MISSING FROM THE COVERAGE OF LEBANON

The Sunday New York Times led with a major story on Lebanon, framing the conflict almost totally in religious terms—Shia versus Sunnis. Oddly there was little on the role of Syria or Iran, or for that matter, Israel and the United States.

Oddly the LA Times had a very different and more nuanced analysis when it showed that Hezbollah was acting less for RELIGIOUS reasons than political ones because US had been covertly funding a Sunni militia to attack them as part, no doubt of the GWOT (Global War on Terror). Read this for the issues the NY Times avoids:

For a year, the main Lebanese political faction backed by the United States built a Sunni Muslim militia here under the guise of private security companies, Lebanese security experts and officials said.

The fighters, aligned with Saad Hariri’s Future movement, were trained and armed to counter the heavily armed Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah and protect their turf in a potential military confrontation.

But in a single night late last week, the curious experiment in private-sector warfare crumbled.

Attacked by Hezbollah, the Future movement fighters quickly fled Beirut or gave up their weapons. Afterward, some of the fighters said they felt betrayed by their political patrons, who failed to give them the means to protect themselves while official security forces stood aside and let Hezbollah destroy them.

CAN YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SHIA AND A SUNNI?

So asked a NY Times Op Ed Writer. The responses he got?

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

…After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?

…But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

…A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.’s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

WHAT’S LEFT OUT

As usual, the background and context of the events were missing in most media accounts, as Jim Fuller noted. (Full story on Mediachannel’s home page)

Hello? Red Queen? Hatter? Rabbit? Alice? Anyone?

Reading about the recent hostilities in Lebanon and growing ever sadder,
it suddenly hit me like a two-by-four to the head that all of the
reporting and all the pundit blathering on the situation, at least in
this country, has a surreal, Wonderland quality.

A major, elephant-in-the-room piece of the story -– Israel’s invasion of
Lebanon less than two years ago — has been entirely absent from the
so-called “mainstream media” coverage of the battles and political
maneuvering and the further suffering of the Lebanese people. Not so
much as a whisper have we heard, not so much as a single line of agate
type have we seen on that essential piece of the story.

Yes, it’s true. The American corporate news organizations have blacked
out an enormously significant piece of the Lebanon puzzle, an act for
which I can find no reason other than to actively support the
machinations of Israel and the White House.

I was so disoriented by that realization, I had to go back and check
2006 news coverage to make sure I wasn’t suffering from false memory,
possibly from some sort of pollution-induced delusion.

Nope. It’s there in the on-line archives and in my files: Israel, with
full support and hush-hush collusion of the Bushcheney administration,
did invade Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and keep it’s troops there for
about six weeks….

A LEBANESE VIEW

Muhamad Mugraby, a lawyer, human rights defender, and president of the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law in Lebanon offers one solution:

The only way to bring Lebanon out of this chronic state of weakness and vulnerability is to establish and abide by the rule of law with all its necessary prerequisites. Among the most significant of such prerequisites is the full recognition of, and protection for, human rights, starting with the right of free speech, which is the cornerstone for accountability. This cannot happen before all “Category One Lebanese” are, like former European nobility and feudal lords, decisively brought under the law and become fully accountable, and their power of private rule-making is decisively ended. Simultaneously, “Category Two Lebanese” must be enfranchised and energized by providing them with concrete socioeconomic protection and a job creation program which, together, bring an end to poverty, with affordable housing, and with state-subsidized and decent education and training.

BURMA: ARE WE GETTING THE WHOLE STORY?

Sarah Flounders: The U.S. corporate media are full of stories on the scale
of the disaster and the inability of the government to cope with the relief effort. Completely omitted is any mention of the U.S. government’s own abysmal track record in providing disaster relief.

Each news article repeats the demand that Washington be
given full military access to Myanmar to deliver emergency
supplies. There is outrage and shock that Myanmar will not
permit U.S. military planes to land or Navy ships to dock.
The charge that the Myanmar government cannot possibly be trusted to deliver
the supplies is repeated again and again.

What is not reported is that the Bush administration, with
criminal calculation and planning, consciously made the
relief efforts far more difficult. The day before Cyclone
Nargis actually hit Myanmar, but when the approach of the
monster storm had already being announced and tracked for
a week, President George W. Bush signed a harsh new level
of economic sanctions on Myanmar. Sanctions are an act of
aggression, a form of economic warfare that specifically
targets the poorest and most desperate….

SCOTT SANDERS: PBS IMPLICATED IN PENTAGON MEDIA SCANDAL

Two more items on the NYT pentagon propaganda expose, a story that keeps on giving. First, the pubcast trade journal Current says it turns out that beyond Robert H. Scales, additional military-industrial-media complex propagandists were given a platform on several NPR and PBS programs:

Newsrooms review booking of war ‘experts’-

But there’s much more than that, according to Scott Sanders at the Chicago Media Action blog:

Pentagon Propaganda, Public Broadcasting, and Sewer Board Trustees -

THE FAILURES OF A US COMPANY

From a General Motors Whistleblower called “Buickman”

When is the last time a GM executive was fired for failure? Trick question…answer is never (at least in modern times). Lovejoy heads GMAC when McNamara burns us for $400 million, he gets transfered to SPO. The Fiat fiasco cost us billions and no one is held accountable. Marketshare nosedives, shareholder value disappears, long term debt skyrockets, Olds is lost, GMAC is sold, Buick is starving to death, plants closed, assets sold, divisions spun …and once again…zero accountability. This is the single biggest trouble at GM. In particular, the marketing staff is comprised of incompetent failures who are never called to task for their inabilities.

Mish’s Global Economic Analysis Blog: Its Worse Than We Think

Excerpt: FRAUD IN HOUSING MARKET CONTINUES UNCHECKED

Over the past few weeks we have seen lenders that are giving up, when it comes to the disposition of inventory. Instead of putting policies and procedures in place, these lenders are slashing staff and outsourcing property disposition. The failure of lenders to get this under control is forcing prices down on a national level. It is not just Florida or Arizona or California. And the reason for the failure is the same reason we are in this position to begin with. There is no accountability and no regulations regarding what the lenders are doing. The snakes have moved out of the mortgage business and into the REO disposition business. These guys are taking the lenders to the cleaners.

I’ve written about one example at Fannie Mae. This week we experienced a similar horror story with GMAC. We are seeing outright fraud, but no one wants to make any attempt to stop it. The result is horrifying. Homes that should sell at $300,000 are being sold at $225,000. This lowers the bar for the rest of the inventory, because the appraisals will tag the $225,000 sale. The banks are letting the slime control how their inventory is sold. We have yet to find a single person at any of the lenders that wants to hear about the fraud or the negligence that is common place. They simply don’t care. Their only goal is to unload inventory. But without accountability, process, procedures and regulations in place, all they are doing is destroying the market.

By the way, property preservation is also outsourced to the snakes . . . and they couldn’t care less. So as this inventory sits, it costs the lenders money, but it also means mold in homes where the electric is turned off, as well as rodent and bug infestations, vandals, etc. Once again . . . no one is at the helm of the ship. Strike that. There are fat cats with big paychecks at the helm of the ship, but they are in the galley gorging themselves on food and drink, living it up at the expense of the country.

NEXT CRASH? THE WALLS STREET EXAMINER REPORTS:

Don’t look now but the FDIC has finally figured out that they have a problem with “brokered deposits”. These are sold through the same largely unregulated sleazy cast of characters who brought you structured finance and CDOs. This ties into the next crash du jour, commercial and retail real estate. Do you own CDs peddled through brokerage firms? Better think long and hard about the insurance on them.

….. FDIC is a collective bank insurance program administered by a government agency, and is not direct insurance. Banks pay into it, not the taxpayer. Read the small print, the fund only has $52 billion on hand to cover $4.25 trillion FDIC insured bank deposits in the US. And even if after FDIC’s tiny insurance cushion gets wiped out it eventually becomes a direct Treasury obligation (which I believe is problematic) than we can just add that one to the trillion deficit I am looking for next year. In other words there is no free ride

Question to Readers: Do you want me to continue to report what the people in the know are saying about the financial crisis, or is it too scary?