BOMBING MEDIA
BUSH ON THE COUCH
FIGHTING BACK

You need to be a psychiatrist to fully comprehend President Bush’s love-hate attitude towards the media. His administration/cabal has made it a priority to spin it, manage it, limit its impact and talk around it. They have even created their own TV channels directly and indirectly. Karl Rove figured out how to shape a counter-narrative in which perception trumped reality, and in which a faith-based information system supplanted a fact-based one. Stalinist style PR operatives like John Rendon monitored media and placed stories in many outlets– all reinforcing the party line:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997

Understanding this is central to “getting” how politics is played in the USA. Media does not stand apart from politics. It IS politics. That’s why we need a media channel to watch all the channels. Media is the window through which you can decode our politics and politricks. And if you don’t believe that, THEY most assuredly do.

ON MESSAGE

Message points and “Message Disciple” was the strategy and it has worked well in the intimidation and bullying of anyone perceived as “off-message.” Reporters not considered “friendlies” were ignored, denigrated, avoided, or like Helen Thomas at the White House, no longer called upon. The BuschCo enemy list makes Nixons’ pale in comparison. Some journo syncphants like the infamous gay male dating site operator Mr. Jeff Gannon, a.k.a Jeff Guckert, was welcomed while others were shown the door. There were other operatives beyond Armstrong Williams on the payroll.

BUSH: “I DON’T READ NEWSPAPERS”

In his book, Bush at War, the many-agendered Bob Woodward disclosed how the President claimed not to even read the press at all. His advisors, he said, would tell him what was important. Meanwhile pundits were put on the payroll directly or given leaks and access like the home team cheerleaders at Fox News. There were plenty of other advisors to help game the media including a former Executive Producer at Nightline. They perfected the photo-op with perfect backdrops and staged events. For people who hated media, they spent a lot of time and money producing for it.

The only good news about this bad news is that the American public is getting hip to it at last. Frank Rich reported in the New York Times that a Harris Poll released last week in the Wall Street Journal showed that 64 percent of the American people “now believe that the Bush Administration ‘generally misleads the American people on current issues to achieve its own ends.’”

That may be but listening to the public is not high on the Administration’s priorities. Bush is apparently in conflict within himself. The private Bush lives in fear of any media outlet that mocks him or effectively challenges his views. Sometimes, as the Observer in London reported yesterday, he is a man obsessed, especially obsessed with Al Jazeera, as excerpts from a Downing St memo leaked in London made clear:

AN AL JAZEERA “OBSESSION”

” the memo reveals Bush’s profound obsession with Al Jazeera, an obsession that stretches from stucco-clad government offices in Washington to the tin huts located behind the razor wire in Guantanamo Bay. Why is the most powerful man in the world worried about a 24-hour news organization?

“Salah Hassan, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was arrested by US forces in November 2003, while filming the aftermath of an attack on a US convoy near the city of Baquba. Following his arrest he was surprised to discover he had been trailed by US troops for and had been secretly photographed at the scene of other attacks. When he was interrogated, he was accused of having prior knowledge of attacks on coalition forces.

“At the heart of the accusation is the fundamental tension between journalists - largely Arab reporters catering for an Arab audience - who say they are anxious to cover the story from both sides, and a United States that regards reporting on some aspects of the insurgency as tantamount to collaboration with terrorism. None of which would matter much were into not for the ferocious tenacity and professionalism of Al Jazeera, factors which have made the station an international phenomenon….”

Al Jazeera journalists were harassed, denigrated, condemned and when captured accused of being Al Qaeda operatives.

“According to Sami Muhyideen al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman arrested in Afgahnistan in 2001 and detained in Guantanamo Bay, US interrogators are obsessed with the idea of Al Qaeda infiltration of the channel and asked about Mansour over 100 times.

“On separate occasions the reporter and producer has been accused of membership of the radical Muslim Brotherhood (which he denies) and forming ‘improper’ relationships with mujahedeen leaders when he covered the Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

‘I don’t know why they would ask about me over a hundred times,’ Mansour told The Observer last week. ‘But the American authorities did not hide their extreme annoyance and fury as a result of my coverage of the first Fallujah campaign in April of 2004. My sole crime was broadcasting the reality of a war I was witnessing.”

(Note: Its been said that one reason the British government is suppressing the latest Downing Street Memo is that it includes a candid conversation about the destruction of Fallujah between Bush and Blair.)

REMEMBER: AL JAZEERA OFFICES WERE BOMBED

Robert Fisk recalls a conversation with Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Baghdad before the Arab Media Center which housed his offices was bombed:

“I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. “Don’t worry, Robert,” Tareq had replied. “We’ve given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won’t get hit.” Three days later, Tareq was dead.”

ECHO OR INSTIGATOR?

Dorrance Smith, former Nightline executive producer for Ted Koppel at ABC left to become a close Bush media advisor. He wrote a piece with no hard evidence suggesting an Al Qaeda/Al Jazeera link. It was dutifully published on the righter than right editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

The BBC asked him to discuss the issue with me on the air. He declined. With hard-line rightwing advisors like Smith and SecDef Rumsfeld egging Bush on, its no wonder he was so hostile towards Al Jazeera. That piece appeared fairly recently.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007498

A COINCIDENCE?

Al Jazeera’s websites were also hacked and attacked. Sounds familiar?USA Today reported on March 30, 2003:

” SEATTLE — Someone made hacker history by knocking out Aljazeera.net, the Arabic satellite news channel’s Web site, for most of last week. No one has ever sustained a crippling attack against a big Web site for so long.

“The timing and scale of the assault fueled speculation that pro-U.S. tech vigilantes pulled off a cybercoup: derailing Al-Jazeera, a rising media outlet, just as it was moving to extend its pro-Islamic news coverage to a wider audience.”

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/iraq/2003-03-30-iraq-web_x.htm

BANNED ON WALL STREET

Remember also that Al Jazeera was forbidden in the post 911 period for awhile to report fom Wall Street:

”The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) fired the first salvo on Tuesday, March 25, when it revoked the credentials of Arab TV network Al-Jazeera correspondents. Shortly thereafter, the Nasdaq Stock Market fired away, refusing to allow Al-Jazeera to use its facilities to broadcast live reports.”

http://poynter.org/dg.lts/id.36/aid.27035/column.htm

WHAT AMERICANS BELIEVE

Kevin Drum writes in the Washington Monthly about the ‘Did He or Didn’t He” threaten to bomb Al Jazeera question. He adds this:

”So take your pick. Either Bush seriously tossed out the idea of bombing a TV station in a friendly country because he didn’t like their coverage of the war, or else this was his equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s “The bombing will begin in five minutes.” There’s no way to know which unless someone leaks the transcript itself. I’d sure like to see whether Tony Blair treated it like a joke when Bush proposed it.

“UPDATE: I don’t have a link for this, but a reader emails to tell me that this was the subject of Tuesday’s “Quickvote Poll” on CNN. The question was:

“Do you believe President Bush talked about bombing the HQ of Arabic-language TV network al-Jazeera?

71% of the respondents said yes. Even if this story turns out not to be true, that’s quite a statement.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_11/007626.php

ALOUNI CASE VERDICT EXPECTED IN SPAIN TODAY

A Spanish Court is expected to return a verdict today in the case of Taysir Alouni, an Al Jazeera correspondent accused of being part of a terror plot. He insists he is innocent as does the network.
www.taysiralony.net/

AND OUR MEDIA?

And what of the western media? Did our channels bother to cover those realities? Not really. In fact, most western media are not broadcasting the reality of the war—to this day. And sadly, say BBC watchers, “Aunty” is no less guilty of sanitizing the bloodletting and covering up its crimes than the pack of our ‘patriotically correct’ networks. So argues the British based journalist and TV documentary maker John Pilger:

“The Indian writer Vandana Shiva has called for an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge”. The insurrection is well under way.

“The great scandal of Iraq has accelerated this. In the United States, several senior broadcasters have confessed that had they challenged and exposed the lies told about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, instead of amplifying and justifying them, the invasion might not have happened…”

“A study by the Cardiff School of Journalism found that 90 per cent of the BBC’s references to Saddam Hussein’s WMDs suggested he possessed them and that “spin from the British and US governments was successful in framing the coverage”. The same “spin” has ensured, until now, that the use of banned weapons by the Americans and British in Iraq has been suppressed as news.”

This is an argument I make in more detail in my forthcoming book When News Lies” about media complicity and the war. Hopefully, more and more people in the media are recognizing the failure that has characterized so much of the coverage.

http://www.newsdissector.org/store.htm

WHAT BLAIR SAYS NOW: CONSPIRACY BAITING

Tony Blair has finally broken his silence on the issue. At first you will recall, Bush’s Al Jazeera comments were brushed off in the pro-Blair media as a joke, never intended to be taken seriously. But that didn’t play after a former Ministry of Defense official said it was very serious indeed.

So the new line is this, as reported in yesterday’s Telegraph:

”Tony Blair yesterday branded as a “conspiracy theory” claims that a leaked memo has revealed plans by President George W Bush last year to bomb the Arabic television station al-Jazeera.

“The Prime Minister broke his silence on the issue as fresh concerns surfaced over the use of the Official Secrets Act to suppress the memo….

“Mr Blair sought to play down the memo yesterday, despite the fact that two men, accused over its leaking, are to appear in court this week facing charges under the Official Secrets Act. He also shrugged off a request from the managing director of al-Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar, for a meeting.”

Poof—you see—it didn’t happen, or if it did, it was a joke or if not a joke, a conspiracy as if the war itself was not one. Like a mafia boss said in a movie I once saw: “FUUUGETABOUT IT.”

SUPRESSED BY THE GATEKEEPERS

The problem that the hostility to Al Jazeera is being echoed as we speak by the actions of cable operators and satellite owners who are not allowing the new al Jazeera International Channel carriage. They don’t want to let us see the channel because it competes with BBC and CNN. An Al Jazeera executive told me that Australia and the US are the two worst offenders in this regard. They don’t like the competition and they don’t like the channel’s values.

HOW THE US MEDIA IS “COVERING” THE STORY

Maybe that’s why this story has already begun to disappear in our media as the original Downing Street Memo did. Look at yesterday’s NY Times Week in Review and it is not there. Not even worthy of a mention. I went to Google Sunday morning and here’s what I found:

News results for al jazeera - View today’s top stories

Bush plans to bomb al-Jazeera, leak reveals - Xinhua - 10 hours ago
British paper: Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera - Christian Science Monitor - Nov 23, 2005
Al-Jazeera seeks answers over ‘bombing’ memo - Guardian Unlimited - Nov 23

There you have it. The British press is cited as the only source as if this is just a British story. Is President Bush not the central character? Is the US media incapable of digging?

The Chinese can read about it, but Americans….Fuhgetabout it.

THE AL JAZEERA MISSION

Al Jazeera is seen as a threat no doubt, in part, because its values are antithetical to those practiced by the corporate media that is suppressing the story.

Here’s how Al Jazeera—which is certainly open to criticism and self-criticism—sums up its own mission. Think of this when you try to understand the hostility and flak the channel has attracted.

”Our ultimate goal is to set up a more proactive relationship with our audience, where the audience is not simply a visitor at the other end of the line. They are and they will always be an integral part of the news reporting and news making process.

“Our team of dedicated journalists with their multi-national education and diversified backgrounds share a common set of attributes: objectivity, accuracy, and a passion for truth.

“Truth will be the force that will drive us to raise thorny issues, to seize every opportunity for exclusive reporting, to take hold of unforgettable moments in history and to rekindle the willpower within every human being who strives for truth.”

www.english.aljazeera.net

TRUTH IN THE UK?

Will anyone defy the law and publish the Downing Street memo in Britain? A journalist there writes in despair and disgust:

”I still feel aggrieved that with all our contacts in the business we can’t get hold of a memo that’s been sitting in the offices of The Guardian, the Mirror, the Mail and which none of them will use for fear of a crazy Secrets Act that never stopped Spycatcher. Whatever else is in that memo, it must be pretty serious…! I thought the age of the internet meant there couldn’t be “secret” memos that have been sitting around in newsrooms.

“Harumph.”

TRUTH IN THE USA?

Is there any American channel even talking about this story in any detail? And what about Truth? The only “T “word they feature is terrorist. I have a separate article on these issues on Buzzflash and Mediachannel. Your thoughts are welcome.

War on the Media: ‘Don’t Bomb Us’
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/11/con05452.html

OTHER NEWS: SADDAM’ TRIAL UNDERWAY.

Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General arrived in Iraq yesterday to advise the defense but its not clear if they will let him the court room. Saddam’s lawyers are seeking a three month delay after two members of the defense team were killed. The Washington Post reports that law students in Washington are drafting research reports and memos for the Court.

” …human rights clinics, once rare, are now popping up at a growing number of law schools. There’s a cluster in the Washington area: Georgetown University Law Center is opening a Human Rights Institute early next year. Students at the University of Virginia School of Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, now in its third year, have done research for the Special Court for Sierra Leone examining war crimes and for cases stemming from the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. American University’s Washington College of Law has one of the oldest and best-known human rights clinics in the country, with students contributing to cases involving asylum, the death penalty, former dictators and war crimes.

ALLAWI: IRAQ IS AS BAD NOW AS IT WAS THEN

With Iraqi political parties calling on the US military to allow Iraqi forces to be as brutal as they wanna be the moral victory that West had hoped to assert is losing its appeal. Yahoo reports:

”Iraq are as bad now as they were under Saddam Hussein and could become even worse, the country’s former interim prime minister said in an interview published Sunday.

“People are doing the same as Saddam’s time and worse,” Ayad Allawi told The Observer newspaper. “It is an appropriate comparison.”

“Allawi accused fellow Shiites in the government of being responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said the brutality of elements in the new security forces rivals that of Saddam’s secret police.
“
Although Allawi is a Shiite, he is secular in his politics and is running separately from the Shiite religious parties in the Dec. 15 election. His comments appear to be an attempt to appeal to Sunni voters, who claim their community has been unfairly targeted by the Shiite-led security forces.

“People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same thing,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

TWO CONGRESSMAN HURT IN IRAQ ACCIDENT

CNN carries an AP report:

” A military vehicle carrying U.S. politicians overturned on the way to the Baghdad airport Saturday, injuring two congressmen, a fellow congressman traveling with them said.

“Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pennsylvania, was airlifted to a military hospital in Germany for an MRI on his neck, and Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Missouri, was sent to a Baghdad hospital, said U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall. Marshall, a Georgia Democrat, was in the vehicle but was not hurt.”

DEBATING THE USE OF WHITE PHOSPHORUS IN IRAQ

My friend, the Italian filmmaker Gabriele Zamparini writes to Iraq expert Juan Cole
http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog/2005/11/open-letter-to-juan-cole-professor-of.htm

The new Current channel had a pretty good report on white phosphorus as a prohibited weapon. CBS News ran a report in which the US military referred to the resistance as “terrorists.” It was as propagandistic as they come.

GUARDIAN: NEW MILITARY SCANDAL

Marines under fire for ritual beatings film
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1652414,00.html

CLEANING UP IS HARD TO DO

TOKYO - Thousands of residents were evacuated in Tokyo on Sunday while authorities dug up an unexploded 550-pound bomb, believed to have been dropped by the United States during World War II, a local official said”