Larry D. Hatfield and Susan Ferriss
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Fri, Dec. 1, 1995
The U.S. government may have paid off a San Francisco man and another former Salvadoran guerrilla in exchange for intelligence information, despite their alleged involvement in the 1985 massacre of four unarmed Marines and eight others in El Salvador, a U.S. senator says.
Citing classified testimony by officials of the CIA and the departments of
State and Justice, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., identified Gilberto Osorio,
of San Francisco, and Pedro Alvarez Andrade, believed living in New Jersey,
as "two of the masterminds" behind the Zona Rosa massacre that resulted in
the deaths of four Marines, two U.S. businessmen, six Salvadoran civilians
and one of the attackers.
"Substantial evidence exists that suggests that the U.S. government paid
these known killers in exchange for intelligence information - all the while
allowing them to live like free Americans, unbeknownst to their neighbors,"
Shelby told a press conference in the nation's capitol Thursday.
He and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Arlen Spector, R-Pa., and Vice Chairman Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., sent a letter Thursday to Secretary of State Warren Christopher demanding a government-wide review of the case to determine any government wrongdoing, and whether Osorio and Alvarez could be prosecuted or deported.
Osorio, a U.S. citizen, denied being an informant or participating in the
attack on the Marines. He said he did not know Alvarez.
"How can they link me as a paid informant unless they are trying to burn me
here and within the FMLN," Osorio said Friday, referring to the Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front. ". . . Maybe they're trying to put me in
bad standing with the guerrillas. Those things used to come up in El
Salvador - whether I was a spy or not - because of the simple fact that I
was an American. I don't think people believed it because I risked my life
alongside them."
He said the FBI went to his house and his job on Thursday, but he wasn't at
either place. They left cards asking him to call the bureau.
Shelby said the more he has learned about the case, the more upset he has
become. "Obviously, there are many unanswered questions," he said, "but the
thought that these killers got off without punishment and may not only be
living in the United States, but also receiving federal funds, is beyond
appalling. I will do everything I can to get to the bottom of this matter.
"We must determine, and I believe we will, whether our government in effect
placed these criminals on retainer in exchange for intelligence
information," Shelby said.
He said a preliminary review of classified testimony indicated that
government officials "knew about and even assisted at least one of those
responsible for the killings in entering the United States."
So far, he said, the only justifications he and the committee have received
from the government for apparently helping Alvarez enter the country are
humanitarian reasons.
The June 19, 1985, massacre occurred when seven guerrillas walked into a
restaurant in the Zona Rosa district of San Salvador and opened fire on the
Marines - embassy guards who were unarmed and dressed in civilian clothes.
The Mardoqueo Cruz urban guerrilla command of the FMLN took responsibility for the attack and the FMLN General Command issued a communique supporting it, restating its directive that U.S. military personnel in El Salvador were legitimate military targets.
Four Salvadorans eventually were prosecuted by the government for their
roles in the slayings although President Jose Napoleon Duarte and the
Salvadoran Supreme Court had to overturn, under U.S. pressure, a military
court's dismissal of the charges; three were convicted and given prison
sentences ranging from four to 25 years.
Osorio, 49, said he wasn't anywhere near San Salvador when the attack
occurred. At the time he was in Morazan Province, working in the central
committee of the FMLN as a secretary to a woman who is now in the Salvadoran
Congress.
He denied in an Examiner interview in May any direct involvement in the
planning or shooting of the Marines and others. In fact, he said, he was at
least 60 miles away from the cafe near the U.S. Embassy where the shootings occurred.
That claim conflicted with the transcript of an earlier "60 Minutes" report which portrayed him as a guerrilla commandant who helped plan the assassinations.
He said Friday he felt "60 Minutes" misunderstood his comments about the
attack.
Osorio said people in the FMLN discussed attacking Americans in a general
sense. "We were discussing things like this at the level of cooks in the
kitchen," he said.
"We always talked about the role of the U.S. If I planned, the cooks planned
it, the masses planned it."
Osorio told The Examiner in May: "It (the assassination plan) was highly
classified. Only the very top (command) knew. I did not know."
Still, he said, he was happy at news of the ambush: "We were all jubilant.
It's war, you know what I mean?"
He and other leftists battling the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government often
talked about the need to send an unmistakable message to Congress.
"There was a need . . . to practically declare war (on) the United States," he
said. "We were telling the United States "Now we can kill you in the streets
and you better watch out.' "
Greg Walker, a former Green Beret advisor in El Salvador and now an
author-journalist, told The Examiner in May he believed Osorio knew in
advance about the ambush of the unarmed Marines.
"As the chief of operations for the . . . group that carried it out, he certainly knew that Americans were going to be targeted and were going to be hit," Walker said.
"My feeling is that Gilberto knew very, very much what was going to happen
and who was going to be hit. . . . He was the man who knew, the man who was involved in planning."
Osorio said he was no longer serving as chief of operations, a position that
might have given him knowledge of the secret mission, at the time of the
attack.
Osorio was born in the Mission District and was taken by his mother to her
native El Salvador when he was 6 months old. He spent his first 18 years
there, then returned to San Francisco, where he enrolled at City College and
San Francisco State University.
He enlisted in the Air Force in 1966 and after several years as an aircraft
mechanic was honorably discharged.
Osorio returned to El Salvador in 1980 and became operations chief in one of five guerrilla armies that formed the FMLN.
Operating under the nom de guerre Gerardo Zelaya, he directed a battalion of 300 in the northern province of San Vicente. When scouts told him that
gringos were directing government troops against his unit, he told The
Examiner, he gave orders to kill any American in the zone.
"They were very skillful and simply overran us," he said. "I passed the
order that if an American was seen or somebody different, to target them, to
kill them, to make an example because they weren't supposed to be there."
He returned to San Francisco when the war ended three years ago.
Osorio helped found the Mission Cultural Center in The City.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
DEADLY DIVERSION: On Opium Trafficking, the CIA & the Challenger Disaster
The Challenger disaster took its time gestating - took me years to piece it together, in fact. I know perfectly well that my word on this will be doubted by anyone unfamiliar with the facts - it's my unfortunate lot in life to report these things - and that's why I suggest chasing down my sources and reading anything relevant available on the Net. My story assumes some knowledge of Mae Brussell's work on Challenger, especially regarding the timing of the explosion. Brussell's main points: There was thick layer of ice on the shuttle's launcher that morning - yet NASA claimed over the course of several days to be waiting for the temperature to rise. This is not an incidental detail. (The American prole brain is conditioned to explain essential facts away, but this one is comprehensible only in the wider context of intention in which it is consistent, not an unexplained contradiction.) I've posted this before, but like many stories I write, the significance of it is lost in a sea of Orwellian historical revision - not mine, the military-industrial media machine's. The Challenger blew up at roughly the same moment that a witness swore in to testify on federally-sanctioned heroin smuggling and money laundering - at that very moment NASA launch conditions were ideal for mass murder, as engineers from Thiokol testified openly, and prolonged flight that morning was impossible. The engineers stated that they knew the O-rings would give, that the Challenger would explode, and signed a group statement in advance that they would assume no responsibility for the decision to launch. That came from above. It is on record, not to be ignored but understood. They knew the cannon was loaded. This is not another "incidental" anomaly ... The reporters attending the drug testimony scurried out of the room when the shuttle exploded - the press never ran the story. How "coincidental." ... Let us reconstruct the Challenger disaster and the drug testimony as they occurred - this set of facts explains the lingering anomalies, which, as I say, are not so incidental - given the bloodshed that ensued, not to mention widespread heroin addiction ... - AC
••••••••••••••
By Alex Constantine
(repost)
On January 28, 1986, Scott Barnes, a DEA contract agent, sat before the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs to testify about American opium smuggling from Southeast Asia. The chairman of the committee was Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming. Other notable nabobs on the committee: Strom Thrumond, George Mitchell, Jeremiah Denton, Alan Cranston and John D. Rockefeller.
Barnes flew in from Los Angeles to testify about the CIA and southeast Asian opium, an underground industry he'd discovered in his search for POWs in Vietnam. He passed lie detector and sodium amytal tests to convince the press ("calls and inimidations from news people escalated ... ") and filled out a sworn affidavit before testifying.
He also spoke to Congressman Solomon, who was "adamant." As an "ex-Marine," said Solomon, "I won't believe any of this."
"As the questioning progressed during my two hour testimony, I began to feel cornered," Barnes wrote. "I heard someone behind me whisper, 'Oh, God, NO!"
Barnes was given two hours to testify on the logistics of a covert postwar underground of military and intelligence officers engaged in the drug trade. He explained that some of them had been apprehended and were held captive in Southeast Asian prison camps.
Scott Barnes: "In the midst of my testimony, Brian Bonnet entered and whispered in the ear of Murkowski who immediately announced, 'Excuse me, I must go to the White House.' Not long after his return, he was interrupted again, then announced, 'I should advise you that unofficially we have had word that THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER HAS BLOWN UP, and things do not look very good. I have nothing final on that but have just been advised that shortly after launching, there was an explosion. So if anybody wants to be excused, we will certainly understand.'"
Barnes, shaken but determined to speak, resumed his testimony ... but "by that time most of the senators and media people had left."1
Moments before, he had addressed a full Congressional committee and a wall of reporters. If not for the Challenger explosion, his account of CIA drug smuggling – and the abandonment of downed pilots overseas – might have made it into public print.
The Challenger explosion was investigated by another "blue ribbon" commission, this one headed up by Nixon ally and Secretary of State William Pierce Rogers, an attorney with a keen professional interest in both the CIA and the heroin industry.
Architect's rendering of the William P. Rogers Building, 2001 K Street, Washington, D.C.
As background, this was culled this from the Lake Erie Reporter:
"Harken [Oil Co., owned by GHW Bush] was connected to the drug trade, the manipulation of foreign currencies and the CIA’s efforts to destabilize the government of Argentina. Harken’s major owners were George Soros, the Harvard [University] Management Corporation, and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a Saudi investor."
William Rogers
Bakhsh was legally represented by Rogers & Wells, the New York law firm of William P. Rogers. Bakhsh "arranged for Union des Banques Swisses, to invest $25 million in the firm. The Swiss bank was connected to the corrupt banking conglomerate BCCI, which collapsed amid scandal in 1992. BCCI has been called the most corrupt bank in modern times, having financed terrorists, drug dealers, and various covert operations."2
Rewind to 1986, Scott Barnes and his explosive Senate testimony. Recall that when he began to wade into detail in his brief to Senator Simpson's committee, someone seated directly behind him burst out in a whisper, "Oh, God, NO!"
Someone was very anxious about the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia. Who might that be?
Barnes: "The videos of the hearing show a very restless Ann Mills Griffiths seated directly behind me."
Ms. Griffiths was the head of the National League of Families, and though she was a vocal proponent of the POW issue, her many critics maintained that she frustrated efforts to resolve the MIA question behind the scenes.
In 1993, her name surfaced in connection with Richard Childress of the Reagan-Bush National Security Council, as reported by USA Today: "A Reagan administration official secretly funneled money from a POW-MIA group seeking information on missing Americans to help anti-communist rebels in Laos, a Senate report said Wednesday. Richard Childress, a National Security Council staffer, channeled the money during the early 1980s operation... Childress received about $200,000 working with Ann Mills Griffiths, head of the POW-MIA group, the National League of Families, and John LeBoutillier, a former New York Republican congressman.
"The operation 'sounds like a dry run' for the Iran-contra affair, said Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator. ...''3
The NSC's Dick Childress was another ne'er-do-well involved in the importation of heroin from Laos.4 And the Challenger explosion occurred at the very moment testimony about heroin smuggling was heard in Senate chambers.
Could this be a factor in the concurrent timing of the Challenger disaster? Political researcher Mae Brussell provided details of the launch and posited that the Challenger explosion was premeditated:
"Memorandum detailing a 'catastrophic' disaster if the shuttle was launched in less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit was presented to NASA in July 1985, and again in August 1985 by two different scientists. Did NASA, and the Pentagon, select the time when they demanded a lunch on the coldest day in shuttle history?
"The Challenger shuttle, unlike any other launch, waited outside in rain and cold for 38 days. Television cameras focused upon the ice coating and huge icicles at the time of the launch. Ice teams were sent out to 'check.'
"It was not always cold at Cape Canaveral. The Rogers Commission limited their public inquiry into launching decisions to the evening of January 27th and the morning of the 28th of January 1986. Plans for an earlier launch on Saturday, January 25th, 1986 were postponed because of dust storms in Africa and Morocco. It is interesting that the weather, so far away, was conveyed to the launch team at the top of the their pyramid. The same decision makers couldn't see ice, or feel freezing temperature around them at Cape Canaveral.
"It was not a matter of seeing or feeling the cold.... Challenger would leave on the morning of January 28, 1986. Weather was not a factor considered, then or now.
"Robert Lund, Vice President for Engineering at Morton Thiokol, the company who made the controversial solid fuel boosters, was told to "stop making an engineering decision." ... The other hat was military. Lund changed directions and took orders. Life is cheap for the Pentagon.
"Sunday turned out to be a fine day for a launch. Was there too much media competition with the Super bowl Sunday, with Reagan's 'teacher in space' production, after two years of publicity? The hundreds of press, teachers, and students waiting at Cape Canaveral, could have seen a fine launch on Sunday, Monday afternoon or even Tuesday afternoon when it was much
warmer.
"NASA officials had been alerted by Sunday that a cold front was coming in Monday night or Tuesday for sure. Indications were that weather was always a factor in safely launching a shuttle."5
It was "the coldest day in shuttle history," and yet Challenger launched... And Barnes returned to California, an obscure DEA contract agent completely unaware that had his testimony on the CIA and drugs had the potential of wiping out the prospects of two future occupiers of the Oval office, GHW Bush and son. At the very least, the CIA would have had its feet put to the fire one more time. And should the name "Childress" have emerged, the Iran-contra investigation would likely have focused on heroin, not hostages.
••••••••••••••
NOTES
1) Scott Barnes, BOHICA, BOHICA Corporation, Canton, Ohio, 1987, pp. 195-204.
2) "Bush Watch," http://mysite.verizon.net/resox2t6/thelakeeriereporter/
id2.html
3) Carol J. Castaneda, "Misuse of funds alleged," USA TODAY, January 14, 1993, p. 13-A.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:LbcaB_pQ3YgJ:listserv.
dom.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe%3FA2%3Dind9606%26L%3Dstumpers
-l%26P%3D18425+ann+mills+griffiths+and+nixon&hl=en&gl
=us&ct=clnk&cd=8
4) See, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/POW.html
5) Mae Brussell, "NASA'S CHALLENGER, R.I.P. January 28, 1986."
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/vm,mb,challengerRIP,2,3,03.htm
••••••••••••••
By Alex Constantine
(repost)
On January 28, 1986, Scott Barnes, a DEA contract agent, sat before the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs to testify about American opium smuggling from Southeast Asia. The chairman of the committee was Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming. Other notable nabobs on the committee: Strom Thrumond, George Mitchell, Jeremiah Denton, Alan Cranston and John D. Rockefeller.
Barnes flew in from Los Angeles to testify about the CIA and southeast Asian opium, an underground industry he'd discovered in his search for POWs in Vietnam. He passed lie detector and sodium amytal tests to convince the press ("calls and inimidations from news people escalated ... ") and filled out a sworn affidavit before testifying.
He also spoke to Congressman Solomon, who was "adamant." As an "ex-Marine," said Solomon, "I won't believe any of this."
"As the questioning progressed during my two hour testimony, I began to feel cornered," Barnes wrote. "I heard someone behind me whisper, 'Oh, God, NO!"
Barnes was given two hours to testify on the logistics of a covert postwar underground of military and intelligence officers engaged in the drug trade. He explained that some of them had been apprehended and were held captive in Southeast Asian prison camps.
Scott Barnes: "In the midst of my testimony, Brian Bonnet entered and whispered in the ear of Murkowski who immediately announced, 'Excuse me, I must go to the White House.' Not long after his return, he was interrupted again, then announced, 'I should advise you that unofficially we have had word that THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER HAS BLOWN UP, and things do not look very good. I have nothing final on that but have just been advised that shortly after launching, there was an explosion. So if anybody wants to be excused, we will certainly understand.'"
Barnes, shaken but determined to speak, resumed his testimony ... but "by that time most of the senators and media people had left."1
Moments before, he had addressed a full Congressional committee and a wall of reporters. If not for the Challenger explosion, his account of CIA drug smuggling – and the abandonment of downed pilots overseas – might have made it into public print.
The Challenger explosion was investigated by another "blue ribbon" commission, this one headed up by Nixon ally and Secretary of State William Pierce Rogers, an attorney with a keen professional interest in both the CIA and the heroin industry.
Architect's rendering of the William P. Rogers Building, 2001 K Street, Washington, D.C.
As background, this was culled this from the Lake Erie Reporter:
"Harken [Oil Co., owned by GHW Bush] was connected to the drug trade, the manipulation of foreign currencies and the CIA’s efforts to destabilize the government of Argentina. Harken’s major owners were George Soros, the Harvard [University] Management Corporation, and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a Saudi investor."
William Rogers
Bakhsh was legally represented by Rogers & Wells, the New York law firm of William P. Rogers. Bakhsh "arranged for Union des Banques Swisses, to invest $25 million in the firm. The Swiss bank was connected to the corrupt banking conglomerate BCCI, which collapsed amid scandal in 1992. BCCI has been called the most corrupt bank in modern times, having financed terrorists, drug dealers, and various covert operations."2
Rewind to 1986, Scott Barnes and his explosive Senate testimony. Recall that when he began to wade into detail in his brief to Senator Simpson's committee, someone seated directly behind him burst out in a whisper, "Oh, God, NO!"
Someone was very anxious about the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia. Who might that be?
Barnes: "The videos of the hearing show a very restless Ann Mills Griffiths seated directly behind me."
Ms. Griffiths was the head of the National League of Families, and though she was a vocal proponent of the POW issue, her many critics maintained that she frustrated efforts to resolve the MIA question behind the scenes.
In 1993, her name surfaced in connection with Richard Childress of the Reagan-Bush National Security Council, as reported by USA Today: "A Reagan administration official secretly funneled money from a POW-MIA group seeking information on missing Americans to help anti-communist rebels in Laos, a Senate report said Wednesday. Richard Childress, a National Security Council staffer, channeled the money during the early 1980s operation... Childress received about $200,000 working with Ann Mills Griffiths, head of the POW-MIA group, the National League of Families, and John LeBoutillier, a former New York Republican congressman.
"The operation 'sounds like a dry run' for the Iran-contra affair, said Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator. ...''3
The NSC's Dick Childress was another ne'er-do-well involved in the importation of heroin from Laos.4 And the Challenger explosion occurred at the very moment testimony about heroin smuggling was heard in Senate chambers.
Could this be a factor in the concurrent timing of the Challenger disaster? Political researcher Mae Brussell provided details of the launch and posited that the Challenger explosion was premeditated:
"Memorandum detailing a 'catastrophic' disaster if the shuttle was launched in less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit was presented to NASA in July 1985, and again in August 1985 by two different scientists. Did NASA, and the Pentagon, select the time when they demanded a lunch on the coldest day in shuttle history?
"The Challenger shuttle, unlike any other launch, waited outside in rain and cold for 38 days. Television cameras focused upon the ice coating and huge icicles at the time of the launch. Ice teams were sent out to 'check.'
"It was not always cold at Cape Canaveral. The Rogers Commission limited their public inquiry into launching decisions to the evening of January 27th and the morning of the 28th of January 1986. Plans for an earlier launch on Saturday, January 25th, 1986 were postponed because of dust storms in Africa and Morocco. It is interesting that the weather, so far away, was conveyed to the launch team at the top of the their pyramid. The same decision makers couldn't see ice, or feel freezing temperature around them at Cape Canaveral.
"It was not a matter of seeing or feeling the cold.... Challenger would leave on the morning of January 28, 1986. Weather was not a factor considered, then or now.
"Robert Lund, Vice President for Engineering at Morton Thiokol, the company who made the controversial solid fuel boosters, was told to "stop making an engineering decision." ... The other hat was military. Lund changed directions and took orders. Life is cheap for the Pentagon.
"Sunday turned out to be a fine day for a launch. Was there too much media competition with the Super bowl Sunday, with Reagan's 'teacher in space' production, after two years of publicity? The hundreds of press, teachers, and students waiting at Cape Canaveral, could have seen a fine launch on Sunday, Monday afternoon or even Tuesday afternoon when it was much
warmer.
"NASA officials had been alerted by Sunday that a cold front was coming in Monday night or Tuesday for sure. Indications were that weather was always a factor in safely launching a shuttle."5
It was "the coldest day in shuttle history," and yet Challenger launched... And Barnes returned to California, an obscure DEA contract agent completely unaware that had his testimony on the CIA and drugs had the potential of wiping out the prospects of two future occupiers of the Oval office, GHW Bush and son. At the very least, the CIA would have had its feet put to the fire one more time. And should the name "Childress" have emerged, the Iran-contra investigation would likely have focused on heroin, not hostages.
••••••••••••••
NOTES
1) Scott Barnes, BOHICA, BOHICA Corporation, Canton, Ohio, 1987, pp. 195-204.
2) "Bush Watch," http://mysite.verizon.net/resox2t6/thelakeeriereporter/
id2.html
3) Carol J. Castaneda, "Misuse of funds alleged," USA TODAY, January 14, 1993, p. 13-A.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:LbcaB_pQ3YgJ:listserv.
dom.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe%3FA2%3Dind9606%26L%3Dstumpers
-l%26P%3D18425+ann+mills+griffiths+and+nixon&hl=en&gl
=us&ct=clnk&cd=8
4) See, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/POW.html
5) Mae Brussell, "NASA'S CHALLENGER, R.I.P. January 28, 1986."
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/vm,mb,challengerRIP,2,3,03.htm
"Islamo-Fascism" is an "Inaccurate and Xenophobic" Term: "Terrorism Awareness" Project - The 21st Century's Red Scare Movement
by Frank J. Ranellihttp://www.opednews.com
A radical faction of the right is attempting to reconstitute McCarthyism in the 21st century by spreading exaggerated falsehoods to college campuses, eschewing accuracy and espousing hysteria about Islam and the honest threat of terrorism. Their aim is simple: Envelope the next generation of young minds under the umbrella of constant panic and indoctrinate them with deceptive and ignorant fear.
The last bastion of Bush proffers has once again trotted out a long ago debunked, inaccurate and xenophobic phrase, "islamo-fascists", once glibly coined by Donald Rumsfeld. Calling their cause, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a radical right alarmist group called, the Terrorism Awareness Project, wants to use old fashion fear and propaganda to persuade college students into this histrionic idea: that amorphous, rogue cells of terrorists operating in the Middle East are, “the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted.”
Now consider these alternatives to so-called “islamo-fascists.” Hitler killed all total 12 million Jews, dissenters and infirmed people, amassed a state-sponsored, mechanical-backed army of millions that wreaked havoc on numerous continents for 12 years. Stalin held the world’s collective stage hostage under a repressive regime replete with thousands of nuclear missiles that came within minutes of incendiary obliteration of the Earth, as we know it.
When in view of the heinous atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, the demagoguery and utter mendacity of the Terrorism Awareness Project should immediately be dismissed. Yet, over two million misinformed and deluded people have visited their site just this year alone. Adding to the sensational theatrics this fringe group is trying to propagate across college campuses are wild assertions such as “the academic left has mobilized to create sympathy for the enemy” and “the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever - Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.”
Claiming to have organized speaking engagements at over 200 campuses, through the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Terrorism Awareness Project has lined up a premier delicatessen of right-winged demagogue polemicists. The astounding list is as distinguished as is the disingenuous message they tout. Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Melanie Morgan and Rick Santorum are but a few of the invited partisan hacks and hypocrites who plan to extol the virtues of the Terrorism Awareness Project and proclaim terrorism is a greater threat to America than global warming is to the world at large.
TAP donation appealIncredulously, this group of firebrand, paranoid propagandists tenaciously tries again to tie Saddam Hussein with the attacks on September 11, 2001. They also falsely claim Iraq was a “second base of terror” long before American forces destabilized that country and provided the catalyst of chaos under which a new and minority faction of unconnected Al Qaeda groups formed.
Flagrant and desperate, the entire website is filled with intimidating and goading terms as well as foreboding phrases. “Islamo-facism”, “apologists for radical Islam” and “anti-Americans who are part of today’s academic environment”, litters the site and sends any rational mind reeling. The inanity and outright obtuse mindset of these shrinking-violets, who found the Cold War ostensibly a minor infraction, can only be realized by visiting the website of the Terrorism Awareness Project. Only then, after a thorough examination, can the full effects of the use of scare tactics and the unnecessary consternation be realized.
Reminding the reader beforehand, that the attacks on 9/11 occurred during the Bush administration - and that same President smugly dismissed a daily presidential briefing entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike” - do we find instead the old saw that “Clinton did it” amongst the many other apocryphal allegations.
To make the point that the endeavor of this organization is reckless and insipid, certainly a platitude, might seem wasted to the other 219 million Americans who have already rejected the Bush doctrine of fear. Furthermore, only 27% of Americans now - Bush’s unshakeable and dutiful base - find the initiative of democracy through a climate of unwarranted fear anything less than odious. However, exposure is the best sanitizer and it ensures that imprudent groups, such as the Terrorism Awareness Project, are brought under the spotlight for scrutiny and proper dismissal as anxiety-ridden, provocative hacks.
To be clear, everyone lucid person should be offended by blatant suggestions that academics are undesirables or that the vast majority of Americans somehow just “don’t understand” the enormity of the specious adversary we face. Reasoned Americans do not endorse or express sympathy to any deed of extremism or group of fanatics, including the Terrorism Awareness Project.
Quite simply, the time has come for all Americans to choose reason, restraint and modesty, over the present zeitgeist of aggression and extreme nationalism, shrouded in obedience through panic and fear, brought upon us by the Bush regime.
_________________________________________________________
Sources: Terrorism Awareness Project, http://www.terrorismawareness.org/; Also see: Defining Fascism, Then and Now
http://www.ranellirants.blogspot.com/
Frank J. Ranelli is a progressive, free-lance political writer and Internet talk show host. His current journalism endeavors to educate people on the dangers of the Bush Administration, the Religious Right, and the unlawful occupation of Iraq. In addition, he is an ardent advocate for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. His writing has been well-received and widely published in a variety of news outlets and across the Internet. His "smartly-written and imagery-invoking" articles have earned him such praise as, "Written with directness, strength, passion...It's great when it smacks, glares, grabs one!" -Ms. Joyce Benedict, Park Guide for FDR Historic Site
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_frank_j__070926_the_terrorism_awaren.htm
Mesa Man was Nazi SS Guard; Neighbor Survived Same Camp
JJ Hensley
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 22, 2007 12:00 AM
Martin Hartmann has been a soldier, typesetter, father and friend. This week, the Department of Justice said the Mesa resident was also a war criminal.
Hartmann, 88, voluntarily left the country Aug. 31, after reaching an agreement with the Justice Department to turn over his passport and naturalization papers. The decision followed a two-year investigation into his past as an armed Nazi SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.
His departure left friends and neighbors in the Leisure World retirement community in east Mesa stunned. But one man knew his secret.
Nathan Gasch, 83, had been in Hartmann's home years ago and saw, hanging on the wall, a photo of a man in an SS uniform. The man was Hartmann, and Gasch recognized the uniform because he had been a prisoner in the same camp in 1944.
Gasch walked out of the house and never mentioned it, and the men even worked on home-improvement projects and exchanged pleasantries in German over the years.
"I was flabbergasted," he said after learning Hartmann was back in Germany.
Next door to Gasch, Ellen Hartmann wonders how her seemingly-idyllic life could have fallen apart so quickly.
"I'm just devastated," said Ellen, 85.
Her husband is staying with family in Berlin, Ellen said, and she plans to join him there next month.
1944 Germany
That's where their relationship started more than 60 years ago.
In 1944, Martin was a young Nazi soldier and Ellen was a 17-year-old girl working at the Red Cross. Their second date was in a bunker in Berlin as bombs went off overhead.
"He was a young man from Romania, and instead of fighting against the Germans, he was in the SS," Ellen said. "When you're coming from Romania and the Russians want to take you and make you fight against the Germans, would you do that if you were German?"
Martin chose to go with the Nazis and ultimately served as a guard at Sachsenhausen, a death camp where the Germans killed an estimated 35,000 people.
"He didn't know what was going on. How did he know what was going on?" Ellen said. "I didn't know anything about Sachsenhausen, and here I grew up in Berlin. We just thought it was regular prisoners like here, in Florence, they have prisoners. Why would you think anything else?"
But officials with the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, a division created in 1979 to pursue war criminals, said Martin Hartmann knew what was happening.
Pursuit of war criminals
The OSI has a team of historians who comb through countless documents, checking names on SS member rosters with U.S. immigration records and pursuing cases when they get a match. In the past 15 years, the office has investigated more than 50 cases and only three have come from outside tips, OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum said.
Rosenbaum wouldn't comment on Hartmann's case but said the OSI pursues a case when agents find someone who participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution.
"Obviously, we are interested in people who were something more than just soldiers," Rosenbaum said. "They had to have participated somehow in Nazi-directed or Nazi-sponsored persecution."
Hartmann had the option to enlist in combat duty or work as a concentration-camp guard when he signed up for duty, said Edgar Chen, an OSI attorney who investigated the case.
SS soldiers had opportunities to transfer once they arrived at the camps, Rosenbaum said.
"There was no request for transfer in this case," he said.
To Holocaust survivors, that means Hartmann should be held responsible for the atrocities they suffered with their family members during the war.
"If he was what they think he was, he should get the punishment," Gasch said. "It's not that he's 88 or 84 or whatever. Anytime is the proper time."
Helen Handler has spent the past 20 years speaking to schoolchildren and in public meetings about the need to remember the horrors of the Holocaust. She said she could never forget the way SS guards, male and female, treated the prisoners she was with at Auschwitz.
"Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Hitler never killed a Jew. He had people like (Hartmann) doing that, and doing that with pleasure," said Handler, who survived Auschwitz but lost her family there.
"This man lives here in peace since 1955 and enjoys all the privileges that our boys from here were dying for. He enjoys the freedoms that he was fighting against," said Handler, a Phoenix resident "Our boys got hurt and got killed for it, and all you have to do is see the cemeteries in Europe. There they lie, and he was enjoying this country's golden, peaceful privileges."
Typical American life
Hartmann's life since his arrival in U.S. was, in fact, typically American.
Martin and Ellen Hartmann came to America in 1955, courtesy of the Lutheran World Federation, Ellen said, though Justice Department officials said Hartmann concealed his Nazi involvement to enter the country.
They settled in Mankato, Minn., before moving to Helena, Mont., Ellen said, where Martin worked as a typesetter and printer before mastering computers.
The couple bought a winter home in Leisure World in 1987 and moved to the area permanently a few years ago, where the Hartmanns planned to live out their days.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0922mesanazi0922.html
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 22, 2007 12:00 AM
Martin Hartmann has been a soldier, typesetter, father and friend. This week, the Department of Justice said the Mesa resident was also a war criminal.
Hartmann, 88, voluntarily left the country Aug. 31, after reaching an agreement with the Justice Department to turn over his passport and naturalization papers. The decision followed a two-year investigation into his past as an armed Nazi SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin.
His departure left friends and neighbors in the Leisure World retirement community in east Mesa stunned. But one man knew his secret.
Nathan Gasch, 83, had been in Hartmann's home years ago and saw, hanging on the wall, a photo of a man in an SS uniform. The man was Hartmann, and Gasch recognized the uniform because he had been a prisoner in the same camp in 1944.
Gasch walked out of the house and never mentioned it, and the men even worked on home-improvement projects and exchanged pleasantries in German over the years.
"I was flabbergasted," he said after learning Hartmann was back in Germany.
Next door to Gasch, Ellen Hartmann wonders how her seemingly-idyllic life could have fallen apart so quickly.
"I'm just devastated," said Ellen, 85.
Her husband is staying with family in Berlin, Ellen said, and she plans to join him there next month.
1944 Germany
That's where their relationship started more than 60 years ago.
In 1944, Martin was a young Nazi soldier and Ellen was a 17-year-old girl working at the Red Cross. Their second date was in a bunker in Berlin as bombs went off overhead.
"He was a young man from Romania, and instead of fighting against the Germans, he was in the SS," Ellen said. "When you're coming from Romania and the Russians want to take you and make you fight against the Germans, would you do that if you were German?"
Martin chose to go with the Nazis and ultimately served as a guard at Sachsenhausen, a death camp where the Germans killed an estimated 35,000 people.
"He didn't know what was going on. How did he know what was going on?" Ellen said. "I didn't know anything about Sachsenhausen, and here I grew up in Berlin. We just thought it was regular prisoners like here, in Florence, they have prisoners. Why would you think anything else?"
But officials with the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, a division created in 1979 to pursue war criminals, said Martin Hartmann knew what was happening.
Pursuit of war criminals
The OSI has a team of historians who comb through countless documents, checking names on SS member rosters with U.S. immigration records and pursuing cases when they get a match. In the past 15 years, the office has investigated more than 50 cases and only three have come from outside tips, OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum said.
Rosenbaum wouldn't comment on Hartmann's case but said the OSI pursues a case when agents find someone who participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution.
"Obviously, we are interested in people who were something more than just soldiers," Rosenbaum said. "They had to have participated somehow in Nazi-directed or Nazi-sponsored persecution."
Hartmann had the option to enlist in combat duty or work as a concentration-camp guard when he signed up for duty, said Edgar Chen, an OSI attorney who investigated the case.
SS soldiers had opportunities to transfer once they arrived at the camps, Rosenbaum said.
"There was no request for transfer in this case," he said.
To Holocaust survivors, that means Hartmann should be held responsible for the atrocities they suffered with their family members during the war.
"If he was what they think he was, he should get the punishment," Gasch said. "It's not that he's 88 or 84 or whatever. Anytime is the proper time."
Helen Handler has spent the past 20 years speaking to schoolchildren and in public meetings about the need to remember the horrors of the Holocaust. She said she could never forget the way SS guards, male and female, treated the prisoners she was with at Auschwitz.
"Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Hitler never killed a Jew. He had people like (Hartmann) doing that, and doing that with pleasure," said Handler, who survived Auschwitz but lost her family there.
"This man lives here in peace since 1955 and enjoys all the privileges that our boys from here were dying for. He enjoys the freedoms that he was fighting against," said Handler, a Phoenix resident "Our boys got hurt and got killed for it, and all you have to do is see the cemeteries in Europe. There they lie, and he was enjoying this country's golden, peaceful privileges."
Typical American life
Hartmann's life since his arrival in U.S. was, in fact, typically American.
Martin and Ellen Hartmann came to America in 1955, courtesy of the Lutheran World Federation, Ellen said, though Justice Department officials said Hartmann concealed his Nazi involvement to enter the country.
They settled in Mankato, Minn., before moving to Helena, Mont., Ellen said, where Martin worked as a typesetter and printer before mastering computers.
The couple bought a winter home in Leisure World in 1987 and moved to the area permanently a few years ago, where the Hartmanns planned to live out their days.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0922mesanazi0922.html
Six Arkansas Nuns Excommunicated for Heresy
By ANDREW DeMILLO Associated Press Writer
News Fuze
09/26/2007
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Six Catholic nuns have been excommunicated for heresy after refusing to give up membership in a Canadian sect whose founder claims to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, the Diocese of Little Rock announced Wednesday.
The Rev. J. Gaston Hebert, the diocese administrator, said he notified the nuns of the decision Tuesday night after they refused to recant the teachings of the Community of the Lady of All Nations, also known as the Army of Mary.
The Vatican has declared all members of the Army of Mary excommunicated. Hebert said the excommunication was the first in the diocese's 165-year history.
"It is a painfully historic moment for this church," Hebert said.
The six nuns are associated with the Good Shepherd Monastery of Our Lady of Charity and Refuge in Hot Springs. Sister Mary Theresa Dionne, one of the nuns excommunicated, said the nuns will still live at the convent property, which they own.
"We are at peace and we know that for us we are doing the right thing," the 82-year-old nun said. "We pray that the church will open their eyes before it is too late. This is God's work through Mary, the blessed mother, and we're doing what we're asked to do."
At a news conference, Hebert said the nuns "became entranced and deluded with a doctrine that is heretical." He said church officials removed the sacraments from the monastery on Tuesday night.
Hebert said the sect's members believe that its founder, Marie Paule Giguere, is the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary and that God speaks directly through her.
Excommunication bars the nuns from participating in the church liturgy and receiving communion or other sacraments.
The diocese said the action was taken after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration that the Army of Mary's teachings were heretical and automatically excommunicated any who embraced the doctrine.
Hebert said the diocese had known for years that the nuns were following the sect and said church officials in the past had encouraged them to come back into the fold.
According to the Catholic News Service, the Army of Mary was founded in Quebec in 1971 by Giguere, who said she was receiving visions from God.
Dionne said she does not know if Giguere is the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, but said she believes God communicates through the sect's founder.
"She is doing only what God and Mary tells her to do," Dionne said.
Calls made to a spokesman for the Army of Mary in Quebec were answered by a fax machine tone.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/nationandworld/ci_7006409
News Fuze
09/26/2007
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Six Catholic nuns have been excommunicated for heresy after refusing to give up membership in a Canadian sect whose founder claims to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, the Diocese of Little Rock announced Wednesday.
The Rev. J. Gaston Hebert, the diocese administrator, said he notified the nuns of the decision Tuesday night after they refused to recant the teachings of the Community of the Lady of All Nations, also known as the Army of Mary.
The Vatican has declared all members of the Army of Mary excommunicated. Hebert said the excommunication was the first in the diocese's 165-year history.
"It is a painfully historic moment for this church," Hebert said.
The six nuns are associated with the Good Shepherd Monastery of Our Lady of Charity and Refuge in Hot Springs. Sister Mary Theresa Dionne, one of the nuns excommunicated, said the nuns will still live at the convent property, which they own.
"We are at peace and we know that for us we are doing the right thing," the 82-year-old nun said. "We pray that the church will open their eyes before it is too late. This is God's work through Mary, the blessed mother, and we're doing what we're asked to do."
At a news conference, Hebert said the nuns "became entranced and deluded with a doctrine that is heretical." He said church officials removed the sacraments from the monastery on Tuesday night.
Hebert said the sect's members believe that its founder, Marie Paule Giguere, is the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary and that God speaks directly through her.
Excommunication bars the nuns from participating in the church liturgy and receiving communion or other sacraments.
The diocese said the action was taken after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration that the Army of Mary's teachings were heretical and automatically excommunicated any who embraced the doctrine.
Hebert said the diocese had known for years that the nuns were following the sect and said church officials in the past had encouraged them to come back into the fold.
According to the Catholic News Service, the Army of Mary was founded in Quebec in 1971 by Giguere, who said she was receiving visions from God.
Dionne said she does not know if Giguere is the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, but said she believes God communicates through the sect's founder.
"She is doing only what God and Mary tells her to do," Dionne said.
Calls made to a spokesman for the Army of Mary in Quebec were answered by a fax machine tone.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/nationandworld/ci_7006409
Ghosts in the Wind (Case File #7): Story Behind Apparent Chicago Suicide Can't be Pried Open
chicagotribune.comTribune staff report
September 16, 2007
Suicides are always mysteries.
What convergence of moment and mood convinces a person that death is trouble's only exit?
Why does one person respond to pressure by choosing the void while another person faced with a similar measure of loss, shame or fear slogs on through life?
The questions come to mind in the case of Orlando Jones, a name most of us probably didn't know until last week when he was found dead with a gun in his hand and a gunshot wound in his head on a lakefront beach in Michigan.
The names of the players in Cook County government don't trip readily off the average Chicago tongue, unless the name is Stroger. Beyond some details about John, the father, and Todd, the son who inherited Dad's job, all the average person could probably tell you about the Stroger fiefdom is that it seems chronically a mess.
Orlando Jones, as any news consumer now knows, was a minor but significant player in the messy fiefdom.A balding, full-faced, mustachioed man of 52, Jones was one of those political people you may have seen in the news but never really looked at. He was unlikely to be in the center of the picture.
Stories about his apparent suicide have called him variously a one-time political insider, a political fixture, politically connected, a top aide and a small fish. John Stroger made him his godson and, later, when Stroger was elected County Board president, his chief of staff.
The stories have been careful to use the word "apparent" about his suicide, though there doesn't seem to be any real doubt about how he died.
Along with the gun in his hand, there was a note in a desk drawer that his wife found in their Chicago home. It stipulated how his affairs should be handled when he was gone.
But another of suicide's mysteries is this: Exactly what happened is unlikely to be discovered, even if the clues add up.
Suicides are almost always private. In a murder, the killer is the witness. In a suicide, in general, the only witness is the victim.
And as often as not, friends and relatives are so shocked and baffled that they're disbelieving. We prefer to think that suicide follows conspicuous depression or distress; otherwise the ultimate drastic act is even harder to fathom.
"I'm not saying there's foul play involved," Jones' lawyer, Robert Stephenson, told the Tribune. "I'm telling you if he did take his own life, there were demons haunting him that I was totally unaware of."
Jones and his lawyer had met on Tuesday to talk about an investigation by Las Vegas police that connected Jones to an alleged phony billing scheme at a public hospital there. The FBI had also recently asked to talk to Jones, though he had declined.
But he hadn't been charged with anything, and his lawyer said he seemed fine the day before he died; he talked about the future.
Because Jones wasn't particularly well-known, his death has not been greeted by any great public mourning. His apparent suicide made news because of who he knew, not who he was.
To the public, Jones' death is mostly a tale of politics, with enough whiff of mystery tossed in to make the politics more interesting.
The Stroger regime is known for its hints of secrets and skulduggery, and a suicide by a close ally makes a good plot for a public addicted to "Law & Order" and "CSI."
But it's worth pausing to remember that whatever else Jones may have been, he was a father and a husband and a friend. He was a man with the dream of a vacation home near the serene beach where he died.
The real mystery he leaves behind may be no darker than the one that lingers after any suicide: If he had only waited out the moment's desperation, would he be glad to still be alive?
www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-schmich_16_bdsep16,0,7095354.story
•••••••••••••
ENTER WILLIAM BLAIR & CO.
WILLIAM BLAIR & CO.? ...
" ... William graduated from Groton School in 1903, and received a BA from Yale in 1907. At Yale, he was a member of SKULL AND BONES. His son, Bowen Blair notes that Skull and Bones were most eager to have him among their ranks. ... "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Blair
"PAUL D WOLFOWITZ - Senior adviser, William Blair & Co."
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2002/Bush-Intersecting-Careers11sep02.htm
" ... Defense Secretary DONALD H. RUMSFELD, whose first campaign for Congress in 1962 was managed by Edgar Jannotta of WILLIAM BLAIR & CO., and who was a senior advisor to that firm from 1985-1990, is a former director of Amylin. ... "http://www.smokershistory.com/McCormic.htm
In the mid-'70s:
RUMSFELD, DONALD H ESQ
CHICAGO, IL 60603
WILLIAM BLAIR & COMPANY
http://www.newsmeat.com/washington_political_donations/Donald_Rumsfeld.php
" ... When Ford was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Rumsfeld headed for the corporate world after a brief flirtation with lecturing at Princeton, his alma mater. ... He's also served as a senior adviser to investment bank William Blair & Co. and as a director of various other firms. ... "
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Inauguration/story?id=122155
Stroger's godson's sweet dealTop aide to former president now pulls in hundreds of thousands for job done in '04
Chicago Sun-Times
September 13, 2007
Orlando Jones' sweet government deal just got sweeter -- by about $75,000 a year.
Jones is a godson and former top aide to former Cook County Board President John Stroger. He also once worked for politically connected developer Tony Rezko, who is under indictment on corruption charges.
These days, Jones is a consultant and lobbyist whose clients include William Blair & Co., a Chicago financial firm that pays him a six-figure "referral fee" every year -- for a job he did in 2004.
Now, Jones stands to grow even richer from the deal. Here's how:
The Illinois State Board of Investment oversees retirement funds for state employees, lawmakers and judges. In 2004, the state agency invested $280 million with the William Blair firm.
Orlando Jones & Associates is making money off that arrangement because Jones told state pension officials about William Blair's services. He made the introduction.
For that, Jones got 20 percent of the management fees the state paid William Blair in the first year of the deal. Jones' cut: $221,852, records show.
In year 2, Jones was to get 15 percent of William Blair's fees. That came to $219,668.
Year 3, Jones got 10 percent -- $149,609.
Year 4 is off to an even better start. Jones is to get 10 percent of William Blair's fees every year the firm continues to do business with the pension board. This summer, the state board gave William Blair more money to invest, bringing the total to $505 million.
When William Blair gets more money, so does Jones. His referral fee stands to net him about $224,000 this year, his biggest payday yet.
A William Blair spokesman didn't want to comment. Jones didn't return telephone calls over the past few weeks, either.
But he defended the arrangement in an interview in 2005, saying he's worked with William Blair on pension deals across the country and is paid only when the firm gets business.
And what exactly does he do for his six-figure annuity?
"I help them in terms of how we're going to make presentations to various pension boards and executive directors -- how we lay out our performance and experience," Jones said.
Chris Fusco
http://www.suntimes.com/news/watchdogs/555294,CST-NWS-watchdog13.article
••••••••••••••
MORE ON THE BLAIRS, LASKER FOUNDATION
The Mrs. William McCormick Blair Jr.
Catherine Gerlach Blair, Vice President and a director of the Lasker Foundation
"Greased by old Chicago ties, Deeda Blair and Mary Lasker became close, and, in 1965, Deeda was named a director and vice-president of the Lasker Foundation.... Through her association with Mary Lasker, Deeda Blair's influence became enormous, too. She was appointed to boards and committees affiliated with organizations from Duke University's Comprehensive Cancer Center to the Harvard School of Public Health, to Rockefeller University to the American Cancer Society. At one time or another she has sat on some of the most prestigious boards and committees in the world of biological research. ... She was Mary Lasker's connection to Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Elliot Richardson in the Nixon administration (pp 92-93). "She is still the one person in the world who can sit next to the catwalks of Paris during the spring shows, put the arm on a few of the 500 or so women who regularly support couture by purchasing dresses priced about the same as a BMW, and come back with a quarter of a million dollars for a new DNA sequencing machine for somebody's lab. 'Deeda could walk through the NIH and everybody would genuflect,' an acquaintance told me (p. 94." (Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion. By Brian Alexander. Basic Books, 2003.)
http://www.smokershistory.com/McCormic.htm
" ... the University of Chicago, where William Blair & Co. partners are very influential on the Board of Trustees. ... "
http://www.smokershistory.com/Tisch.htm
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Podhoretz secretly urged Bush to bomb Iran
www.politico.com
By: David Paul Kuhn
September 24, 2007
President Bush and Karl Rove sat listening to Norman Podhoretz for roughly 45 minutes at the White House as the patriarch of neoconservatism argued that the United States should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The meeting was not on the president’s public schedule.
Rove was silent throughout, though he took notes. The president listened diligently, Podhoretz said as he recounted the conversation months later, but he “didn’t tip his hand.”
“I did say to [the president], that people ask: Why are you spending all this time negotiating sanctions? Time is passing. I said, my friend [Robert] Kagan wrote a column which he said you were giving ‘futility its chance.’ And both he and Karl Rove burst out laughing.
“It struck me,” Podhoretz added, “that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, ‘No, no, it’s not futile, there’s a very good chance.’ ”
Podhoretz walked out of the meeting neither deterred nor assured the president would attack the Persian state.
Yet prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York for the United Nations’ General Assembly, Podhoretz said he believes that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before the end of his presidency.
His assumption is based on intellectual instinct.
If Podhoretz were merely another old man of the chattering class, his intellectual instincts would hardly be worth pondering. But Podhoretz, after a half-century in argument, remains fiercely relevant.
He is a senior foreign policy adviser to Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani. He participates in weekly conference calls with the campaign and says he is in constant contact via e-mail with the foreign policy team. The meeting with the president was at Podhoretz’s request.
No less a figure than Rush Limbaugh said on Wednesday, during his radio show, that Podhoretz’s most recent book is “a no-holds-barred, brilliant explanation of just what we face around the world, not just here in our country.”
That book, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” is not so much a study of the “Islamofascism” he argues Americans must fight, as it is a treatise justifying his own fight. He indicts the foes of neoconservatism (of which there are many), and defends the Bush doctrine of pre-emption (a task few would attempt today).
Podhoretz sometimes seems to be the last neoconservative still in the political arena.
One of the movement’s formative minds, Francis Fukuyama, has recanted. Paul Wolfowitz ingloriously left the White House and was later pushed off the world stage, quite literally, after his brief stint leading the World Bank.
Dick Cheney, their consummate paleoconservative ally, has seen his influence over the president diminish.
Then there is Iraq.
If an idea is only as good as its implementation, the protracted war in Iraq has left neoconservatives struggling to prove they had a good idea.
Undeterred, Podhoretz plods onward. He remains the unabashed hawk. History will redeem him, Iraq and this president, Podhoretz asserts.
“When this war’s won — I don’t say if, I say when; I am uncharacteristically optimistic — what will happen is the political configuration of the entire region will be changed,” he insisted.
“That will involve a replacement of all the despotisms with regimes that are on the way to becoming free societies.”
This was a characteristic neoconservative comment in 2003, at the outset of the war in Iraq.
But Podhoretz is still saying it four years later, sitting in his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment between pictures of his grandchildren and the archives of Commentary, where he was the editor for 35 years.
The nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is framed in his living room. Bush bestowed it in 2004, at the very time that Democrats were attacking him for a war that was not going as advertised.
Podhoretz now finds himself defending both the rosy picture he and fellow neoconservatives painted in the run-up to war, as well as the reasons America has been involved in it longer now than World War II.
It is world war that dominates Podhoretz’s work today. He argues that World War III was the Cold War and that World War IV is the war on terrorism, a view echoed by the likes of Clinton-era CIA Director James Woolsey.
Only when the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are understood as one larger conflict, Podhoretz argues, can one grasp the gravity of the struggle before the United States.
The Bush Doctrine — as he summarizes it, “to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy” — puts democratization at the top of the agenda.
During the Cold War containment was the priority; democracy was secondary. Neoconservatives, by contrast, argue that democracy is a means to an end.
Perhaps ironically, democracy may be one of the great impediments to Podhoretz’s getting his way. A good portion of his book is devoted to arguing why the president should press on despite the domestic unpopularity of the war in Iraq — effectively short-circuiting democracy here in America.
He does acknowledge that after Vietnam, Americans became impatient with war, especially when it seems mismanaged and ill-conceived (which he argues Iraq was not).
Still, Podhoretz says, “We have to find a way to fight the war with the people we now are.”
Podhoretz cannot be dismissed as an ideological outlier. Despite a majority of Americans favoring a withdrawal from Iraq, a substantial minority subscribe to his argument that the war there is part of a larger one.
As recently as this summer, according to the Gallup Poll, 44 percent of Americans considered the war in Iraq “to be part of the war on terrorism which began on Sept. 11, 2001.”
But when he details his worldview, he severs himself from the bulk of foreign policy wonks, both conservative and liberal.
Podhoretz argues the war in Iraq has not empowered Iran. He believes that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons, but they were likely shipped out to Syria. And, says the man with the ear of the current and possibly next president, the war in Iraq is a success.
“The seeds of this democratization are planted,” as Podhoretz describes Iraq. “The opposition to this process of democratization turned out to be much more ferocious than anybody anticipated, including me. So it took a while for our people to learn how to deal with it,” he continued.
The greatest proof that Podhoretz is right, he insisted, is the very intensity of attacks in Iraq.
“If the enemy of that process [of democratization] thought it was a failure, they wouldn’t be blowing themselves up to frustrate it or derail it,” he argued.
“They agree that this is not only happening, but that it is a danger to them. They agree with Bush. They agree with me,” Podhoretz chuckled.
“That’s why they are fighting so hard.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5964.htmlC5B7896F8
By: David Paul Kuhn
September 24, 2007
President Bush and Karl Rove sat listening to Norman Podhoretz for roughly 45 minutes at the White House as the patriarch of neoconservatism argued that the United States should bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The meeting was not on the president’s public schedule.
Rove was silent throughout, though he took notes. The president listened diligently, Podhoretz said as he recounted the conversation months later, but he “didn’t tip his hand.”
“I did say to [the president], that people ask: Why are you spending all this time negotiating sanctions? Time is passing. I said, my friend [Robert] Kagan wrote a column which he said you were giving ‘futility its chance.’ And both he and Karl Rove burst out laughing.
“It struck me,” Podhoretz added, “that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, ‘No, no, it’s not futile, there’s a very good chance.’ ”
Podhoretz walked out of the meeting neither deterred nor assured the president would attack the Persian state.
Yet prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to New York for the United Nations’ General Assembly, Podhoretz said he believes that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before the end of his presidency.
His assumption is based on intellectual instinct.
If Podhoretz were merely another old man of the chattering class, his intellectual instincts would hardly be worth pondering. But Podhoretz, after a half-century in argument, remains fiercely relevant.
He is a senior foreign policy adviser to Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani. He participates in weekly conference calls with the campaign and says he is in constant contact via e-mail with the foreign policy team. The meeting with the president was at Podhoretz’s request.
No less a figure than Rush Limbaugh said on Wednesday, during his radio show, that Podhoretz’s most recent book is “a no-holds-barred, brilliant explanation of just what we face around the world, not just here in our country.”
That book, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” is not so much a study of the “Islamofascism” he argues Americans must fight, as it is a treatise justifying his own fight. He indicts the foes of neoconservatism (of which there are many), and defends the Bush doctrine of pre-emption (a task few would attempt today).
Podhoretz sometimes seems to be the last neoconservative still in the political arena.
One of the movement’s formative minds, Francis Fukuyama, has recanted. Paul Wolfowitz ingloriously left the White House and was later pushed off the world stage, quite literally, after his brief stint leading the World Bank.
Dick Cheney, their consummate paleoconservative ally, has seen his influence over the president diminish.
Then there is Iraq.
If an idea is only as good as its implementation, the protracted war in Iraq has left neoconservatives struggling to prove they had a good idea.
Undeterred, Podhoretz plods onward. He remains the unabashed hawk. History will redeem him, Iraq and this president, Podhoretz asserts.
“When this war’s won — I don’t say if, I say when; I am uncharacteristically optimistic — what will happen is the political configuration of the entire region will be changed,” he insisted.
“That will involve a replacement of all the despotisms with regimes that are on the way to becoming free societies.”
This was a characteristic neoconservative comment in 2003, at the outset of the war in Iraq.
But Podhoretz is still saying it four years later, sitting in his Upper East Side Manhattan apartment between pictures of his grandchildren and the archives of Commentary, where he was the editor for 35 years.
The nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, is framed in his living room. Bush bestowed it in 2004, at the very time that Democrats were attacking him for a war that was not going as advertised.
Podhoretz now finds himself defending both the rosy picture he and fellow neoconservatives painted in the run-up to war, as well as the reasons America has been involved in it longer now than World War II.
It is world war that dominates Podhoretz’s work today. He argues that World War III was the Cold War and that World War IV is the war on terrorism, a view echoed by the likes of Clinton-era CIA Director James Woolsey.
Only when the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are understood as one larger conflict, Podhoretz argues, can one grasp the gravity of the struggle before the United States.
The Bush Doctrine — as he summarizes it, “to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy” — puts democratization at the top of the agenda.
During the Cold War containment was the priority; democracy was secondary. Neoconservatives, by contrast, argue that democracy is a means to an end.
Perhaps ironically, democracy may be one of the great impediments to Podhoretz’s getting his way. A good portion of his book is devoted to arguing why the president should press on despite the domestic unpopularity of the war in Iraq — effectively short-circuiting democracy here in America.
He does acknowledge that after Vietnam, Americans became impatient with war, especially when it seems mismanaged and ill-conceived (which he argues Iraq was not).
Still, Podhoretz says, “We have to find a way to fight the war with the people we now are.”
Podhoretz cannot be dismissed as an ideological outlier. Despite a majority of Americans favoring a withdrawal from Iraq, a substantial minority subscribe to his argument that the war there is part of a larger one.
As recently as this summer, according to the Gallup Poll, 44 percent of Americans considered the war in Iraq “to be part of the war on terrorism which began on Sept. 11, 2001.”
But when he details his worldview, he severs himself from the bulk of foreign policy wonks, both conservative and liberal.
Podhoretz argues the war in Iraq has not empowered Iran. He believes that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons, but they were likely shipped out to Syria. And, says the man with the ear of the current and possibly next president, the war in Iraq is a success.
“The seeds of this democratization are planted,” as Podhoretz describes Iraq. “The opposition to this process of democratization turned out to be much more ferocious than anybody anticipated, including me. So it took a while for our people to learn how to deal with it,” he continued.
The greatest proof that Podhoretz is right, he insisted, is the very intensity of attacks in Iraq.
“If the enemy of that process [of democratization] thought it was a failure, they wouldn’t be blowing themselves up to frustrate it or derail it,” he argued.
“They agree that this is not only happening, but that it is a danger to them. They agree with Bush. They agree with me,” Podhoretz chuckled.
“That’s why they are fighting so hard.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5964.htmlC5B7896F8
Resist “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”: Confront the Horowitz Fascists
"Islamo-Fascism" is a gross exaggeration that conceals the true source of global terrorism, a tool of domestic intelligence agencies, not of Islamic origin. Dave Emory, Daniel Hopsicker, Joe Trento, Peter Dale Scott and other researchers who promote the concept are in bed with handlers who feed them disinformation and slanted reports on terrorism, and in return provide flattery, sex and money. This gambit began before 9/11, when someone at the CIA had the bright idea to turn the research community into a propaganda front for the "Big Event." I was also brought into the game - and dropped it as soon as I realized that we were being manipulated. Most of the researchers compromised are still beating the "Islamo-Fascist" drum and turning out bogus work that scapegoats the Saudis, ala Hopsicker and Emory, who are merely conveying the same message as David Horowitz, repackaged to render it palatable to "conspiracy theorists." Anyone blaming 9/11 on "Islamo-Fascists" is an agent of the Bush administration, willingly or unconsciously, and should be challenged. - ACby Reevolution Newspaper (revolution.sfbureau [at] gmail.com )
Sep 23rd, 2007
This October 22-26, America’s fascists will attempt to make a further major step in this repressive process. They have declared an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” They are planning programs and protests at over 100 campuses, supposedly against the oppression of women under Islam and “the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West.” In fact, their aim is to rally people behind the U.S. “crusade” against the people of the world and to shut down dissent against this crusade on the campus and, by extension, more broadly throughout society.
There is an ice sheet spreading across the campuses of America. Well-known professors have lost their jobs due to their political views. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of other professors, less well-known, have been fired, denied tenure, harassed and silenced. Critical thinking is under assault; the universities are being transformed into uncontested centers of indoctrination.
This October 22-26, America’s fascists will attempt to make a further major step in this repressive process. They have declared an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” They are planning programs and protests at over 100 campuses, supposedly against the oppression of women under Islam and “the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West.” In fact, their aim is to rally people behind the U.S. “crusade” against the people of the world and to shut down dissent against this crusade on the campus and, by extension, more broadly throughout society. Coming as it does at the time of continued escalation of the Iraq war and the distinct possibility of war against Iran, the danger of this cannot be underestimated. A particular objective of “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” is to whip up reactionary sentiment and hysteria on campuses, and to provide a rallying point to further organize a fascist student movement – spreading racism, chauvinism, and intellectual conformity to reaction; hounding progressive professors and student organizations; and creating a more repressive climate on campus.
This must be confronted and opposed on every campus where it rears its head. Indeed, all people who care anything about critical thinking and academic freedom and about the issues of war, repression, racism and the oppression of women must rally together, and seek out, confront and put this whole effort on the political defensive. Horowitz’s project has to be opposed and taken as an opportunity to raise awareness of the growing danger of U.S. fascism and the reality of the fascist direction and measures being taken by those in the highest reaches of power.
What Is “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”?
Go online to revcom.us for more articles exposing David Horowitz, and on the fight to defend dissent and critical thinking on campuses. And watch the pages of Revolution newspaper and check revcom.us for more information leading up to the “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.”
The very term “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” is an attempt to frame discussion and debate in a way that forces people to choose between U.S. imperialism’s bloody crusade on the one hand, or Islamic fundamentalism on the other. Posing these as the only choices traps people in a deadly framework and logic. It ends up strengthening both of these reactionary forces, when neither represents liberation for the people.
Islamic fundamentalism is a reactionary force. Like other brands of religious literalism, it is a program full of oppressive and outmoded content: patriarchy, bigotry, religious warfare and the all-round promotion of superstition and ignorance.
But the U.S. is the far, far more aggressive, and dangerous reactionary force in the world. And those who live inside the U.S. have the particular responsibility to oppose this power. What is needed right now, on campuses and around the country (and the world) is to bring forward a movement, and critical thinking that opposes the crimes of U.S. imperialism, and, in the process, brings forward a whole different alternative—both in the imperialist countries and in the nations oppressed by imperialism.
Horowitz is threatening sit-ins against Women’s Studies departments “to protest their silence about the oppression of women in Islam.” Coming from someone who does not only support, but helps strategize with the Bush regime, this is grotesque, galling and shameless hypocrisy. This regime has taken major steps to ban not just abortion but birth control as well. And the Bush regime, and Horowitz himself, is deeply connected to their own brand of reactionary, theocratic religion: the Christian Fascist movement, which commands women to subordinate themselves to their husbands and to see their main role as breeders of children, and which has committed violence and murder against abortion providers.
Horowitz is threatening to go after “the anti-American curriculum of the tenured left” and to “teach an alternative curriculum that will arm America against the radical Jihad.” In fact, Horowitz has already led attacks on professors like Ward Churchill, known mainly for his work on exposing the U.S. genocide against Native Americans, and Norman Finkelstein, known mainly for his exposure of Israel’s crimes and its hypocritical use of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews to justify those crimes. He has published a book listing 101 “dangerous professors”—almost all of whom research and teach about the real nature of American society and whose work and views don’t “fit into” the crusade now being carried out by the U.S. government.
He is branding the Muslim Student Associations as “the enemy,” and is aiming to stir up hatred and suppression against these students. He is going after the environmentalists for supposedly raising too much concern over global warming in a way that Horowitz feels detracts from the so-called “war on terror.”
If this goes down unopposed, it will be very bad—it will mark a major new degree of chill on the ice age now descending on the universities. Instead, something different must emerge. This “week” must be confronted and opposed, and out of that must emerge a greatly heightened understanding of, and resistance to, the real fascist danger in this society.
People need to prepare to plunge into the coming controversy, seeking out these fascists and confronting them with the real facts and the truth, and in the process winning over many others. Students must step forward now, on every campus, and organize to politically confront and expose Horowitz’ campus fascists—and to change the tone and tenor on these campuses, unleashing ferment and activism, and organized resistance.
*****
Who Is David Horowitz?
Horowitz is a self-described “battering ram” against any thinking in academia that challenges a whole range of lies this system has perpetrated. As the accompanying article points out, he’s played a major role in slandering, hounding, and even ending the careers of progressive teachers.
Horowitz established his credentials with the ruling class by renouncing his involvement in the 1960s movements for social change in a series of slanderous articles, books and conferences. He “made his bones” in the ’90s, by waging a high-profile campaign against reparations for African-Americans, with the theme that Black people should be grateful for slavery! Horowitz took out huge ads in campus newspapers proclaiming this vicious lie and to this day makes it a major part of his attack.
He wrote a book on the “art of political war” that Karl Rove distributed to key Republican campaign operatives. He is a vitriolic defender of everything from the extermination of the Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people, to the savage and criminal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture of those whom this regime deems to be terrorists. He has set up a website that clamors for the arrest and imprisonment of revolutionaries, radicals, dissenters and liberals and reports every slander, rumor, lie and innuendo that comes his way. And, bankrolled from the ruling class, he has organized the falsely named “Students for Academic Freedom,” which literally takes notes on lectures and rips things out of context in an attempt to get professors who do not sufficiently bow down to the Bush agenda fired. The modern-day Nazi-type student groups inspired by Horowitz organize so-called “games” like “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” on campus.
In short, Horowitz defends every crime that this system has ever committed and is now preparing to justify even more, and to intimidate and silence any who would question or resist this.
Conservative My Ass—These People Are Nazis!
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/09/23/18449286.php
Karl Rove and American Fascism
Rove scary?: "'Yes, I am. I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ...'"
by Steven Jonas
www.dailyscare.com
Fascism can be briefly defined as: “A politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy." (If you want to see longer definitions of mine, please refer to columns of mine published on The Political Junkies.net of May 27, 2004 “On Fascism -- And The Georgites,” Jan 27, 2005 “Comparing George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler”, and February 10, 2005, “The Georgite Version of ‘Freedom and Democracy' ...
Many political obituaries have been written on Karl Rove. This is not one of them. When Dick Cheney is around, one cannot say of any other person "he is the most dangerous man in America," but Rove comes in a close second. He is hardly finished. He is simply taking a bit of a rest. But even that will not last too long. Karl Rove is too central to the success of the central forces in charge of the current incarnation of the Republican Party for him to be put out to pasture and this driven man will not willingly go into the good (or bad as the case may be) night anytime soon.
Either out-in-front or behind the scenes, Karl Rove will play a pivotal role in the 2008 election as he drives to create the Permanent Republican Presidency, his chosen political successor to the Permanent Republican Majority that he was unable to achieve. The former, however, is very much a possibility. Even for these folks who so easily convert improprieties into "proprieties," he could hardly play an active role in any Republican Presidential Campaign while still holding the title "Deputy Chief of Staff" at the White House. To be active in 2008, he had to leave now. Just like virtually everything else that goes on in the BushCheney Administration, this one was most likely fully stage-managed among the three of them (and maybe Josh Bolton).
He would likely go to the potentially highest bidder. That would be Romney, who has tons of his own money and also has JEB Bush's finance team working for him (or at least he did the last time I saw something on the matter). However, while he was the early Fox "News" Channel choice, and does have those Bush family operatives, he is a) unlikely to win the nomination and b) if he does, he is unlikely to win the Presidency regardless of whom the Democrats put up.
No, Rove will likely go with the current choice of the Republican Right, Rudy Giuliani, who also happens to have a real chance of winning in 2008, regardless of whom the Democrats put up (and especially if it is Hillary). A) Giuliani needs Rove to do all the political plastic surgery he needs to have done on his image, and who better? If the man could sell George Bush, he can sell anyone. B) Giuliani is Rove's kind of guy. Yes, he does have a strong fascist streak (and I am hardly the only one to have said that he is a candidate in search of a balcony overlooking the plaza in front of the Vittorio Emmanuel II monument in Rome --- yes, that would be Mussolini's favorite talking perch). Fits right in with Rove. And it is Rove's political philosophy, not his political tactics (as reprehensible as they are) that presents the biggest danger to our nation and its future.
In The Guardian (UK) of November 25, 2004, political analyst Sidney Blumenthal had a column "One gulp and Bush was gone" about the opening ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, AR.
In reference to Karl Rove, Blumenthal noted that "offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours. According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy. 'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ...' "
One does not have to look at Cheney and Addington and Yoo and Gonzales for the source of the Bush approach to amending the Constitution (although they have certainly been at the center of it as well): who needs Congress and the States; do it on your own. Either simply ignoring the Constitution, as the Bushies have done, or legally in the first instance changing it beyond recognition, as Hitler did to the German Weimar Constitution, is at the center of establishing fascism in an existing Constitutional Democracy. And here is Karl Rove, at the center of the Georgite Revolution, not only on the tactical side, but on the strategic side as well. Look out for him, folks. He is hardly done yet.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly contributing author for The Political Junkies, and contributing editor for The Moving Planet Blog.
http://www.dailyscare.com/1986/rove-and-american-fascism
by Steven Jonas
www.dailyscare.com
Fascism can be briefly defined as: “A politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy." (If you want to see longer definitions of mine, please refer to columns of mine published on The Political Junkies.net of May 27, 2004 “On Fascism -- And The Georgites,” Jan 27, 2005 “Comparing George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler”, and February 10, 2005, “The Georgite Version of ‘Freedom and Democracy' ...
Many political obituaries have been written on Karl Rove. This is not one of them. When Dick Cheney is around, one cannot say of any other person "he is the most dangerous man in America," but Rove comes in a close second. He is hardly finished. He is simply taking a bit of a rest. But even that will not last too long. Karl Rove is too central to the success of the central forces in charge of the current incarnation of the Republican Party for him to be put out to pasture and this driven man will not willingly go into the good (or bad as the case may be) night anytime soon.
Either out-in-front or behind the scenes, Karl Rove will play a pivotal role in the 2008 election as he drives to create the Permanent Republican Presidency, his chosen political successor to the Permanent Republican Majority that he was unable to achieve. The former, however, is very much a possibility. Even for these folks who so easily convert improprieties into "proprieties," he could hardly play an active role in any Republican Presidential Campaign while still holding the title "Deputy Chief of Staff" at the White House. To be active in 2008, he had to leave now. Just like virtually everything else that goes on in the BushCheney Administration, this one was most likely fully stage-managed among the three of them (and maybe Josh Bolton).
He would likely go to the potentially highest bidder. That would be Romney, who has tons of his own money and also has JEB Bush's finance team working for him (or at least he did the last time I saw something on the matter). However, while he was the early Fox "News" Channel choice, and does have those Bush family operatives, he is a) unlikely to win the nomination and b) if he does, he is unlikely to win the Presidency regardless of whom the Democrats put up.
No, Rove will likely go with the current choice of the Republican Right, Rudy Giuliani, who also happens to have a real chance of winning in 2008, regardless of whom the Democrats put up (and especially if it is Hillary). A) Giuliani needs Rove to do all the political plastic surgery he needs to have done on his image, and who better? If the man could sell George Bush, he can sell anyone. B) Giuliani is Rove's kind of guy. Yes, he does have a strong fascist streak (and I am hardly the only one to have said that he is a candidate in search of a balcony overlooking the plaza in front of the Vittorio Emmanuel II monument in Rome --- yes, that would be Mussolini's favorite talking perch). Fits right in with Rove. And it is Rove's political philosophy, not his political tactics (as reprehensible as they are) that presents the biggest danger to our nation and its future.
In The Guardian (UK) of November 25, 2004, political analyst Sidney Blumenthal had a column "One gulp and Bush was gone" about the opening ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, AR.
In reference to Karl Rove, Blumenthal noted that "offstage, beforehand, Rove and Bush had had their library tours. According to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in everything he saw, and asked questions, including about costs, obviously thinking about a future George W. Bush library and legacy. 'You're not such a scary guy,' joked his guide. 'Yes, I am,' Rove replied. Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: 'I change constitutions, I put churches in schools ...' "
One does not have to look at Cheney and Addington and Yoo and Gonzales for the source of the Bush approach to amending the Constitution (although they have certainly been at the center of it as well): who needs Congress and the States; do it on your own. Either simply ignoring the Constitution, as the Bushies have done, or legally in the first instance changing it beyond recognition, as Hitler did to the German Weimar Constitution, is at the center of establishing fascism in an existing Constitutional Democracy. And here is Karl Rove, at the center of the Georgite Revolution, not only on the tactical side, but on the strategic side as well. Look out for him, folks. He is hardly done yet.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly contributing author for The Political Junkies, and contributing editor for The Moving Planet Blog.
http://www.dailyscare.com/1986/rove-and-american-fascism
Monday, September 24, 2007
Media Mafia: Corruption in the Cable Industry (Case File #9) - Fascism, Opinion Formation and Murdoch's Use of Soccer as a Tool of Globalization
Edited by Alex Constantine
CNN Host Glenn Beck Threatens Muslims with Concentration Camps:
" ... All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin' hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, 'Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.' I'm telling you, with God as my witness... human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things—when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up. Is that wrong? Oh my gosh, it is Nazi, World War II wrong, but society has proved it time and time again: It will happen. ... "
Full story: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3014
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Mussolini in a Nutshell: Corporate Deregulation = Fascism
Deregulation is the third stage of cable development:
"... The involvement of governments in determining the course of development of cable systems has comprised three main stages. In the first stage, governments tried to ignore cable and prevent the establishment of cable infrastructure. In the second stage, governments regulated the technology in order to promote a national cable policy and encourage the overall development of the broadcasting media. In the third stage, although at different speeds and perceptions, governments deregulated cable by giving permission to market forces to dominate cable's development and abandoning the social goals of cable policy." - Yaron Katz, "The diminishing role of governments in cable policy," European Journal of Political Research, Volume 38 Issue 2 Page 285-302, October 2000
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Opinion Formation: Exactly How Low are the Cable Networks Willing to Go?:
Chris from Ohio Says - " ... Then there was that woman who sat there and said that lead on our toys and poison in our food is good b/c it means low prices at Wal-Mart. The cable news networks should have their funds cut off now. ... " - September 20th, 2007 at 10:27 AM - PDT
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/09/20/the-colbert-report-naomi-wolf-on-fascism-in-america/
•••••••••••••
Newspeak
Projecting Fascism
by David Neiwert
... Newspeak permeates the political environment right now. The core agenda of the Bush administration, mouthed by a hundred talking heads on cable TV, is now neatly summed up by two of the core truisms of Newspeak:
"War is peace." [The purpose of the Iraq war, and the War on Terror generally, is to ensure peace and security at home, we are told.]
"Ignorance is strength." [Consider the way Bush's fumbled syntax and express anti-intellectualism is integral to his crafted image of homespun integrity.]
http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismi.php
•••••••••••••
A Whiff of Fascism
by Carla Binion Online Journal Contributing Editor
Online Journal, April 7, 2003
http://www.onlinejournal.com
... Lets focus on corporate/government control of the press, specifically corporate control of U.S. television news networks. According to a March 24 article, Protests Turn Off Viewers'by Harry A. Jessell, 45 percent of Americans rely on cable channels as their primary source of news, and 22 percent get most of their news from broadcast networks evening newscasts.
Only 11 percent rely on other forms of media as their principle source of war news.
Our corporate controlled TV networks might as well be state controlled, because they promote the war and Bush policies fairly consistently and have virtually eliminated all dissenting voices. ... If youve spent much time watching the pro-Bush, pro-war cable television news programs, you cant help but notice they manipulate (whether deliberately or not) the viewing audiences emotions rather than appealing to viewers' logic. ...
According to Klaus Fisher, the Nazis eliminated from state media any ideas that clashed with official views. He writes that permissible media topics for public consumption included war itself and the Nazi movement; support of Nazi soldiers; praise for Hitler and celebrating the thrill of combat and the sacredness of death when it is in the service of the fatherland.
Todays Bush-friendly TV networks have also deemed only certain subjects permissible,'as evidenced by the irrefutable fact that they only cover a narrow range of subjects. Coincidentally, the proverbial network list'would read virtually the same as the list in the paragraph above. Permissible topics include praise for the war;'praise for the administrations policies; support for our soldiers; praise for Bush and the celebrating the thrill of combat and the sacredness of death when it is in the service of'(in this case) the homeland, even though there is no rational link between attacking Iraq and defending our soil.
Of course, who needs rationality or facts from TV news when the American public already has enough information about world events? In a March 26 article for Editor and Publisher, Polls Suggest Media Failure in Pre-War Coverage,'reporter Ari Berman refers to a Knight Ridder/Princeton Research poll. This poll showed 44 percent of respondents believed most'or some'of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqis. Only 17 percent gave the correct answer: none.
In the same poll, 41 percent said they believed Iraq definitely has nuclear weapons. As Berman points out, not even the Bush administration has claimed that.
Berman also refers to a Pew Research Center/Council on Foreign Relations survey showing that almost two-thirds of people polled believed U. N. weapons inspectors had found proof that Iraq is trying to hide weapons of mass destruction.'This claim was never made by Hans Blix or Mohammed ElBaradei.
The same survey found 57 percent of those polled falsely believed Saddam Hussein assisted the 9/11 terrorists, and a March 79 New York Times/CBS News Poll revealed that 45 percent of respondents believed Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
TV news reporters have done little to correct the publics misconceptions. On the contrary, network reporters and their guests have often helped bolster the false impressions by mentioning September 11, or the threat of terrorism by al Qaeda, and the threat'posed by Saddam in the same breath.
Individual TV reporters aren't always free to choose the information they pass along to the public. CNN now has a relatively new script approval system, whereby journalists send their copy in to CNN chiefs for sanitizing.
The policy says, All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval . . . Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved . . . All packages originating outside Washington, LA or NY, including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW [a group of script editors] in Atlanta for approval.
William Shirer comments on the Nazi party's control of press, radio and film, Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In case of any misunderstanding, a daily directive was furnished along with the oral instructions. ...
The content of television news lacks range and diversity, but the way the news is presented is also disturbing. Television reporters often deliver news of the war'with apparent breathless excitement, as if they're giving play-by-play descriptions of football games. People are dying in this conflict.
Civilians are caught in the middle, being blown to pieces or losing loved ones. Children are left behind when their soldier-parents are killed. Instead of presenting news of this war'with giddiness, wouldnt it be more appropriate, more human, for network reporters to take a somber, respectful approach? ...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Whiff_of_Fascism.html
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060821_marie_cocco_tv_experts/
Marie Cocco: Return of Cable TV’s ‘Experts’
Aug 21, 2006
By Marie Cocco
WASHINGTON—The voice on my phone tape was unmistakably young, and carried an undertone of panic. The caller said she’d heard from someone in New York that I knew John F. Kennedy Jr., and so could I possibly—please?—go on her cable-TV network that afternoon to talk about the tragic disappearance of his plane?
Befuddlement set in. Not only had I never met the son of the late president, but I couldn’t imagine how my name could be even loosely thrown about as someone who may have rubbed elbows with the handsome prince of tabloid dreams.
Was it because I’d worked as a journalist in New York, where the papers dutifully chronicled JFK Jr.’s life and loves? Or because I knew prosecutors at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where Kennedy once had worked? It couldn’t possibly be my journalistic association with his uncle Ted, since even that consists—as it does for hundreds of others in the news business—of trailing the Massachusetts senator around Capitol Hill when he is in the thick of some legislative maneuver.
Well, maybe it had something to do with growing up in Boston, having a liberal political outlook and being Catholic—attributes, after all, that only a few million potential Kennedy family “experts’’ can claim. In truth, the closest I’ve ever come to Hyannisport was on a tourist boat that plied the waters off Cape Cod, the guide pointing out the beachfront that runs along the Kennedys’ iconic summer home.
No, I was sorry to tell the young producer when I belatedly returned her call, I didn’t know JFK Jr. Like most everyone else in July 1999, I merely watched in stunned sadness as yet another Kennedy family tragedy unfolded before us.
The odd exchange comes fresh to mind now because another summer has descended into delirious coverage of a made-for-tabloid-TV story. The arrest of a suspect in the decade-old murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey has rejuvenated the Roman circus of cable coverage—just when the infotainment industry had bored itself covering the apparently less titillating war in the Middle East.
They’re back—all back: the legal “experts,’’ most of whom have seen precisely none of the evidence compiled by the police, the district attorney’s office or the Thai authorities who picked up John Mark Karr; the shrinks who specialize in plumbing the darkness of the criminal mind, though none have probed Karr’s; the DNA specialists who admit they don’t know if Karr’s DNA sample matches the biological evidence found at the girl’s murder scene—but if it does, of course, then the case against him is a slam-dunk.
American journalism always has had a taste for the sensational—the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the over-the-top coverage of it predated the coming of cable by decades. But the loose standard for news that marks the era of cable television has no precedent.
Cable news organizations, unlike the broadcast networks, are faced with feeding the beast of round-the-clock airtime. But short of natural disasters and plane crashes, little genuine “news’’ breaks out 24 hours a day. So airtime is filled with an endless lineup of questionable commentators with limited claim on hard information. Thus did my name somehow turn up as a potential JFK Jr. acquaintance. After all, there seemed to be only six degrees of separation between us, when really there were about 6 million.
It is impossible for viewers to determine which “experts’’ are experts and which are peddlers of uninformed bunk who go on television because the appearances provide free advertising for lawyers, private eyes, psychiatric consultants, jury experts and others who might gain from some association with a high-profile crime. Not a few of these types wrongly convicted John and Patsy Ramsey of their daughter’s murder a decade ago, just as they concluded in 2001 that Gary Condit, then a member of Congress, must have been complicit in the murder of Chandra Levy, an intern with whom he’d had an affair. Levy apparently was the victim of a random assault.
Cable news routinely transforms local crimes into national crises—convincing a fair number of people that there really are terrible scourges afoot in which pregnant women such as Laci Peterson are brutally murdered, and teenagers on graduation trips disappear. The transformation of news into voyeuristic spectacle is a distraction from societal and political rot that isn’t given similar seriousness of coverage. And this will, one day when the circus is over, catch up with us.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060821_marie_cocco_tv_experts/
•••••••••••••
Rupert Murdoch and the Politics of Soccer
From: "Television leaves the Broadcast Age"
New Politics Institute
... Rupert Murdoch, owner of Skynews, Fox and so many other media outlets has a global footprint, and is using soccer to create a global, universal product that can transcend cultural boundries.
This globalization of the English Premiere League has had a huge impact on the League itself. Seeking a global audience its teams have been much more aggressive about signing players from all the over world. You see many more Africans, Americans and Asians in England than any other European league. Yes the Spanish have their Brazilians, but most of the European teams still draw heavily from players in their home countries. They are not yet truly globalized. But I expect that will come.
As this globalized 21st century media platform emerges, sports is increasingly becoming the lingua franca, the media experience that binds people together in a much more fragmented and personal media world. Remarkable soccer goals often make the top 10 on YouTube. ESPN is emerging as the most powerful cable channel among the hundreds now available. Mastery of the emerging media of this century will mean many things, but one thing it will mean for sure is the ability to connect one’s values to sport, as the Republicans have with NASCAR and the NFL. What is the progressive response? We tried soccer last year, with great success. But there is clearly much more to be learned and tried in the years to come.
http://www.newpolitics.net/taxonomy/term/20
••••••••••••••
This is the html version of the file http://www.outfoxed.org/docs/outfoxed_storms_theatres_press_notes_7-30.doc.
OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
A Robert Greenwald Film
Produced and Directed by Robert Greenwald
Co-Produced by
Laurel Busby, Jim Gilliam, Kate McArdle and Devin Smith
Running Time: 77 Minutes
LOS ANGELES PUBLICITY CONTACT:
BETH PORTELLO
CINEMA LIBRE STUDIO
8328 DE SOTO AVENUE
CANOGA PARK, CA 91304
PH: 818-349-8822
FX:818-349-9922
bportello@cinemalibrestudio.com
DISTRIBUTOR CONTACT:
ADAM CHAPNICK
CINEMA LIBRE DISTRIBUTION
8328 DE SOTO AVENUE
CANOGA PARK, CA 91304
PH: 818-349-8822
FX: 818-349-9922
achapnick@cinemalibrestudio.com
www.outfoxed.org
THE DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
Making films can certainly take a toll on one's physical and mental health. I don't know how to describe the pain of watching hours and hours of Fox news. For myself, our great media monitors around the country, and the dedicated crew working on the film, it actually became physically painful as the hours of watching turned into weeks and then months. The combination of abrasive attack mode all the time, fear mongering 24/7 and gross amounts of overstatement and bias... well, it was no picnic.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to the media monitors (see the behind the scenes on the dvd to get a sense of their work) who were glued to the television for hours at a time, watching, noting, sending me thousands of pages of comments. Without them we could not have made the film.
There are some wonderful media activist groups working to change things. My most passionate wish is that you will see the film and then decide which groups to work with, support, or start your own, in order to effect change. We must change the media, to get the kind of country we want.
Finally, encourage all of you to take a look at the other films that I am part of that are raising issues for our country, the "Un series", Unprecedented about the Florida 2000 election directed by Joan Sekler and Richard Perez, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, about the reasons for the war in Iraq, and Unconstitutional, about civil liberties after 9.11, directed by Nonny de la Pena.
The wondrous MoveOn.org and the critically important Center for American Progress helped bring these films to life. Please support both of these critical organizations.
Thank you.
Robert Greenwald
Los Angeles
July 2004
ABOUT THE FILM
OUTFOXED examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.
The film explores Murdoch's burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person.
Media experts, including Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society.
This documentary also reveals the secrets of Former Fox news producers, reporters, bookers and writers who expose what it's like to work for Fox News. These former Fox employees talk about how they were forced to push a "right-wing" point of view or risk their jobs. Some have even chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect their current livelihoods. As one employee said "There's no sense of integrity as far as having a line that can't be crossed."
Director/Producer Robert Greenwald has produced and/or directed 53 television movies, miniseries and features. He is the director of UNCOVERED: THE WAR ON IRAQ and the Executive Producer of the UN series - Unprecedented, Uncovered and the soon to be released Unconstitutional.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:jlp-PT10xgMJ:www.outfoxed.org/docs/outfoxed_storms_theatres_press_notes_7-30.doc+New+media+politics:+shaping+cable+television+policy+in+France&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=76&gl=us
CNN Host Glenn Beck Threatens Muslims with Concentration Camps:" ... All you Muslims who have sat on your frickin' hands the whole time and have not been marching in the streets and have not been saying, 'Hey, you know what? There are good Muslims and bad Muslims. We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head.' I'm telling you, with God as my witness... human beings are not strong enough, unfortunately, to restrain themselves from putting up razor wire and putting you on one side of it. When things—when people become hungry, when people see that their way of life is on the edge of being over, they will put razor wire up and just based on the way you look or just based on your religion, they will round you up. Is that wrong? Oh my gosh, it is Nazi, World War II wrong, but society has proved it time and time again: It will happen. ... "
Full story: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3014
••••••••••••••
Mussolini in a Nutshell: Corporate Deregulation = Fascism
Deregulation is the third stage of cable development:
"... The involvement of governments in determining the course of development of cable systems has comprised three main stages. In the first stage, governments tried to ignore cable and prevent the establishment of cable infrastructure. In the second stage, governments regulated the technology in order to promote a national cable policy and encourage the overall development of the broadcasting media. In the third stage, although at different speeds and perceptions, governments deregulated cable by giving permission to market forces to dominate cable's development and abandoning the social goals of cable policy." - Yaron Katz, "The diminishing role of governments in cable policy," European Journal of Political Research, Volume 38 Issue 2 Page 285-302, October 2000••••••••••••
Opinion Formation: Exactly How Low are the Cable Networks Willing to Go?:
Chris from Ohio Says - " ... Then there was that woman who sat there and said that lead on our toys and poison in our food is good b/c it means low prices at Wal-Mart. The cable news networks should have their funds cut off now. ... " - September 20th, 2007 at 10:27 AM - PDT
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/09/20/the-colbert-report-naomi-wolf-on-fascism-in-america/
•••••••••••••
Newspeak
Projecting Fascism
by David Neiwert
... Newspeak permeates the political environment right now. The core agenda of the Bush administration, mouthed by a hundred talking heads on cable TV, is now neatly summed up by two of the core truisms of Newspeak:
"War is peace." [The purpose of the Iraq war, and the War on Terror generally, is to ensure peace and security at home, we are told.]
"Ignorance is strength." [Consider the way Bush's fumbled syntax and express anti-intellectualism is integral to his crafted image of homespun integrity.]
http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismi.php
•••••••••••••
A Whiff of Fascism
by Carla Binion Online Journal Contributing Editor
Online Journal, April 7, 2003
http://www.onlinejournal.com
... Lets focus on corporate/government control of the press, specifically corporate control of U.S. television news networks. According to a March 24 article, Protests Turn Off Viewers'by Harry A. Jessell, 45 percent of Americans rely on cable channels as their primary source of news, and 22 percent get most of their news from broadcast networks evening newscasts.
Only 11 percent rely on other forms of media as their principle source of war news.
Our corporate controlled TV networks might as well be state controlled, because they promote the war and Bush policies fairly consistently and have virtually eliminated all dissenting voices. ... If youve spent much time watching the pro-Bush, pro-war cable television news programs, you cant help but notice they manipulate (whether deliberately or not) the viewing audiences emotions rather than appealing to viewers' logic. ...
According to Klaus Fisher, the Nazis eliminated from state media any ideas that clashed with official views. He writes that permissible media topics for public consumption included war itself and the Nazi movement; support of Nazi soldiers; praise for Hitler and celebrating the thrill of combat and the sacredness of death when it is in the service of the fatherland.
Todays Bush-friendly TV networks have also deemed only certain subjects permissible,'as evidenced by the irrefutable fact that they only cover a narrow range of subjects. Coincidentally, the proverbial network list'would read virtually the same as the list in the paragraph above. Permissible topics include praise for the war;'praise for the administrations policies; support for our soldiers; praise for Bush and the celebrating the thrill of combat and the sacredness of death when it is in the service of'(in this case) the homeland, even though there is no rational link between attacking Iraq and defending our soil.
Of course, who needs rationality or facts from TV news when the American public already has enough information about world events? In a March 26 article for Editor and Publisher, Polls Suggest Media Failure in Pre-War Coverage,'reporter Ari Berman refers to a Knight Ridder/Princeton Research poll. This poll showed 44 percent of respondents believed most'or some'of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqis. Only 17 percent gave the correct answer: none.
In the same poll, 41 percent said they believed Iraq definitely has nuclear weapons. As Berman points out, not even the Bush administration has claimed that.
Berman also refers to a Pew Research Center/Council on Foreign Relations survey showing that almost two-thirds of people polled believed U. N. weapons inspectors had found proof that Iraq is trying to hide weapons of mass destruction.'This claim was never made by Hans Blix or Mohammed ElBaradei.
The same survey found 57 percent of those polled falsely believed Saddam Hussein assisted the 9/11 terrorists, and a March 79 New York Times/CBS News Poll revealed that 45 percent of respondents believed Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.
TV news reporters have done little to correct the publics misconceptions. On the contrary, network reporters and their guests have often helped bolster the false impressions by mentioning September 11, or the threat of terrorism by al Qaeda, and the threat'posed by Saddam in the same breath.
Individual TV reporters aren't always free to choose the information they pass along to the public. CNN now has a relatively new script approval system, whereby journalists send their copy in to CNN chiefs for sanitizing.
The policy says, All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval . . . Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved . . . All packages originating outside Washington, LA or NY, including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW [a group of script editors] in Atlanta for approval.
William Shirer comments on the Nazi party's control of press, radio and film, Every morning the editors of the Berlin daily newspapers and the correspondents of those published elsewhere in the Reich gathered at the Propaganda Ministry to be told by Dr. Goebbels or by one of his aides what news to print and suppress, how to write the news and headline it, what campaigns to call off or institute and what editorials were desired for the day. In case of any misunderstanding, a daily directive was furnished along with the oral instructions. ...
The content of television news lacks range and diversity, but the way the news is presented is also disturbing. Television reporters often deliver news of the war'with apparent breathless excitement, as if they're giving play-by-play descriptions of football games. People are dying in this conflict.
Civilians are caught in the middle, being blown to pieces or losing loved ones. Children are left behind when their soldier-parents are killed. Instead of presenting news of this war'with giddiness, wouldnt it be more appropriate, more human, for network reporters to take a somber, respectful approach? ...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Whiff_of_Fascism.html
••••••••••••••••
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060821_marie_cocco_tv_experts/
Marie Cocco: Return of Cable TV’s ‘Experts’
Aug 21, 2006
By Marie Cocco
WASHINGTON—The voice on my phone tape was unmistakably young, and carried an undertone of panic. The caller said she’d heard from someone in New York that I knew John F. Kennedy Jr., and so could I possibly—please?—go on her cable-TV network that afternoon to talk about the tragic disappearance of his plane?
Befuddlement set in. Not only had I never met the son of the late president, but I couldn’t imagine how my name could be even loosely thrown about as someone who may have rubbed elbows with the handsome prince of tabloid dreams.
Was it because I’d worked as a journalist in New York, where the papers dutifully chronicled JFK Jr.’s life and loves? Or because I knew prosecutors at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where Kennedy once had worked? It couldn’t possibly be my journalistic association with his uncle Ted, since even that consists—as it does for hundreds of others in the news business—of trailing the Massachusetts senator around Capitol Hill when he is in the thick of some legislative maneuver.
Well, maybe it had something to do with growing up in Boston, having a liberal political outlook and being Catholic—attributes, after all, that only a few million potential Kennedy family “experts’’ can claim. In truth, the closest I’ve ever come to Hyannisport was on a tourist boat that plied the waters off Cape Cod, the guide pointing out the beachfront that runs along the Kennedys’ iconic summer home.
No, I was sorry to tell the young producer when I belatedly returned her call, I didn’t know JFK Jr. Like most everyone else in July 1999, I merely watched in stunned sadness as yet another Kennedy family tragedy unfolded before us.
The odd exchange comes fresh to mind now because another summer has descended into delirious coverage of a made-for-tabloid-TV story. The arrest of a suspect in the decade-old murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey has rejuvenated the Roman circus of cable coverage—just when the infotainment industry had bored itself covering the apparently less titillating war in the Middle East.
They’re back—all back: the legal “experts,’’ most of whom have seen precisely none of the evidence compiled by the police, the district attorney’s office or the Thai authorities who picked up John Mark Karr; the shrinks who specialize in plumbing the darkness of the criminal mind, though none have probed Karr’s; the DNA specialists who admit they don’t know if Karr’s DNA sample matches the biological evidence found at the girl’s murder scene—but if it does, of course, then the case against him is a slam-dunk.
American journalism always has had a taste for the sensational—the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby and the over-the-top coverage of it predated the coming of cable by decades. But the loose standard for news that marks the era of cable television has no precedent.
Cable news organizations, unlike the broadcast networks, are faced with feeding the beast of round-the-clock airtime. But short of natural disasters and plane crashes, little genuine “news’’ breaks out 24 hours a day. So airtime is filled with an endless lineup of questionable commentators with limited claim on hard information. Thus did my name somehow turn up as a potential JFK Jr. acquaintance. After all, there seemed to be only six degrees of separation between us, when really there were about 6 million.
It is impossible for viewers to determine which “experts’’ are experts and which are peddlers of uninformed bunk who go on television because the appearances provide free advertising for lawyers, private eyes, psychiatric consultants, jury experts and others who might gain from some association with a high-profile crime. Not a few of these types wrongly convicted John and Patsy Ramsey of their daughter’s murder a decade ago, just as they concluded in 2001 that Gary Condit, then a member of Congress, must have been complicit in the murder of Chandra Levy, an intern with whom he’d had an affair. Levy apparently was the victim of a random assault.
Cable news routinely transforms local crimes into national crises—convincing a fair number of people that there really are terrible scourges afoot in which pregnant women such as Laci Peterson are brutally murdered, and teenagers on graduation trips disappear. The transformation of news into voyeuristic spectacle is a distraction from societal and political rot that isn’t given similar seriousness of coverage. And this will, one day when the circus is over, catch up with us.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060821_marie_cocco_tv_experts/
•••••••••••••
Rupert Murdoch and the Politics of Soccer
From: "Television leaves the Broadcast Age"
New Politics Institute
... Rupert Murdoch, owner of Skynews, Fox and so many other media outlets has a global footprint, and is using soccer to create a global, universal product that can transcend cultural boundries.
This globalization of the English Premiere League has had a huge impact on the League itself. Seeking a global audience its teams have been much more aggressive about signing players from all the over world. You see many more Africans, Americans and Asians in England than any other European league. Yes the Spanish have their Brazilians, but most of the European teams still draw heavily from players in their home countries. They are not yet truly globalized. But I expect that will come.
As this globalized 21st century media platform emerges, sports is increasingly becoming the lingua franca, the media experience that binds people together in a much more fragmented and personal media world. Remarkable soccer goals often make the top 10 on YouTube. ESPN is emerging as the most powerful cable channel among the hundreds now available. Mastery of the emerging media of this century will mean many things, but one thing it will mean for sure is the ability to connect one’s values to sport, as the Republicans have with NASCAR and the NFL. What is the progressive response? We tried soccer last year, with great success. But there is clearly much more to be learned and tried in the years to come.
http://www.newpolitics.net/taxonomy/term/20
••••••••••••••
This is the html version of the file http://www.outfoxed.org/docs/outfoxed_storms_theatres_press_notes_7-30.doc.
OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
A Robert Greenwald Film
Produced and Directed by Robert Greenwald
Co-Produced by
Laurel Busby, Jim Gilliam, Kate McArdle and Devin Smith
Running Time: 77 Minutes
LOS ANGELES PUBLICITY CONTACT:
BETH PORTELLO
CINEMA LIBRE STUDIO
8328 DE SOTO AVENUE
CANOGA PARK, CA 91304
PH: 818-349-8822
FX:818-349-9922
bportello@cinemalibrestudio.com
DISTRIBUTOR CONTACT:
ADAM CHAPNICK
CINEMA LIBRE DISTRIBUTION
8328 DE SOTO AVENUE
CANOGA PARK, CA 91304
PH: 818-349-8822
FX: 818-349-9922
achapnick@cinemalibrestudio.com
www.outfoxed.org
THE DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION
Making films can certainly take a toll on one's physical and mental health. I don't know how to describe the pain of watching hours and hours of Fox news. For myself, our great media monitors around the country, and the dedicated crew working on the film, it actually became physically painful as the hours of watching turned into weeks and then months. The combination of abrasive attack mode all the time, fear mongering 24/7 and gross amounts of overstatement and bias... well, it was no picnic.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to the media monitors (see the behind the scenes on the dvd to get a sense of their work) who were glued to the television for hours at a time, watching, noting, sending me thousands of pages of comments. Without them we could not have made the film.
There are some wonderful media activist groups working to change things. My most passionate wish is that you will see the film and then decide which groups to work with, support, or start your own, in order to effect change. We must change the media, to get the kind of country we want.
Finally, encourage all of you to take a look at the other films that I am part of that are raising issues for our country, the "Un series", Unprecedented about the Florida 2000 election directed by Joan Sekler and Richard Perez, Uncovered: The War on Iraq, about the reasons for the war in Iraq, and Unconstitutional, about civil liberties after 9.11, directed by Nonny de la Pena.
The wondrous MoveOn.org and the critically important Center for American Progress helped bring these films to life. Please support both of these critical organizations.
Thank you.
Robert Greenwald
Los Angeles
July 2004
ABOUT THE FILM
OUTFOXED examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.
The film explores Murdoch's burgeoning kingdom and the impact on society when a broad swath of media is controlled by one person.
Media experts, including Jeff Cohen (FAIR) Bob McChesney (Free Press), Chellie Pingree (Common Cause), Jeff Chester (Center for Digital Democracy) and David Brock (Media Matters) provide context and guidance for the story of Fox News and its effect on society.
This documentary also reveals the secrets of Former Fox news producers, reporters, bookers and writers who expose what it's like to work for Fox News. These former Fox employees talk about how they were forced to push a "right-wing" point of view or risk their jobs. Some have even chosen to remain anonymous in order to protect their current livelihoods. As one employee said "There's no sense of integrity as far as having a line that can't be crossed."
Director/Producer Robert Greenwald has produced and/or directed 53 television movies, miniseries and features. He is the director of UNCOVERED: THE WAR ON IRAQ and the Executive Producer of the UN series - Unprecedented, Uncovered and the soon to be released Unconstitutional.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:jlp-PT10xgMJ:www.outfoxed.org/docs/outfoxed_storms_theatres_press_notes_7-30.doc+New+media+politics:+shaping+cable+television+policy+in+France&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=76&gl=us
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