|
Plame Thread I +
II. Billmon: Riding the Waiver
—
I. We never had this, but I will give it a try.
The honorable barfly r´giap suggests to keep a thread open on the Plame affair and its consequences.
The story will split into various directions and many of Billmon’s post and a few of mine will touch on this. But for now I think r’giap is right and there is need to keep the details straight and to have the links to the various subs collected in one place.
The outcome of this may vary form Fitzgerald just shutting down without submitting a report up to a full impeachment procedure and its not a US only issue.
The best background so far is in the Gellman/Pincus piece Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence and in Josh Marshall’s inaugurating Practice to Deceive. Both were written 2003.
Freelance investigative Murray Waas seams to be the only one to have a source within Fitzgerad’s investigation. His blog is whatever already!,
firedoglade keeps both eyes on the issue and E&P is a good source for the media relevance.
Please add your links, ideas and analysis in the comments.
I think the Bushies, most of them at least, actually believed most of the lies they spewed.
i think this is nothing short of delusional. if they believed it they wouldn’t have to play the spin game, they could have just gone w/truth. the first niger doc didn’t cause any traction. they needed those letter heads.
Those fake docs. were old news. No one who might have wanted to boost their authenticity or have them taken seriously would have sent anyone, much less Joe Wilson, to Niger to check things out. Sending Wilson could only have the aim of showing the matter WAS taken seriously, it WAS looked into, and the story was shown to be absurd. How could Saddam buy 25% of Niger’s yearly yellowcake production? Impossible.
i can agree to disagree
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
tenet made a point of stating the cia sent wilson ‘on their own initiative’ . yet to this day know one can quite remember who’s idea it was. there were some people at the meeting but know one person thought of wilson. again, would someone tell me what would be the point of making an issue of claiming cheney had nothing to do w/sending him? makes no sense.( unless they are protecting him) it’s established cheney initiated sending someone . and yet there is some great significance w/everyone distancing him from knowing who wilson is. the lie started early . why would cheney push push push and then just not even know about the trip. absurd.
“The Vice-President also defended the way in which he had involved himself in intelligence matters: “This is a very important area. It’s one that the President has asked me to work on. . . . In terms of asking questions, I plead guilty. I ask a hell of a lot of questions. That’s my job.”
HERSH
Cheney’s office claimed to have no knowledge of Wilson or his report: “The vice president doesn’t know Joe Wilson and did not know about his trip until he read about it in the press,” said the vice president’s spokeswoman, Catherine Martin. Cheney’s position was supported by Tenet, who said Wilson’s trip was made on “the CIA’s own initiative.”
this is from ’03. and we know now this is a lie because cheney met w/whig prior to wilson’s editorial.
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.” The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
cheney’s motive for distancing himself from the niger trip was because he wanted to use the docs to push his war. acknowledging awareness of the debunking meant he couldn’t
The intelligence report was quickly stovepiped to those officials who had an intense interest in building the case against Iraq, including Vice-President Dick Cheney. “The Vice-President saw a piece of intelligence reporting that Niger was attempting to buy uranium,” Cathie Martin, the spokeswoman for Cheney, told me. Sometime after he first saw it, Cheney brought it up at his regularly scheduled daily briefing from the C.I.A., Martin said. “He asked the briefer a question. The briefer came back a day or two later and said, ‘We do have a report, but there’s a lack of details.’ ” The Vice-President was further told that it was known that Iraq had acquired uranium ore from Niger in the early nineteen-eighties but that that material had been placed in secure storage by the I.A.E.A., which was monitoring it. “End of story,” Martin added. “That’s all we know.” According to a former high-level C.I.A. official, however, Cheney was dissatisfied with the initial response, and asked the agency to review the matter once again. It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office
one in which cheney was unaware of the wilson trip? no way
Posted by: annie | Oct 13 2005 19:52 utc | 45
a little history – of wars & journalistc hores & tyrants & common murder by john pilger :
Remembering Suharto, the West’s Fallen Hero. Nothing Has Changed.
By John Pilger
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 13 October 2005
“The propagandist’s purpose,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” The British, who invented modern war propaganda and inspired Joseph Goebbels, were specialists in the field. At the height of the slaughter known as the First World War, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, confided to C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.”
What has changed?
“If we had all known then what we know now,” said the New York Times on 24 August, “the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” The admission was saying, in effect, that powerful newspapers, like powerful broadcasting organisations, had betrayed their readers and viewers and listeners by not finding out – by amplifying the lies of Bush and Blair instead of challenging and exposing them. The direct consequences were a criminal invasion called “Shock and Awe” and the dehumanising of a whole nation.
This remains largely an unspoken shame in Britain, especially at the BBC, which continues to boast about its rigour and objectivity while echoing a corrupt and lying government, as it did before the invasion. For evidence of this, there are two academic studies available – though the capitulation of broadcast journalism ought to be obvious to any discerning viewer, night after night, as “embedded” reporting justifies murderous attacks on Iraqi towns and villages as “rooting out insurgents” and swallows British army propaganda designed to distract from its disaster, while preparing us for attacks on Iran and Syria. Like the New York Times and most of the American media, had the BBC done its job, many thousands of innocent people almost certainly would be alive today.
When will important journalists cease to be establishment managers and analyse and confront the critical part they play in the violence of rapacious governments? An anniversary provides an opportunity. Forty years ago this month, Major General Suharto began a seizure of power in Indonesia by unleashing a wave of killings that the CIA described as “the worst mass murders of the second half of the 20th century”. Much of this episode was never reported and remains secret. None of the reports of recent terror attacks against tourists in Bali mentioned the fact that near the major hotels were the mass graves of some of an estimated 80,000 people killed by mobs orchestrated by Suharto and backed by the American and British governments.
Indeed, the collaboration of western governments, together with the role of western business, laid the pattern for subsequent Anglo-American violence across the world: such as Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet’s bloody coup was backed in Washington and London; the arming of the shah of Iran and the creation of his secret police; and the lavish and meticulous backing of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, including black propaganda by the Foreign Office which sought to discredit press reports that he had used nerve gas against the Kurdish village of Halabja.
In 1965, in Indonesia, the American embassy furnished General Suharto with roughly 5,000 names. These were people for assassination, and a senior American diplomat checked off the names as they were killed or captured. Most were members of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party. Having already armed and equipped Suharto’s army, Washington secretly flew in state-of-the-art communication equipment whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Council advising the president, Lyndon B Johnson. Not only did this allow Suharto’s generals to co-ordinate the massacres, it meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in.
The Americans worked closely with the British. The British ambassador in Jakarta, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, cabled the Foreign Office: “I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.” The “little shooting” saw off between half a million and a million people.However, it was in the field of propaganda, of “managing” the media and eradicating the victims from people’s memory in the west, that the British shone. British intelligence officers outlined how the British press and the BBC could be manipulated. “Treatment will need to be subtle,” they wrote, “eg, a) all activities should be strictly unattributable, b) British [government] participation or co-operation should be carefully concealed.” To achieve this, the Foreign Office opened a branch of its Information Research Department (IRD) in Singapore.
The IRD was a top-secret, cold war propaganda unit headed by Norman Reddaway, one of Her Majesty’s most experienced liars. Reddaway and his colleagues manipulated the “embedded” press and the BBC so expertly that he boasted to Gilchrist in a secret message that the fake story he had promoted – that a communist takeover was imminent in Indonesia – “went all over the world and back again”. He described how an experienced Sunday newspaper journalist agreed “to give exactly your angle on events in his article . . . ie, that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery”.
These lies, bragged Reddaway, could be “put almost instantly back to Indonesia via the BBC”. Prevented from entering Indonesia, Roland Challis, the BBC’s south-east Asia corres-pondent, was unaware of the slaughter. “My British sources purported not to know what was going on,” Challis told me, “but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it . . . Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.”
The bloodbath was ignored almost entirely by the BBC and the rest of the western media. The headline news was that “communism” had been overthrown in Indonesia, which, Time reported, “is the west’s best news in Asia”. In November 1967, at a conference in Geneva overseen by the billionaire banker David Rockefeller, the booty was handed out. All the corporate giants were represented, from General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank and US Steel to ICI and British American Tobacco. With Suharto’s connivance, the natural riches of his country were carved up.Suharto’s cut was considerable. When he was finally overthrown in 1998, it was estimated that he had up to $10bn in foreign banks, or more than 10 per cent of Indonesia’s foreign debt. When I was last in Jakarta, I walked to the end of his leafy street and caught sight of the mansion where the mass murderer now lives in luxury. As Saddam Hussein heads for his own show trial on 19 October, he must ask himself where he went wrong. Compared with Suharto’s crimes, Saddm seem second-division.
With British-supplied Hawk jets and machine-guns, Suharto’s army went on to crush the life out of a quarter of the population of East Timor: 200,000 people. Using the same Hawk jets and machine-guns, the same genocidal army is now attempting to crush the life out of the resistance movement in West Papua and protect the Freeport company, which is mining a mountain of copper in the province. (Henry Kissinger is “director emeritus”.) Some 100,000 Papuans, 18 per cent of the population, have been killed; yet this British-backed “project”, as new Labour likes to say, is almost never reported.
What happened in Indonesia, and continues to happen, is almost a mirror image of the attack on Iraq. Both countries have riches coveted by the west; both had dictators installed by the west to facilitate the passage of their resources; and in both countries, blood-drenched Anglo-American actions have been disguised by propaganda willingly provided by journalists prepared to draw the necessary distinctions between Saddam’s regime (“monstrous”) and Suharto’s (“moderate” and “stable”). Since the invasion of Iraq, I have spoken to a number of principled journalists working in the pro-war media, including the BBC, who say that they and many others “lie awake at night” and want to speak out and resume being real journalists. I suggest now is the time.
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Oct 14 2005 3:10 utc | 75
For Iran, I think the scenario is domestic terror attack (possibly reusing the 7 Al-Quaida operatives from 9-11 who have since turned up alive–Ha!), followed by swift “retribution”, while at the same time feeling that they have a reasonable chance at “pulling a Kermit”, that is, an inside coup. LOL, given the quality of intelligence we had in invading Iraq! This is very risky. Still, the elite must be terrified about the Iranian bourse. No good options here for them–this is Bush’s and Cheney’s screwup. By next year we may be looking at Exxon and Halliburton (which, to dredge the Memory Hole, was on the verge of bankrupcy at the onset of the invasion) doubling in size, while the Big Three Auto Mfrs. and numerous airlines go broke. Perhaps a bit more economic restructuring than the Chamber of Commerce had in mind.
Or maybe invade Syria, so that the region is in such an uproar that Iran can’t get its Bourse off the ground. Nevertheless, it should be stated that, with Iran, what we are essentially talking about is Europe’s oil supply. Europe is the largest regional net importer of oil at 15MBPD, surpassing US and China, and they are doing everything under the sun, literally, to mitigate this.
So, yes Uncle$, I am saying that, in all probability “Bush has screwed Ledeen’s pooch”, but I’m not sure if they completely accept this yet. But the window is closing fast.
I believe that the basic methodology as described in John Perkins book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” governs America’s actions, namely: To enact the neoliberal agenda of the corporate elite that are Bush’s true constituency, start with “diplomacy”–trade agreements,UN resolutions etc.; when that fails send in the Economic Hitmen–the IMF and World Bank grabs their balls by forcing loans for infrastructure needed by the multinationals which they will not be able to repay; when that fails send in the CIA, Seals and Rangers to “pull a Kermit”; when that fails send in the Marines and Smedly Butler; when that fails send in the diplomats… The mistake people make is in believing that they stop when they screw up. Wrong. They never stop, ever, when one strategy fails, it paves the way for the next, like the endless song “Show me the way to go home…” War paves the way for diplomacy, each screw-up just makes the next step easier, more inevitable. And every area of the globe is considered, no place, no resource is forgotten by the elite planners.
Take the case of a war we “lost”, (and here I owe a great deal to Chomsky in my thinking) Vietnam. After thirty years of French and American destruction, which Arthur Westling compared to the “less efficient” destuction of Carthage during the Punic Wars, Vietnam was left a “vast and empty landscape, which will take several generations to recover, if possible at all.” Despite the fact that the US did not achieve its maximal goals in Indochina, those countries “will not endanger global order by social and economic success in a framework that denies the West the freedom to exploit, infecting regions beyond.” And where are we now, thirty years later? We are welcomed back (“I was treated better there than I was by my own country.”); the hitmen are back setting up sweatshops as fast as possible where desparate labor, forced off the land, is so cheap they can undercut even the Chinese in this neo-liberal race to the bottom, placing them again within our economic sphere of influence. Furthermore, Vietnam and China may not shy away from a confrontation in order to safeguard access to much-needed natural resources, and both will attempt to maintain their own spheres of influence for that purpose. Vietnam already acts as a regional powerbroker when it comes to the domestic and foreign affairs of Cambodia and Laos, which are states with much less geopolitical clout. It is not at all unlikely that Vietnam will attempt to rebuff growing Chinese ambitions across East Asia in order to ensure that its own population can survive the coming economic and social pressures. So, in many ways America’s goals have been achieved over time.
The same relentless pressure will be brought to bear upon Iraq. If we are forced by domestic and international pressure to withdraw our forces, then puppets will be installed. If the puppets are overthrown, then the spooks go in. If that doesn’t work, well we may have to bomb again in a few years. I’m not trying to depress everyone here, but we should be cognizant that not even the ghost of Paul Wellstone is calling for an end to American imperialism, is calling for an end to American influence over the area, or is stating that those countries should be able to determine their own fates.
Anyway, this rant is getting off the topic of the tread, so I had better end here.
P.S. I cry Uncle$–sorry to appear cryptic with my last post–I was just trying to type quickly. What I mean’t to say more clearly is that the IHT is owned by the NYTimes, so sometimes they will send up trial balloons there to see how Europe reacts, before launching the concept on the domestic audience.
Posted by: Malooga | Oct 14 2005 7:05 utc | 83
|
