by Gary North

The media have covered such recent events as the Olympics, the selection of Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, and what John McCain is going to do about the selection of the Vice President of the Republican Party. Now the media will focus on the national convention of the Democratic Party.

The most important news for the month of August was the fact that President Bush has quietly sent the largest armada into the Persian Gulf since the Iraq war began in 2003, when there were six carrier groups. This is a huge number of ships to be concentrated in one location in peacetime.

This story has been completely ignored by the news media all over the West. The only coverage is from special-interest websites. It was only on Saturday morning, August 23, that I learned what was going on.

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This article is from the September issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.

Soldiers at war rarely write magazine stories. But on July 13, 2007, a 24-year-old army private named Scott Thomas Beauchamp who had been serving in Iraq for about 10 months published a short, pseudonymous essay in the New Republic magazine that created a media firestorm.

"Shock Troops" is a grim first-person account of the dehumanizing aspects of war. In a tone vacillating between shame and detachment, Beauchamp, under the byline "Scott Thomas," recounts with squirm-inducing detail how he and his buddies were becoming so callous they openly mocked a gruesomely disfigured woman—the apparent victim of a roadside bomb—when she sat down for a meal in a military mess hall.

Among neoconservative war apologists and self-anointed superpatriots, discrediting the story became a crusade: Beauchamp must be proven a liar, and TNR must be humiliated"I love chicks that have been intimate—with IEDs. It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses...," Beauchamp quotes himself as saying, loud enough so the woman could hear. He continues: "My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall." Playfully referring to her as the Crypt Keeper, they made her a running gag.

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Obama calls for media boycott, for real. w/update

by GoogleBonhoeffer

Mon Aug 25, 2008 at 03:51:38 PM PDT

In case your were wondering, it appears as though Barack Obama is totally fed up with the mainstream media right along with us. In fact, he's asking us to do something unprecedented in Presidential elections--to target (read: boycott) media that runs the 'William Ayers' attack ad. We knew that the swiftboat attacks were inevitable but now we know damn well that we can help Barack defend himself as we should. All we have to do is turn off the TV. More details from Politico below.

Make no mistake about it-the primary objective of Republican strategists is to portray Senator Barack Obama as a threat to our national security. Ever since the convention started, the cable networks have been scouring the streets in search of hostile protesters that could be linked to Obama in a way that undermines his peaceful grassroots movement for change.

The recent William Ayers ad plays on the theme of Obama-is-the-enemy and highlights the Republican platform in 2008. Some Republican Billionaire and accomplice of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth paid for the Ayers ad.

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Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)

The Washington Post's White House reporter, Michael Abramowitz, was asked yesterday during a chat to name some of his "favorite people who work at the White House but who are not in the spotlight," and Abramowitz happily and easily offered a long list:

I like your question. One of the things you find in covering the White House is that many of the staff are extremely friendly and dedicated, and it's fun to get to know some of them. The truth is reporters tend to hang out with the people in the [White House] press office, so the names I might give you tend to be lower-level press aides, like Carlton Carroll, Stuart Siciliano and Pete Seat -- and spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. They are extremely helpful to me (and I don't mean this list to be all-inclusive.) I also enjoy talking with deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan and deputy national security adviser Jim Jeffrey -- I wouldn't be surprised if Joel is one day a cabinet officer or a CEO somewhere. He has an interesting life story -- he joined the Marines after graduating from Harvard, then became a lawyer and is basically the top aide to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.
Of course, Joel and others I mention are extremely discreet, so it's not like anyone is really dishing on the president! You need to look elsewhere for that.

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Wednesday, August 20, 2008

 In 1989, the Wall Street Journal reported that Richard Perle and Douglas Feith had set up a lobbying company called International Advisors Inc [IAI] to lobby for “appropriation of U.S. military and economic assistance’ to Turkey."” When news of the $600,000 per annum contract got too hot to handle, Perle and Feith folded IAI and helped establish the American Turkish Council (ATC) to accomplish the same goals, but with a more respectable veneer.

Now, nineteen years later, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Richard Perle is “exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan” with a “consortium founded by Turkish company AK Group International... Potential backers include two Turkish companies as well as Kazakhstan.”

Richard Perle issued a strange-sounding denial to the Wall Street Journal that he is involved with these latest oil projects, although he also issued a similarly "bizarre" denial to the 1989 WSJ article which reported on his consulting company IAI.

The WSJ continues:

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Jed Babbin

The morning of June 20, 2006, an email message circulated amongst U.S. Defense Department officials.

"Jed Babbin, one of our military analysts, is hosting the Michael Medved nationally syndicated radio show this afternoon. He would like to see if General [George W.] Casey would be available for a phone interview," the Pentagon staffer wrote. "This would be a softball interview and the show is 8th or 9th in the nation."

Why would the Pentagon help set up a radio interview? And how did they know that the interview would be "softball"?

From early 2002 to April 2008, the Defense Department offered talking points, organized trips to places such as Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and gave private briefings to a legion of retired military officers working as media pundits. The Pentagon's military analyst program, a covert effort to promote a positive image of the Bush administration's wartime performance, was a multi-level campaign involving quite a few colorful characters.

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Saturday, August 16, 2008

Winter Patriot

  Mistakes were made when the so-called "Liquid Bombers" were arrested, and in two instances, British national dailies reported information which turned out to be false. These false reports led to claims of defamation which have cost the publishers hundreds of thousands to settle out of court.

In the first instance, it was reported that a British man had been arrested, held overnight, and released without charges. But later a consortium of newspapers published an apology saying he had never been arrested at all, and they paid £170,000 (about $330,000) to settle a claim filed on his behalf.

The second instance concerned a man about whom many different reports were published. Thus it was variously reported that he had been arrested or detained for questioning, in Britain or in Pakistan. But later a group of newspapers apologized, saying that he had not been arrested or detained or even questioned by any police, anywhere. Again a substantial settlement was paid, but in this instance the amount was not disclosed.

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Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)

The more that is revealed about the FBI's still largely-secret case against Bruce Ivins, the more doubts that are raised about whether their accusations are true. A particularly vivid episode illustrating how shoddy the FBI's case seems to be occurred in the last several days.

Ever since the FBI accused Bruce Ivins of being the sole anthrax attacker, one of the most glaring of the many deficiencies in the FBI's case is the complete lack of evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, placing Ivins at the New Jersey mailboxes (the proverbial "scene of the crime") on either of the two dates on which the anthrax letters were sent. To respond to criticisms pointing out that huge flaw, the FBI, on August 7, leaked -- and the news media then dutifully and uncritically trumpeted -- what was supposedly a highly incriminating fact: namely, that Ivins, on September 17, the day before the first batch of anthrax letters were postmarked, took administrative leave from work in the morning and did not return until 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. that day. This time period during September 17, according to The Washington Post (which was fed the leaked scoop), was the window in which Ivins drove to New Jersey and mailed the anthrax letters:

Anthrax attack suspect Bruce E. Ivins took several hours of administrative leave from his Fort Detrick, Md., laboratory on a critical day in September 2001 when the first batch of deadly letters was dropped in a New Jersey mailbox, government sources briefed on the case said yesterday. The gap recorded on his time sheet offered investigators a key clue into how he could have pulled off an elaborate crime that involved carrying letters packed with lethal powder to a distant location for mailing, the sources said. . . .

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Monday, August 18, 2008

Last week, Scott Horton interviewed (audio) investigative journalist Joe Lauria. Lauria was one of the co-authors of the three-part (1, 2, 3) series on the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds for the UK's Sunday Times.

In the interview Lauria discusses the Sibel Edmonds case, the state of the US media, and the Military Industrial Complex in the context of his new book with presidential candidate Mike Gravel: "A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and One Mans Fight to Stop It"

In the interview, Lauria says that he spoke at length to the three FBI agents who were Sibel's immediate bosses at the FBI and that they "corroborated in general terms, that this story is true."

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By Olga Ivanova

Friday, August 15, 2008; A21

I wish I could fly back to Russia. I have been in the United States for a year, and I am studying and working here to get experience in American journalism, known worldwide for its independence and professionalism. But in recent days it has felt as though I am too late, that the journalism of Watergate is well behind us and that reporting is no longer fair and balanced.

For years I have respected American newspapers for being independent. But no longer. Coverage of the conflict between Russia and Georgia has been unprofessional, to say the least. I was surprised and disappointed that the world's media immediately took the side of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili last week.

American newspapers have run story after story about how "evil" Russia invaded a sovereign neighboring state. Many accounts made it seem as though the conflict was started by an aggressive Russia invading the Georgian territory of South Ossetia. Some said that South Ossetia's capital, Tskhinvali, was destroyed by the Russian army. Little attention was paid to the chronology of events, the facts underlying the conflict.

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By Mark Ames

August 13, 2008 

Five days after Georgia invaded and seized the breakaway separatist region of South Ossetia, sparking a larger-scale Russian invasion to drive Georgian forces back and punish their leaders, Russia surprised its Western detractors by calling a halt to the country's offensive. After all, the mainstream media, egged on by hawkish neocon pundits and their candidate John McCain, had everyone believing that Russia was hellbent on the full-scale annihilation and annexation of democratic Georgia.

But then came Tuesday's cease-fire announcement--and we're now forced to ask ourselves serious questions about the recent conflict: what really started it, how dangerous was it and what, with serious careful consideration, could be done to prevent it from turning into a worst-case scenario?

Up until now, this war was framed as a simple tale of Good Helpless Democratic Guy Georgia versus Bad Savage Fascist Guy Russia. In fact, it is far more complex than this, morally and historically. Then there are two concentric David and Goliath narratives here. The initial war pitted the Goliath Georgia--a nation of 4.4 million, with vastly superior numbers, equipment and training thanks to US and Israeli advisers--against David-Ossetia, with a population of between 50,000-70,000 and a local militia force that is barely battalion strength. Reports coming out of South Ossetia tell of Georgian rockets and artillery leveling every building in the capital city, Tskhinvali, and of Georgian troops lobbing grenades into bomb shelters and basements sheltering women and children. Although true casualty figures are hard to come by, reports that up to 2,000 Ossetians, mostly civilians, were killed are certainly believable, given the intensity of the initial Georgian bombardment, the wanton destruction of the city and surrounding regions and the generally savage nature of Caucasus warfare, a very personal game where old rules apply. 

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Thu Aug 14, 2008 2:36pm EDT

By Robert MacMillan

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Gannett Co Inc plans to eliminate 1,000 positions from its local newspapers around the U.S. because of declining advertising and circulation revenue, and may cut more if those conditions persist.

The largest U.S. newspaper publisher said the cuts equal about 3 percent of the positions in its Community Publishing unit, according to a memo obtained by Reuters on Thursday. The unit accounts for the vast majority of the company's newspapers, except for USA Today.

About 600 people probably will be laid off as part of the cuts, the memo said. The remaining cuts will come from retirements, resignations and other vacancies that will go unfilled.

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Ed Note: The US is Using Georgia to Keep Russia from Helping Iran


8/14/08

U.S. corporate media frequently evoked the Cold War as a key to understanding the conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. This was certainly true of the media themselves, which generally placed black hats or white hats on the actors involved depending on whether they were allied with Moscow or Washington.

On August 11, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams referred to "what's being called the Russian blitz of the nation of Georgia, former Soviet republic that split away and is now threatening to split apart from within." NBC reporter Jim Maceda followed up: "The powerful Russian war machine is moving ever deeper into Georgia, and teaching all of us really a lesson about what makes Russia tick." Maceda then gave what has become the standard media template for describing the conflict:

• "It started as a gamble by Georgia, the former Soviet republic and darling of the West: Move quickly into the breakaway pro-Russian enclave called South Ossetia and take back what is legally Georgia's. But the plan failed. Instead, Russian forces invaded Georgia last week and crushed Georgian resistance. According to U.S. military officials, Russia is out to decimate the U.S.-trained Georgian armed forces."

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August 13, 2008

The New York Times reports today: "The United States took a series of steps that emboldened Georgia: sending advisers to build up the Georgian military, including an exercise last month with more than 1,000 American troops; pressing hard to bring Georgia into the NATO orbit..." Neither President Bush this morning nor Secretary of State Rice yesterday took questions following their comments.


FRANCIS BOYLE
Professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Boyle is author of Breaking All The Rules and Destroying World Order. He said today: "It is curious but not surprising how the Bush administration and its allies have now found renewed respect for international law in the Caucasus, but not when it comes to (1) the United States invading Afghanistan and Iraq, while threatening to attack Iran; (2) Israel invading Lebanon and Palestine, attacking Syria, and threatening to attack Iran; (3) Ethiopia invading Somalia; (4) Colombia attacking Ecuador, etc. From an international law perspective, the real issue here is whether during her trip to Tbilisi a month ago, U.S. Secretary of State Rice gave the proverbial green light to Georgia to attack South Ossetia and thus deliberately provoke an overreaction by Russia. And how does this fit in with the U.S./U.K. naval armada currently steaming for the Persian Gulf and possible military confrontation with Iran over its right to engage in nuclear enrichment under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?"


RICHARD FALK
Falk is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and distinguished visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of more than 20 books including The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order after Iraq. Falk recently returned from Turkey.

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August 13, 2008

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

So attacks in Afghanistan must be the work of Pakistan’s dastardly Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), yet again, because the New York Times told us the other day that “American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.” The New York Times went on to claim that “The conclusion was based on intercepted communications between Pakistani intelligence officers and militants who carried out the attack, the officials said, providing the clearest evidence to date that Pakistani intelligence officers are actively undermining American efforts to combat militants in the region. The American officials also said there was new information showing that members of the Pakistani intelligence service were increasingly providing militants with details about the American campaign against them, in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas.”

There are plenty of clichés (“powerful spy service” and “actively undermining” are splendid examples), but not a shred of hard evidence in this important story. There is not one bit of material that can be verified or even checked for accuracy. No names are named. There are declarations by anonymous “American officials” concerning supposed electronic intercepts of which no details are provided. But the New York Times and other US newspapers chose to blare to the world the unsupported conclusion that Pakistan is guilty of treason against itself.

It might be thought that the New York Times would have learned a lesson after being manipulated by the infamously incompetent and gullible reporter Judith Miller who made such a fool of the paper at the time of the US invasion of Iraq. She swallowed nonsense purveyed to her by un-named “government officials” and other anonymous and indeed malevolent sources, but the newspaper’s editors just followed along and published the rubbish. Garbage in; Garbage out. As one of her colleagues said of her in the context of a combined story : “She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies.”

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August 13, 2008

Two Morons: Bush and Saakashvili

"President Bush, Will You Please Shut Up?"

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war.

Back in the Reagan years the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a cold war tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states.

The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.

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Cracking the Pentagon Pundit Code

As reporters and researchers know all too well, releasing information isn't necessarily the same thing as releasing useful information.

Pentagon pundit Ken AllardCase in point: the Pentagon's military analyst program. In early 2002, the Defense Department began cultivating "key influentials" -- retired military officers who are frequent media commentators -- to help the Bush administration make the case for invading Iraq. The program expanded over the years, briefing more participants on a wider range of Bush administration talking points, occasionally taking them overseas on the government's dime.

In April 2006, the group was used to counter criticism of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The apparent coordination between the Pentagon and the pundits piqued the interest of New York Times reporters. Two years later -- after wresting some 8,000 pages of internal documents from the Defense Department -- the Times exposed the Pentagon's covert attempts to shape public opinion through its so-called "message force multipliers." A few weeks later, the Defense Department posted the same documents publicly.

It wasn't the high-octane data dump it first appeared to be. Sure, paging through the emails, slides and briefing papers is interesting, and occasionally you come across something noteworthy. But the documents are formatted in such a way that systematically exploring them via keyword searches is impossible. A cynic (or realist) might think the Pentagon was doing damage control by putting the documents out in the open, while making it near-impossible to find crucial needles in a very large, chaotically-compiled haystack.

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by Pavel Yakovlev / August 12th, 2008

I lost all faith in the American democratic system and its media when President Bush initiated a false war against Iraq and got away with it. This time, the U.S. media and Bush Administration are lying about a different war — the one between Georgia and Russia. To understand the complex nature of this conflict, a brief review of history is necessary.

Throughout its long history, Georgia, the country, has had difficult relations with Russia and its other neighbors, including the ethnically different Ossetians. Georgians and Ossetians did not always get along. In one instance, Georgian leaders asked the Russian tsar for permission to enslave the Ossetians. The answer was no. During the Russian Revolution, Georgia seceded from the Russian Empire and sided with Mensheviks (tsarists), thereby starting a conflict with the Ossetians and killing about 5,000 of them until Bolsheviks intervened and forcefully returned Georgia under Russia’s control. During Stalin’s rule, Georgia (Stalin’s homeland) was assigned some of the Ossetian and Abkhazian territory together with their historic inhabitants. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in the early 1990s, Georgia declared its independence without any resistance from Russia. However, when South Ossetia and Abkhazia tried to declare their independence from Georgia, they were greeted by a brutal military campaign aimed at keeping these tiny regions under Georgian control. Unfortunately for Georgia, it had to live with their de-facto independence due to strong resistance from these breakaway regions and Russia’s intervention. Long story short, Russia became the only third party peacekeeper, albeit a biased one, in this conflict until now.

In 2008, the United States and Europe recognized Kosovo’s independence from Serbia despite Russian and Serbian opposition. Russia warned the United States that this is a dangerous precedent that could ignite the old conflict between Georgians and Ossetians, who might seek independence according to the Kosovo’s scenario. Meanwhile, Georgia being lead by charismatic, pro-Western president Mr. Saakashvilli sought to join NATO and the EU. However, Georgia’s unresolved territorial disputes with South Ossetia and Abkhazia formally precluded its membership in NATO. Mr. Saakashvilli could resolve this conflict in two ways: (a) officially recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s de-facto independence from Georgia or (b) drive out or physically exterminate all Ossetians and Abkhazians because they would never again want to live peacefully under Georgia’s control.

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