Bill O’Reilly’s enemies of the state
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Bush-league script enraging press
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MEDIA BRIEFS
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Media dodging UN surveillance story

By Norman Solomon

Mar. 6— Three days after a British newspaper revealed a memo about US spying on UN Security Council delegations, I asked Daniel Ellsberg to assess the importance of the story. “This leak,” he replied, “is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers.”

The key word is “timely.” Publication of the secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, made possible by Ellsberg’s heroic decision to leak those documents, came after the Vietnam War had already been underway for many years. But with all-out war on Iraq still in the future, the leak about spying at the United Nations could erode the Bush administration’s already slim chances of getting a war resolution through the Security Council.

“As part of its battle to win votes in favor of war against Iraq,” the London-based Observer reported on Mar. 2, the US government developed an “aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the e-mails of UN delegates.” The smoking gun was “a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency [NSA] — the US body which intercepts communications around the world — and circulated to both senior agents in his organization and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency.”

The Observer added: “The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York — the so-called “Middle Six” delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.”

The NSA memo, dated Jan. 31, outlines the wide scope of the surveillance activities, seeking any information useful to push a war resolution through the Security Council — “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.”

Three days after the memo came to light, the Times of London printed an article noting that the Bush administration “finds itself isolated” in its zeal for war on Iraq. “In the most recent setback,” the newspaper reported, “a memorandum by the US National Security Agency, leaked to the Observer, revealed that American spies were ordered to eavesdrop on the conversations of the six undecided countries on the United Nations Security Council.”

The London Times article called it an “embarrassing disclosure.” And the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States.

Several days after the “embarrassing disclosure,” not a word about it had appeared in America’s supposed paper of record, The New York Times, — the single most influential media outlet in the United States — still had not printed anything about the story. How could that be?

“Well, it’s not that we haven’t been interested,” New York Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale said Wednesday night, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. “We could get no confirmation or comment” on the memo from US officials.

The Times opted not to relay the Observer’s account, Smale told me. “We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting.” She added: “We are still definitely looking into it. It’s not that we’re not.”

Belated coverage would be better than none at all. But readers should be suspicious of the failure of the New York Times to cover this story during the crucial first days after it broke. At some moments in history, when war and peace hang in the balance, journalism delayed is journalism denied.

Overall, the sparse US coverage that did take place seemed eager to downplay the significance of the Observer’s revelations. On Mar. 4, the Washington Post ran a back-page 514-word article headlined “Spying Report No Shock to UN,” while the Los Angeles Times published a longer piece that began by emphasizing that US spy activities at the United Nations are “long-standing.”

The US media treatment has contrasted sharply with coverage on other continents. “While some have taken a ho-hum attitude in the US, many around the world are furious,” says Ed Vulliamy, one of the Observer reporters who wrote the Mar. 2 article. “Still, almost all governments are extremely reluctant to speak up against the espionage. This further illustrates their vulnerability to the US government.”

To Daniel Ellsberg, the leaking of the NSA memo was a hopeful sign. “Truth-telling like this can stop a war,” he said. Time is short for insiders at intelligence agencies “to tell the truth and save many, many lives.” But major news outlets must stop dodging the information that emerges.

Norman Solomon is co-author of the new book Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You, published by Context Books

Source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

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Bush-league script enraging press

By Antonio Zerbisias

Mar. 9— The West Wing is in a flap.

Or at least the White House press corps is.

Judging by its rumblings and grumblings since that Valium-drip presidential news conference last Thursday, feathers are ruffled and may start flying.

Yes, the gang that has spent the past few years pecking at the meal that dribbles from the mouth of chief spokesperson Ari Fleischer is mad as hell over how that mind-numbing newser, only the second primetime Q&A President George W. Bush has ever held, was conducted.

Like a well-choreographed ballet of sleepwalkers.

Bush, who seemed, in the words of the Washington Post’s Tom Shales, “ever so slightly medicated,” came across so rehearsed he was almost robotic.

As presidential hagiographer Bob Woodward (Bush At War) would tell CNN’s Larry King after the performance, Bush “was slow talking” and the news conference was “almost like a wake.”

“And this process of calling on people and then having long speeches somewhat from the reporters and multiple questions,” continued Woodward, “I think didn’t kind of get to some of the key points.”

“This,” added Democratic Senator Chris Dodd, “is not a spontaneous press conference, the kind we’re normally used to from presidents over the years.”

No kidding.

Not only is flying solo at news conferences a rare event for Bush — at this point in his presidency, his dad had held 58 to Junior’s eight — but he would have none of the usual Mr. President! yelling or hand-waving pick me! pick me! action from reporters.

That was exactly what the White House wanted: The whole thing was “scripted,” as Bush allowed in one of the few slips he made that night.

Looking down yet again at what was a list of reporters whose questions he planned to take, he said, “This is a scripted...” catching himself as the press gang burst into laughter.

In the end, neither Bush nor the journalists whose questions he deigned to answer — or non-answer — ever got anywhere.

And never mind the tough questions that never got asked.

Indeed, the whole show, aside from being staged to capture Survivor addicts and capitalize on one of the biggest TV audiences of the week, was truly stage-managed in advance.

As White House communications chief Dan Bartlett told the Washington Post, this administration holds news conferences more sparingly than other types of presidential communication opportunities, because “if you have a message you’re trying to deliver, a news conference can go in a different direction.”

Especially given Bush’s Bushisms.

“In this case, we know what the questions are going to be, and those are the ones we want to answer,” Bartlett admitted. “We think the public will see the thought and care and attention he’s given to a lot of the different questions that are being asked about the diplomatic side and the military side and the potential post-Iraq issue. These are all legitimate questions that he has answers for and wants to talk about.”

Now let me hasten to add one thing: This is much the same attitude displayed by the very regime Bush wants to topple. For example, last month Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz refused to take a question from an Israeli journalist, even though he answered the same question when it was posed by another reporter.

“It was not in my agenda to answer questions by the Israeli media,” he told a news conference in Rome. “Sorry.”

Bush pulled a similar stunt when he ignored a long-running White House tradition of taking questions from syndicated columnist Helen Thomas who has covered every president since John F. Kennedy.

But then, she’s the journalist who had the temerity to say that Bush was “the worst president ever.” Yet snubbing her was so shocking that even the conservative Washington Times, said to be Bush’s paper of choice, noted it.

“What’s the message? If you cross the president or Ari, you too will get banned?” White House journalist Russell Mokhiber, who edits Corporate Crime Reporter, asked me Friday.

That day, at yet another Fleischer skating party, the journalistic pack got all snarly and snappish. When asked by right-wing radio talk show host Lester Kinsolving how and why Bush cherry-picked his questioners, Fleischer confessed that he was the one who made up the list, and that columnists such as Thomas were not included.

Pressed again by another reporter, Fleischer replied: “The President just thinks it is actually a more orderly news conference, rather than to have the usual cacophony of everybody screaming, where the person who gets called on is the person who has the loudest voice.”

Well, if what Mokhiber told me turns out to be true, the yelling has barely begun.

“I sense that they’re starting to fight back,” he told me, calling the news conference “unprecedented and “revolting.”

Let’s hope revulsion turns into rebellion.

The world depends on it.

Source: Toronto Star

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Bill O’Reilly’s enemies of the state

By Kurt Nimmo

Mar. 3— It’s bad enough the Bushites sincerely believe your principled opposition to Iraq attack II is “irrelevant,” and New York’s finest think it’s acceptable to push a barricade up in your face while you’re attempting to exercise your constitutional right to free speech and assembly. It’s bad enough that your Congress person responds to your letters and phone calls with a form letter, or not at all, and the local newspaper will not publish your letters to the editor. Considering the way things are in America these days, you may have concluded all of this is inevitable, and sadly predictable.

But it’s about to get worse, much worse.

Soon, thanks to the corporate media, you may not only be denied the right to express your opposition to Bush’s attack, you may very well be considered an enemy of the state — and most of us know what that means.

Enter loud mouth and hyper-reactionary Bill O’Reilly. On Feb. 26, during O’Reilly’s Fox News Channel show, he said the following: “Once the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can’t do that, just shut up. Americans, and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me. Just fair warning to you, Barbara Streisand and others who see the world as you do. I don’t want to demonize anyone, but anyone who hurts this country in a time like this, well. let’s just say you will be spotlighted.”

Now, of course, it’s prudent to consider the source — a TV personality interested primarily in ratings — but it is also advisable to consider O’Reilly’s pull. Thanks to his rabid “journalism,” Bill O’Reilly essentially had Dr. Sami al-Arian, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida, not only bounced from his job but also arrested and indicted by the Justice Department on racketeering and terrorist charges due to his alleged association with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Ashcroft went as far as to characterize al-Arian as “the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.” Sami and his co-defendants face possible life sentences if convicted.

I’m sure Bill O’Reilly is tickled.

Recall O’Reilly saying during the Sept. 26, 2001, al-Arian interview, “If I was the CIA, I’d follow you wherever you went. I’d follow you 24 hours.”

Obviously, this is what happened. O’Reilly had used his show as a sort of media-glamorized McCarthy hearing, accusing al-Arian of complicity in terrorism. As it now appears, the FBI and Justice Department were watching Sami and his co-defendants prior to Sami’s appearance on the O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly’s and the Justice Department’s efforts dovetailed nicely — some will likely say too nicely. It’s no secret the corporate media is essentially the official propaganda office of the Bush White House. It’s the promotional department for the Pentagon.

Sami al-Arian’s arrest after his much ballyhooed appearance on national television is nothing short of a PR coup d’etat for the Ashcroft Justice Department as it endeavors to convince the American public that sinister threats from al-Qaida and Islamic militants are pervasive from the shores of New York to San Francisco and beyond. Bushites Tom Ridge of the Ministry of Homeland Security and John Ashcroft of the Justice Department are entrusted with the requisite task of creating a climate of color-coded hysteria and ubiquitous fear in America as the Bushites prepare us for continual war against the “terrorist states” of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea.

Sami al-Arian is but the first of many fishes to be snagged from the mostly illusory (and meticulously engineered) river of terrorism the Bushites have fabricated — with more than a little help from the CIA — in an effort to scare Americans into the required psychological state needed for perpetual war. In fact, the “international terror network” Bush and Crew often mention runs back through the days of Iran-Contra to Zbigniew Brzezinski and the creation of ferocious and murderous Islamic radicalism during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It worked for Carter and Reagan. It will work for Bush.

As O’Reilly points out, in the not too distant future you will be expected to either give your full support to Bush, or shut up. If you can’t shut up, if you insist on taking to the streets in protest, if you insist the First Amendment (which O’Reilly exploits) means what it says it does, you will be “spotlighted.” You will be declared an “enemy of the state.”

Of course, not every American opposed to Bush and his vision of recurrent war will be “spotlighted” by the Fox News reactionary, but the real or perceived leaders of the emerging anti-war movement certainly will be. O’Reilly — as the consummate media snake with the dark personality of a relentless bully — will happily finger these perceived leaders on his show and the FBI, CIA (with full presence now in FBI offices), agents from the Ministry of Homeland Security, and those from the Justice Department will descend on prominent and not so prominent dissenters like Attorney General Palmer’s hired thugs did on labor leaders and socialists after World War I.

Naturally, O’Reilly is not so much interested in the anti-war musings of Barbara Streisand or Sean Penn (who can be silenced relatively easily through intimidation), but rather those of us who organize peace vigils and marches, who publish anti-war websites, those of us who write words like the ones you are reading at this very moment. We are the sincere threat to the Bush cabal and its demented vision of forever war, even as Dubya’s dismissive subalterns call us “irrelevant.” Millions of people around the world pouring into the streets and pressuring their governments to end this war before it begins cannot be easily dismissed as “irrelevant.” It will take accusations and frame-ups and TV spangled slander and innuendo to put a dent in the anti-war movement. It will take a lot of work for the newly christened COINTELPRO to take down the antiwar movement.

Like Nixon before him, Bush privately roils over these massive rallies and marches and you can bet he will pull out all the stops to circumvent them, especially after he sends the troops into Iraq. Soon Bush will play on the patriotic impulses of millions of Americans to follow lockstep behind him as he murders untold thousands in the Middle East. He will — either implicitly or directly — question the patriotism of those arrayed against the madness of total and unremitting war. It happened in the dark days after Sept. 11 and during the attack on Afghanistan — it will happen again, and with a vengeance, when Bush gives the order for his military juggernaut to roll over the helpless Iraqi people. You’re either with Bush and the Zionist chickenhawks, or you will suffer the fate of Sami al-Arian.

Bill O’Reilly will see to it.

Source: CounterPunch

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