to the position of Oil Minister of Iraq. It doesn't get any more redolent than this, and yet there was hardly an eye-blink from the press. Let torpor reign. Jane Mayer, writing in the New Yorker a year ago (June 7, 2004) chronicled Chalabi's astonishing ability to ooze his way to the top. Along with his well-publicized conviction in Jordan in 1992 for embezzlement of $300 million, there's his less-known friendship with Dick Cheney, his long association with the CIA, the U.S.-protected forgery shop he ran in northern Iraq in the 1990's, and the unaccounted-for $100 million that his Iraq National Congress received from the United States government between 1992 and last year. And it was Chalabi who suggested in a 1998 interview in the Jerusalem Post that it would be easy to topple Saddam and restore the oil line (cut off in 1948) from Iraq to Israel. This tiny drop of toilet water aroused the interest of the Neocons, particularly Paul Wolfowitz. And there's this. Before the U.S. turned on him a year ago - for alleged misdeeds, including leaking secrets to Iran-- they appointed him to head the finance committee of the Iraqi Governing Council. His assignment? To install the oil, finance and trade ministers, as well as the governor of Iraq's Central Bank. By forging an alliance with the Shiite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, Chalabi held on to his power and is now the acting Minister of Oil, putting him in charge of the world's second largest known supply of crude. Since then the government of Jordan has announced that it will consider pardoning Chalabi, though they want a few favors in exchange. Will the Neocons find forgiveness in their hearts as well? Something is rotten, yet the cowed press ignores it and will continue to do so in light of the thrashing given to Newsweek. The rest of us, either beaten down by a government without scruple or no longer able to feel, drift through one day of deadly deception after another. What will it take to reawaken the sensors to our brains? Maybe the long fingers of the draft, plucking over the children of the rich and sending them into war -- or into hiding --just as it did 40 years ago to feed the last big bloody American mistake. Susan Lenfestey is a Minneapolis writer. She can be reached at soolen@aol.com.