Правда
на Потомак
(Pravda on the Potomac)
By Ernest Partridge
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"Our press's
penchant for reporting lies as truth about one president,
and then suppressing truths about another, demonstrates a
sort of cognitive disorder actually more worrying than any
simple 'bias,' liberal or 'conservative." What
this grand disorder has produced, in these United States, is
a press system as irrational as those in power. Never
fearing that the press might act on our behalf, they
simply use it to define reality for us, so that it has
worked here as it has worked in closed societies, where
truth remains negotiable -- things meaning always, and
only, what Bush/Cheney's GOP interprets them to mean."
Mark Crispin Miller
Cruel and Unusual (137)
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On Monday, August 2, a federal crime was committed in plain view of
millions of Americans and millions more abroad. A Pakistani intelligence
mole, crucial in the “war” against al Qaeda, was outed by an
individual in the Bush Administration.
We know that this was a federal crime from the preceding (and still
unsolved) Valerie Plame case. While the culprit is still unindicted, the
fact that the “outing” of a covert intelligence asset is a
crime, is now known to all.
Today, more than a month later, the individual who blew the cover of the
Pakistani double-agent has not been identified, much less arrested and
indicted. And the story has disappeared from the media – which is,
arguably, the greatest outrage of all.
For those who have forgotten, here is a recapitulation of the crime.
On Sunday, August 1, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced
that due to “new and unusually specific information,” he was raising
the terrorist threat level from yellow (“elevated”) to orange (“high”),
thus bumping news of the just-completed Democratic convention off the
front pages.
The “targets” of the terrorists, we were told, were five
specifically identified financial institutions in Washington and New
York.
In retrospect, several intriguing questions arise: (1) If five specific
buildings in two cities were targeted, why a nationwide alert? (2) Why
any alert at all? Would it not have been better to warn only the
occupants of the buildings, keeping the “confidential” tip-off a
secret, so as to entrap the terrorists?
As more information about the “plot” emerged, the official version
began to unravel. It turned out that the “intelligence” was three to
four years old, and that it had been gathered from the internet and
other publicly available sources. In addition, there was no evidence of
recent al Qaeda planning.
So we were asked to believe that all this old material was part of a
three-year old plot scheduled precisely for early August, 2004, and
directed to five specific buildings.
With official credibility hemorrhaging, emergency intervention was
necessary. It arrived the very next day, on Monday, with the “fresh
information” that the data wasn’t all that old, after all. As
Reuters reported:
The New York Times published a story on Monday saying
U.S. officials had disclosed that a man arrested secretly in Pakistan
was the source of the bulk of information leading to the security
alerts. The newspaper named him as Khan, although it did not say how
it had learned his name. U.S. officials subsequently confirmed the
name to other news organizations on Monday morning. None of the
reports mentioned that Khan was working under cover at the time,
helping to catch al Qaeda suspects." (Juan
Cole)
OOPS!
So there was the crime, as plain as the smirk on Dubya’s face: the “outing”
of an intelligence asset.
This is serious stuff. How serious? Peter
Graff of Reuters explains:
The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed
after Washington launched its "orange alert" this month has
shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have
set back the war on terror....
Reuters learned from Pakistani intelligence sources on Friday that
computer expert Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, arrested secretly in July,
was working under cover to help the authorities track down al Qaeda
militants in Britain and the United States when his name appeared in
U.S. newspapers.
"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse,"
said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense
publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising
a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys
in there in the first place?"
"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage,
counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth.... Running agents
within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence
agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months
and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."
So it comes to this: In order to escape from a public
relations embarrassment, the Busheviks willingly exposed a “mole”
– a source of information from inside the operations and planning
center of al Qaeda.
Similarly, Valerie Plame’s crucially important operation was shut
down, in order to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, for committing the
crime of premeditated truth-telling.
Once again, the Busheviks burned down the barn to roast the pig.
And what was the political price they paid for these catastrophic
blunders? Essentially zilch. True, “Plame-gate” is still
under investigation, though with only two months to go, the damaging
denouement will likely be postponed until after the election. Maybe a
minor White House apparatchik will be sacrificed. No further damage –
until the nuclear device that Plame’s operation might have intercepted
falls into the hands of al Qaeda.
As for “Pak-gate,” after a month, it has totally disappeared from
the media radar, presumably never to surface again. No investigation, no
indictment, no political cost – no cost at all, except perhaps the
lives of a few thousand of our fellow citizens, when the shipping
container containing the WMD package from al Qaeda, about which
double-agent Khan might have alerted us, enters one of our harbors.
This is the stuff of major scandal. Had this happened during the
administration of a Democratic president, Congress would even now be
drawing up articles of impeachment. In an election year, that
president, like LBJ, would choose not to run for re-election, and for
good reason: he would be unelectable.
But not this administration and not this
president. Instead, the media hasn't touched this scandal, much
less investigated it. “Pak-gate” (for which I must invent a name,
because the media has not), is gone and forgotten: unexamined by
Congressional oversight, and uninvestigated by our “journalists.”
Where’s the outrage?
Meanwhile, the totally baseless and transparently mendacious “Swift
Boat” smear resounds. The media presents “both sides” of the
controversy, pretending that the accusers even have a “side.” A
responsible press would have looked to the merits of the accusations
and, finding none, would have exposed the scam sufficiently to have
disgraced the slanderers, and made an example of them that might
discourage subsequent attempts to besmirch honorable political
candidates.
But we’ve seen so much of this two-faced, double-standard so-called
journalism that we should be used to it by now. Accustomed, but not
tolerant.
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Eight years and $70 million of persistent probing of
the public and private lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton, resulted
in nothing more than the discovery of an illicit but consensual sex
act.
Comparable behavior by the accusers, Gingrich, Hyde, Livingston,
etc., was deemed irrelevant.
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Groundless smears against Al Gore – that he had
claimed to have “invented the internet” (false), had claimed to
have “discovered Love Canal” (false), and so on. But no mention
of George W. Bush’s business failures, his possibly illegal
investment deals, his “escape” from his National Guard
obligations, his record as the Governor of Texas.
The evidence of the media’s bias in the 2000 election
is clear and incontrovertible, as Paul Begala demonstrated in a
November, 2002 Nexus-Lexus search:
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There were exactly 704 stories in the campaign
about this flap of Gore inventing the Internet. There were only 13
stories about Bush failing to show up for his National Guard duty
for a year. There were well over 1,000 stories -- Nexus stopped at
1,000 -- about Gore and the Buddhist temple. Only 12 about Bush
being accused of insider trading at Harken Energy. There were 347
about Al Gore wearing earth tones, but only 10 about the fact that
Dick Cheney did business with Iran and Iraq and Libya…
And now, the Administration of George Bush, arguably the
most incompetent and corrupt in US history, is given a free pass by the
media.
Had the current management of the Washington Post been in charge
during the Watergate burglary, Woodward and Bernstein would no doubt
have been ordered to get back to covering freeway smash-ups, and Richard
Nixon would have finished his term, unexposed and unpunished.
There are precious few indicators of change in this dismal situation. The
New York Times and the Washington Post, “flagships” of
American journalism, have both published tepid apologies for their
failure to serve as responsible watch-dogs of the government, in the
run-up to the Iraq war. But now, having apologized for their
misbehavior, they are repeating it. There is an abundance of opportunity
for critical, objective and balanced reporting of the current election
campaign. Once again, it is an opportunity not taken.
In the face of all this evidence, it is difficult to understand how
anyone with more than a casual acquaintance with the corporate media
persist in the belief that the media have a “liberal bias”?
The examples of the corporate media’s double dealing could fill a
book, as indeed they have, many times over. And I expect to continue
this elaboration in subsequent essays. But it is time, now, to bring
this to a close.
When I was a youngster half a century ago, the US press delighted in
relating the fantasies of Pravda and Isvestia, and we all
wondered “how could they get away with printing such outright lies,”
and “what kind of effect does all this have on the Soviet People?”
Today, there is not all that much difference between Pravda c.1960s and
the US media today. With FOX, right-wing talk radio and the NY Post
there is no difference. As an October, 2003 study demonstrated, the more
one watches FOX News, the less informed one is. Shaun
Waterman of UPI reports:
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It's official -- watching Fox News makes you
ignorant. To be precise, researchers from the Program on
International Policy at the University of Maryland found that
those who relied on Fox for their news were more likely than those
who relied on any other news source to have what the study called
"significant misperceptions" about the war in Iraq...
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After decades of this kind of “journalism,”
discerning Russians came to appreciate that they were being
systematically lied to by their media – a realization that has not
yet come to most Americans.
For the Soviet citizens seeking to escape the fog of “official
news,” their reality check was the Voice of America, Radio Free
Europe, the BBC, illegally smuggled-in publications and “Samizdat”
– unauthorized personal publications (by handscript or
typewriter).
For us, it is the Internet – while it lasts. After
the internet is privatized and then closed to dissenters,
we will have to devise our own “Samizdat,”
perhaps of audiotapes and computer disks.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, we might, as an aroused public, demand the
return of a free and diverse commercial media.
For the campaign immediately ahead, we do not ask that the media
join “our side.” It will quite suffice if the media renounce
their allegiance to the Bush regime, and instead direct that
allegiance to the truth – to facts, evidence, clarity and
logic. That is their legitimate function and their duty to the
public. We demand that the media present the facts in an even-handed
manner, investigate indications of corruption and mendacity, and
spare us the trivia.
Then John Kerry and John Edwards will win.
Because Rove and the Bushistas can’t handle the truth. And we the
people can.
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Copyright 2004, by Ernest Partridge
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- Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and
lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He
publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly)
and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org).
- originally published in www.crisispapers.org
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