Bush Admin. worse than our Nightmares
It was worse.
Back in the bad old days of Bush's corrupt gang, we on the left were pilloried for suggesting that the administration was manipulating terrorism-related news in order to win the 2004 elections. But when Tom Ridge says it . . .
In fact, I argued in summer, 2004, that when Ridge did raise the terrorism alert, it had the unfortunate effect of outing an al-Qaeda double agent who had been turned by the Pakistani government and was helping set a trap for al-Qaeda in the UK. In turn, that caused the British government to have to move against the people it had under surveillance prematurely, harming the case.
Ridge is alleging he was pressured on the eve of the election. But I still wonder about the circumstances of the summer announcement. He might have been being used then, too, and not known it.
And if any of us had said that Dick Cheney was setting up civilian mercenary assassination squads (at least 007 works for the British government), and set things up so that perhaps neither the CIA director nor the president even knew about it, we would have been branded moonbats. But well, that is today's story
You shudder to think what hasn't come out yet.
If Bush and his gang falsely put up the terror alert or even tried to, for partisan political gain, that is a sort of treason. If they thereby ruined a British surveillance operation, they recklessly endangered US and NATO security. If they were arranging for civilian mercenaries to murder people . . . well you'd have to say that they were at least planning to be murderers. (The wingnuts will say that Xe was only being contracted to kill al-Qaeda types; but the wingnuts wouldn't be able to tell a Barelvi from an al-Qaeda supporter if their lives depended on it, and I wouldn't exactly trust Mr. Prince to be fair to Muslims.)
The horrible thing is that Wolf Blitzer on CNN assembled David Frum and Frances Townsend, former members of the Bush administration, to sit around on his afternoon news and analysis program on Thursday afternoon and more or less either call Ridge a liar or pooh-pooh the significance of what he is saying. There wasn't a single centrist or left of center voice to show any outrage. I mean, I know that Time Warner is not made up of people who necessarily care about the little person or social justice or anything. But a little bit of shame?
It isn't enough that the corporate media lied to us for Bush for 8 years, they are continuing to do it. Give money to Amy Goodman.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/21/2009 01:26:00 AM
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11 Comments:
The security of the world was certainly threatened under Bush. Obama seems to be making simliar mistakes in his foreign policy decisions. I am not optimistic about the success of US involvement in the Middle East and South Asia.
FAILURE IS CUMULATIVE. Please remember those words. The US needs to accept this reality and cut its losses and get out of South Asia and the Middle East ASAP.
The allegations are:
US elected officials ordered indiscriminate murder of civilians.
US officials paid mercenaries to conduct these killings.
For both the mercenaries and the elected officials, the purpose was financial and political gain.
Hmmmm, has any other nation been in the news lately accused of horrific behavior (i.e. killing people for profit)?
Did anyone see the propaganda piece for the Predator drone program on 60 Minutes Sunday? This show has become a joke. I think it was a re- run...nonetheless, still fascinatingly alarming re: the corporate media...
The breathless 'journalist' was interviewing a pilot of the Predator drones (a veteran of Kosovo, stated somberly..didn't know they had an air force..)and a colonel who was in charge of part of the drone program, each in their comfy brand- new homes outside of Las Vegas. Smiling cheerfully and answering questions with one eyebrow raised as they cheerfully show the 'journalist' a laser guided 500 pound bomb.. The colonel even came complete with a surgically altered wife...
In the war room, of course there were shots of important looking people (most if not all white male, of course) walking around an electronic control console, earnest square-jawed young men at the controls of the planes...as they assemble criteria for kills, and on the video screens people being blown to smithereens. What if you are wrong? is a weak effort at a penetrating question: We are not wrong, the response...War as video game..Infinite justice..twisted we have become, our tax dollars, our complicity...It has come to this, as only the Pentagon can produce it...Meanwhile the 'journalist' asks the big strong pilot what he does in his spare time...the answer? He goes to church and plays golf.
Pakistan and Afghan citizens? The two images of folks from there, other than the video monitor showing their deaths, were crowds of adult males chanting and screaming with of course, the requisite American flag burnign in the background, and of course, stacks of coffins.
Sickening. No wonder the Pentagon and the US government is despised the world over. War is now peace, just as Mr. Orwell told us.
What is to be done? Answer: Not much. I guess we can all go back to sleep and let Professor Obama roll over and be eviscerated by the lunatic right.
And the money flows..and the Strangeloves and the Turgidsons and the Jack T. Rippers drag us to our ultimate demise..while an anesthetized public turns on another episode of Big Brother.
Sweet dreams, folks.
The Bush & CIA out of the loop part. Where are you getting that?
GOONS-R-US
That CNN has for so many years made Wolf Blitzer, a former big honcho at AIPAC, the most illuminated face of what it touts as its highly judicious international coverage, ought to be an embarrassment to CNN. It's certainly a statement on the current state of what passes for mainstream journalism in the US. Pathetic.
I shut off NPR the day after the 2004 election when they acted like Bush had somehow won legitimacy and I've never gone back to it. The media has adopted the notion that if there are two parties, each side must have equivalently valid opinions. It's the height of intellectual laziness and the height of gutlessness.
If the professor will allow a barely off-topic post.....
Sibel Edmonds has testified on the details of treasonous acts by US officials during the Bush administration. (Raw Story article)
Sibel Edmonds was an FBI translator who "...was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States' security. "
(Wikipedia article)
But surely History will vindicate them.....
/sarcasm
cicely
merceneries are not different with terrorist
Yes Wolf Blitzer, from "The Most Trusted Name In News."
Adding to John R's comment, I submit Jeff Gates with some interesting information, and some equally interesting conclusions, the least of which would be a stunning lack of disclosure:
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/print_article.php?id=15353
"The dominant influence of pro-Israelis in mainstream media is not the focus of this article. Here the focus is Wolf Blitzer at Cable News Network who typifies how “the people in between” manipulate public opinion in plain sight and, to date, with legal impunity.
While working as a Washington correspondent for Jerusalem Post (1973-1990), Blitzer served as an editor of Near East Report, a publication founded by Isaiah Kenen, a registered foreign agent of Israel, who also founded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC coordinates a network of transnational political operatives known loosely as “the Israel lobby.” Neither AIPAC nor Blitzer has yet registered as a foreign agent in the U.S.
"The son of Polish Ashkenazi émigrés, Blitzer first emerged on the media scene in 1989 with the publication of Territory of Lies, an account of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard that The New York Times obligingly included in its list of “Notable Books of the Year.” Reviewer Robert Friedman described Blitzer’s sympathetic treatment of Pollard’s treason (the theft of more than one million classified documents) “a slick piece of damage control that would make his former employers at AIPAC (not to mention Israel’s Defense Ministry) proud.”
"As a writer for Hebrew language newspapers in the 1970s, Blitzer wrote under the name Ze’ev Barak—Hebrew for “wolf lightning.” The Blitzer media presence first emerged with his CNN coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Initially a military reporter for CNN, he became a fixture on television news as CNN’s Clinton-era White House correspondent until 1999 when he became a high profile CNN anchor.
"Since August 2005, CNN (marketed as “the most trusted name in news”) has featured the former AIPAC editor broadcasting from a White House-associative studio set branded as “The Situation Room.” CNN colleague John King deploys a similar credibility enhancing set by broadcasting from “The State of the Union.”
Robert Friedman concurs: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3751
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