POWELL MARKS FIRST SPEECH ANNIVERSARY

CIA DIRECTOR MARKS FIRST PUBLIC SPIEL

MORE BEEB TALK

THE NATION is marking the first anniversary of Colin —“he’s the good guy in the Administration”— Powell’s speech to the UN. Remember the self-assurance, the slides, the “intelligence intercepts”, … the satellite photos, the stunning presentation, the “proof.” Remember its impact:

“One year ago, in a much-lauded presentation before the United Nations, Colin Powell presented evidence of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the need to go to war to destroy them. As Greg Mitchell wrote in a devastating summary of media coverage in Editor and Publisher last fall, “the Powell charade was the turning point in the march to war, and the media, in almost universally declaring that he had ‘made the case’ fell for it hook, line and sinker, thereby making an invasion inevitable.”

WAS HE HIGH? AND ON WHAT?

I wish I had watched George Tenet defend the CIA yesterday in one more act in the deceptive shadow play and shell game that is now being played out to keep the truth from coming out. He came out of the woodwork in Langley to make a PR speech yesterday that prompted one of our readers, Anna Taylor, to comment, “Am I the only one who thinks Tenet was high as a kite when he gave this address?”

Anna’s comment brought to mind one of President Bush’s talks to the nation that led Maureen Dowd to call him the “Xanax President” since she felt, along with many others that he was more sedated than usual. Tenet is shuffling the ball out of his court back at his critics. BBC reported:

CIA DEFENDS CIA (WHO ELSE WOULD?)
“CIA director George Tenet has defended the gathering of intelligence later used to justify declaring war on Iraq. No one told security officials what to say or how to say it, he said, adding: “We always call it as we see it.”

"He said the intelligence services had never said Saddam Hussein was an “imminent threat” but stood by warnings about the future danger he could pose.” BBC News

Most telling was his welcoming the new investigation into intelligence failures which tells you how lacking in credibility that exercise is likely to be. Subjects of investigations rarely welcome them. I loved his unequivocal exercise in CMA: “When the facts on Iraq are all in, we will be neither completely right nor completely wrong.” As the record is revised, it is also being rewritten says Paul Krugman in today’s NY Times.

Of course, the thrust of his institutional defense tends to contradict the thrust of the Administration’s stance. For a devastating analysis of the WMD issue, see the new report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

CHENEY’S OFFICE LINKED TO CIA LEAK

Speaking of Intelligence, UPI is reporting: “Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney’s office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer’s identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.

“According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, were the two Cheney employees. “We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,” one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president’s office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls. The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah “that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time” as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.” UPI

INVESTIGATE BREASTS, NOT BLOODSHED

Back in the USSA, the only investigation that is raising eyeballs is the one into the “nipple” incident at the Superbowl. Last night CBS’ own David Letterman suggested that it had been part of the show all along, something that the network denies. But the issue is being exploited as David Walsh explains on the World Socialist Web Site argues:

“It has given rise to demands for further censoring the television airwaves and provided yet another opportunity for whipping up the Christian fundamentalist “base” of the Republican Party.

“The guardians of American decency are up in arms, including National Football League (NFL) commissioner Paul Tagliabue, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Michael Powell, the religious right, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and executives from corporate giants PepsiCo, America Online and CBS.

“Tagliabue, who presides over a multi-billion dollar sport-business that more and more seems to recapture the spirit of Roman gladiatorial contests, called the MTV-produced halftime show “offensive, inappropriate and embarrassing to us and our fans. We will change our policy, our people and our processes for managing the halftime entertainment in the future.” Before the game, the NFL commissioner posed on the sidelines for photographs with former president George Bush….

"Right-wing “family groups” had a field day piously denouncing Jackson’s nationally televised exposure. Focus on the Family’s James C. Dobson noted that the FCC threat to “punish” CBS was encouraging, “but it is even more encouraging to see moms and dads rise up in defense of their sons and daughters to say ëEnough is enough.’ That reaction, more than any government agency’s action, has the greatest potential to clean up what passes for popular entertainment these days.” (This “rising up” has the usual character of such stage-managed affairs. Extreme right web sites and radio talk-show hosts call on their readers and listeners to bombard the corporation or government body in question with protests and the media obediently describes the “public outrage.”)…” WSWS

The progressives at MoveOn.org Voter Fund are also turning up the heat on CBS with this appeal for their members to write and call:

” We didn’t think the hypocrisy at CBS headquarters could get any worse. But it just did.

"As you know, CBS refused to run MoveOn Voter Fund’s “Child’s Pay” ad — perhaps the most tasteful and uncontroversial advocacy ad in history — during the Super Bowl. CBS executives claimed they had a blanket policy against all so-called “issue” ads.

"Yesterday, we learned that the network plans to broadcast an ad promoting the Bush Medicare prescription drug law. This is part of a $13 million taxpayer-financed TV campaign to take the heat off the White House for pushing through a drug plan that benefits drug companies and insurance companies more than Medicare recipients.

"The White House ad features the tagline “Same Medicare. More Benefits.” But a report by Consumers Union last month said that most people covered by Medicare will wind up spending more for prescription drugs, as a result of the provisions in the law which favor drug companies. According to the Washington Post, the campaign is intended “to counteract Democratic criticism that changes to the (Medicare) program will harm older Americans.”

"If that isn’t a controversial issue ad, we don’t know what is. But since CBS appears to be changing its policy, our Voter Fund has submitted our own Medicare ad which exposes the facts behind this spin campaign to run on CBS. So far, we haven’t heard back. Please give CBS a call today at (212) 975-4321 to let them know that they need to either pull the White House ads or run ours." MoveOn.org Voter Fund

TRANSPARENCY

It’s being called "An Experiment in Transparency." Journalist Ron Susskind is posting key documents given to him by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill:

“These documents are drawn from a collection of 19,000 files of Paul H. O’Neill, the US Treasury Secretary for the first two years of the Presidency of George W. Bush. Like all Treasury Secretaries, O’Neill was the top domestic appointment of the President and also a principal of the National Security Council. The files, which range from memoranda to the President to handwritten notes to “sensitive” internal reports, cover a sweeping array of foreign and domestic issues. They also display the attending political and personal matters that often determine policy. They were collected as part of a Treasury Department archiving process in which every item that crossed O’Neill’s desk, from every department in government, was copied into a TIF, or image, file. Documents cited in the “The Price of Loyalty” are presented with explanations of context and little comment. They speak, as does all irrefutable evidence, for themselves. More files of compelling public interest will be released in the coming days and weeks." An Experiment in Transparency

ON THE BBC

"UPDATE; The BBC’s new management has decided not to file a legal challenge to the Hutton Report. This is after, according to the Mail, “BBC lawyers drew up a secret dossier accusing Alastair Campbell of misleading MPs in an attempt to counteract Lord Hutton’s damning verdict of the corporation.” The Financial Times reports: “The BBC’s senior management is launching a deeper review of editorial standards than initially planned following last week’s Hutton report.”…The Times reports: “ Greg Dyke is writing a book about the David Kelly affair and said he would consider making a return as BBC director general."

IN DEFENSE OF AUNTY

Our anonymous BBC presenter is back responding to David Tranier from Colchester England who has been critiquing the Beeb for us:

“I take your Colchester correspondent’s point about not wishing to turn the newsletter into a debating forum, but just to answer briefly some of his points about the BBC:

“I am more than aware of the Cardiff and Media Tenor reports. However, it should be noted that you don’t necessarily judge balance with a stopwatch or by counting heads. What is said and what is shown, and the contexts of each, go unmeasured by such bean-counting operations. If the BBC quoted a lot of sources of coalition or military origin, perhaps this is because the BBC were asking these people the difficult questions that needed answering. If you want to ask why a restaurant full of families having dinner had been reduced to dust and rubble, then the people you need to ask are the ones who destroyed the restaurant.

“I trust David noted the "allegedly" in the quote from the Daily Mirror about contributors to interactive programs. I produce and present phone-in programs, and I have never been told anything of the kind.

“David actually makes the same point as I do about opinion polls, just in a different way. And of course, people who feel very strongly about any issue are always going to perceive their views are being underrepresented by a fair, impartial and balanced broadcaster. The people who believed 100% that the war was right were aggrieved that time was given to people who thought the war was wrong; and vice versa. For these people not to feel that their views were underrepresented, we’d havve had to represent their views and their views alone.

“Once again, there is no eidence to suggest that the BBC never challenges the government line. Just on day spent listening to Today, 5 Live Breakfast, The World At One, PM, 5 Live Drive and The World Tonight, and watching the Six, the Ten and in particular Newsnight would confirm quite the opposite.

"Mentioning Lord Reith, the BBC’s founding director-general, is a colossal red herring. Yes, in the 1920s - eighty years ago - Reith said that the BBC could serve to protect the status quo. But he also banned adverts for lavatory cleaner from appearing on the Sunday radio listings pages of the Radio Times, deeming them inappropriate reading for the Sabbath, and in the 1920s Oxford and Cambridge professors had two votes each in General Elections. The BBC, and society as a whole, has come a long way since the 1920s; quoting Reith on this issue is like saying you secretly suspect that we’re still required to wear dinner jackets and black tie when we’re broadcasting, and that the studio webcam images are faked.

"Can I just point out that if this were true - “The BBC seems remarkably comfortable with taking the Government at its word even when there is remarkable evidence showing Government duplicity” - then there would have been no discussion of the changes made to the government’s dossiers on weapons of mass destruction, seemingly at the behest of Downing Street. Do you think if that statement were true, the BBC would have tracked down and interviewed the academic whose 12-year-old Ph.D. thesis formed the basis of the first such dossier, to take just one example? And if it were true, then Hutton would never have happened.

"And with this - “The BBC’s principal news programs are those that go out on BBC 1 at One, Six, and Ten - they’re the ones that the overwhelming majority watch and they’re the ones that frequently consist of little more than stenography of Government spokespeople” - we’re back in the realms of bollocks again, frankly. Sorry, David, but that’s just not true, and it’s an insult to the BBC’s journalists to suggest that all they - we - do is sit at the right hand of government ministers noting down their thoughts and relaying them to a grateful, gullible nation."

PROGRAM NOTE: Former BBC Chief Greg Dyke will be interviewed by Tina Brown on her new CNBC program “Topic A” this Sunday at 8 PM Eastern (and repeated at l l PM.) If you catch it, I would welcome your comments, I have been helping with the show.

YOUR LETTERS: ON JANET AND SO MUCH MORE

Susan Marston writes

"RE: Ed Devitt’s comment entitled “Domination” in today’s blog: I had the same exact thoughts. The entire Janet Jackson fiasco and the ensuing public outcry play too well into the hands of Michael Powell and those intent upon censuring the media."

Bradley Laing is back to say:

“Although I’m not sure of this, my impression is that the right-wing, and the public in general, has lost interest in Iraq. The guys who argued loudly for the invasion in 2003 don’t know or care about the occupation in 2004. Shades of the Korean War where forgetting about W.W.II was a national past time, so Korea got ignored by the press and public alike?"

Phil Hinton writes from Japan:

"After reading the letter written by the anonymous BBC reporter, I’d just like to say that the BBC as with all what we call ‘News Agencies’ need to actually start giving us some before we will actually appreciate the job they are doing. After watching BBC World a week ago, I was flabbergasted by the misuse of time. The notion of ‘non-news’. With all the problems (and positives) that we have in the world, I hardly think a 5 minute section about a train line through the back of ‘beyonder’ in Australia is a good use of a 25 minute program. We have to look at actually what we are being given. In fact, I’m off to time what’s showing on today’s news. Propaganda or Pop? As my friend says ‘that’s entertainment’. And these days news seems more like entertainment than it ever has. And it will get worse."

Gay Marriage — Chris Cook writes from Olympia, Washington:

"Greetings again, Danny; we’re all enjoying your electoral circus up here. We’re preparing, in our diminutive Canadian way, for an election, too ( it’s not uncommon for “our” politicos to run campaigns parallel to the US to capitalize on political fatigue ). I was especially interested to see the issue of gay marriage beginning to float into the debate. The Canadian Alliance Party, (recently amalgamated with the traditional Conservative Party) cynically tried to use this as a tool to bludgeon the ruling Liberals."

It was a desperate attempt, that has so far failed to generate support. The former CA party is closely aligned to America’s Republicans, both ideologically and financially. Look for more on gay marriage as November approaches. Thanks for the daily reality check.

Bob Barret writes

Thank you for printing Sidney Blumenthal’s excellent article. I hope it helps awaken the US public to the global destructiveness of the Bush Administration. Insight into the viciousness of this group is afforded by an examination of the characteristics of those who are afflicted by antisocial personality disorder. According to the ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders by the World Health Organization, Geneva, the F60.2 Dissocial (Antisocial) Personality Disorder is described as:

(A) personality disorder, usually coming to attention because of a gross disparity between behavior and the prevailing social norms, and characterized by at least 3 of the following:

1. callous unconcern for the feelings of others;
2. gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules and obligations;
3. incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, though having no difficulty in establishing them;
4. very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence;
5. incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment;
6. marked proneness to blame others, or to offer plausible rationalizations, for the behavior that has brought the patient into conflict with society. There may also be persistent irritability as an associated feature. Conduct disorder during childhood and adolescence, though not invariably present, may further support the diagnosis. Includes: * amoral, antisocial, asocial, psychopathic, and sociopathic personality (disorder)

Persons who present with this form of psychopathy are characterized by amorality, lack of affect, lying and violent behavior that fail to produce feelings of guilt.

Unencumbered by shame, our fascistic ‘misleaders’ are, thus willing to do whatever they believe is necessary to control the principal sources of oil and make the world safe for laissez-faire American capitalism. …

Help wanted for new Iraq project

We’re writing to you about the formation of a film and television training college in Baghdad. We’re both Iraqi film makers who’ve lived outside the country for many years and have teaching and film production experience, in Europe and in the Arab World. We feel we have a contribution to make to the rebuilding of the country.

“For many years, no television or film production independent of government control was possible in Iraq. After 13 years of the most comprehensive sanctions in history, 3 devastating wars, 35 years of dictatorship and now occupation, the need couldn’t be greater.

We’ll offer a series of one- and two-month courses, free of charge, for 20 students at a time; from Baghdad and from outside the city, with a minimum of 25% of women. We’ll teach camera, sound, lighting, editing, documentary and short fiction film making and provide production facilities so students can continue making films after their courses end. We’ll use DV camera equipment, but hope in time to introduce 16mm film as well….”

To help, contact: maysoon@oxymoronfilms.demon.co.uk or kasimabid@yahoo.co.uk

Dyslexics — Nathaniel Polster, editor of Adolescent Medicine writes:

In re the message from Neddy Harris today. That person is self-described as a dyslexic. No one should accept that diagnosis without exploring behavioral optometry.

Our family is using it on our granddaughter, also smart above average and talented, but dyslexic. Behavioral optometry has helped. If Harris wants more information, I can send it. We’ve reported on it in Adolescent Medicine newsletter.

Moyers mentioned his coming retirement about the same time that he mentioned your work at the Media Reform Conference in Madison. I am pushing a college to hire him to set up a journalism program, but am not sanguine bout a response. I wonder if the rumors of NOW being quashed are a misinterpretation of the retirement.

ON JOURNALISM AND POETRY

Have a great weekend but before it begins, may I share this with you — an insight from poet Archibald MacLeish:

“To separate journalism and poetry —therefore, history and poetry— to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.”

And with that I bid adieu. Thanks to all who wrote with email suggestions … mine seems to be working, albeit slowly.

NOTE TO READERS: Our new editor Sam Robinson is going to be experimenting with the format of the Dissector Blog and helping to try to grow the list of subscribers. Please check out what he’s doing and give us your feedback. My email seems back in action and I thank you for your concern. Now share it with the Washington Post which, as the NY Times reports, made a boo-boo: “The Washington Post inadvertently allowed the registration for one of its Internet domain names to expire, and that lapse had the immediate effect of shutting down the e-mail system.”

See you Monday or before. Feedback to me: Dissector@mediachannel.org