Obama’s Last Chance
Exclusive: For six years, President Obama has bent to the will of Official
Washington by reneging on promises to the American people for “transparency” and
operating instead as an out-of-touch “insider.” Now, the Democratic election
debacle offers him a last chance to remember why he was elected, writes Robert
Parry.
By Robert Parry
The Democrats clearly deserved to lose on Tuesday, though the Republicans may
not have deserved to win. Indeed, there was almost a yin-yang quality to the
Democratic rout/Republican victory in which the Democrats played into almost all
the Republican themes, making the outcome feel inevitable.
Most notably, President Barack Obama and the Democrats shelved all the
“contentious” issues that might have rallied their “base” to turn out and vote.
Immigration reform was put on hold; release of the Senate report on “torture”
was postponed; what to do about “global warming” was ignored; the argument about
the value of activist government was silenced; etc., etc., etc.
On a personal level, supposedly polarizing “liberal” candidates, such as actor
Ashley Judd in Kentucky, were pushed aside in favor of supposedly more
“electable” candidates, like Alison Lundergan Grimes. Unwilling to say whether
she had voted for President Obama in 2012, Grimes managed to win only 41 percent
of the vote against the perennially unpopular Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell.
Obama himself was virtually sidelined from many races in what was an implicit
Democratic admission of the Republican theme that Obama was a failure and that
he deserved an electoral repudiation. The smell of fear pervaded the Democratic
ranks and panic is not the most inspiring of emotions.
In some states, the Democrats seemed enamored with what might be called the
“nepotism strategy,” counting on the “magic” of political names and family
connections to somehow overcome their lack of message and their image of
timidity: Pryor in Arkansas, Grimes in Kentucky, Nunn in Georgia all went down
to decisive defeat.
In the bigger picture, the Democratic failure seems part and parcel with the
broader weakness of progressivism in the United States. The Right continues to
dominate in areas of media and messaging, investing billions upon billions of
dollars in a vertically integrated media apparatus, from the older technologies
of print, radio and TV to the newer ones around the Internet. The Right also has
layers upon layers of think tanks and other propaganda outlets.
By comparison, the Left has never made anything close to a comparable
investment. And, even the ostensibly “liberal” network MSNBC and the purportedly
“liberal” New York Times fall into line behind neoconservative foreign policy
initiatives at nearly every turn, such as the “regime change” campaigns in
Syria, Iran and Ukraine. So, too, do many of the supposedly “liberal” think
tanks, such as the Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation.
Indeed, a remarkable reality about U.S. policy circles is that six years after
the end of George W. Bush’s disastrous neocon-dominated presidency, the neocons
continue to dominate America’s foreign policy thinking, albeit sometimes
rebranded as “liberal interventionism.”
A ‘Closet Realist’
Though President Obama may be something of a “closet realist” hoping to work
quietly with foreign adversaries to resolve international crises he has never
taken firm control over his own foreign policy.
Obama apparently thought that neocon holdovers from the Bush years, like Gen.
David Petraeus or Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria
Nuland, and Democratic neocons, such as his first Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, would somehow drop their ideological certitudes and cooperate with his
approach.
Instead, the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies burrowed deep
into the foreign policy bureaucracy and pop up periodically to press for their
war-mongering agendas. A distracted President Obama always seems outmaneuvered
from the 2009 Afghan “surge,” to the 2010 stand-off over Iran’s nuclear program,
to the 2011 civil wars in Libya and Syria, to the 2014 Ukrainian coup d’etat.
Arriving late at each new crisis, Obama usually signs off on what the neocons
want, although he intermittently pushes for his “realist” approach, such as
collaborating with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in avoiding a U.S. war on
Syria in 2013 and negotiating a peaceful settlement to Iran’s nuclear program,
which could be completed in 2014 if Obama doesn’t lose his nerve.
The big question now is whether the Democrats’ humiliating defeat on Nov. 4 will
teach Obama and the party any meaningful lessons or will the Democrats just kid
themselves into thinking that “demographics” will save them or that they will
prevail in 2016 by avoiding controversial stands and putting up another famous
“name,” in Hillary Clinton.
Will Obama finally realize that he has to revert back to his inspiring messages
of 2008 on issues such as his promise of government transparency? For the past
six years, transparency has worked only one way: the government gets to look
into the secrets of citizens while the citizens have no right to know about the
government’s secrets.
There is a fundamental disconnect between this image of an intrusive federal
government spying on everyone and the progressive concept that an active federal
government is necessary to address fundamental problems facing the American
people and the world, such as what to do about global warming, income
inequality, corporate power, racial injustice, etc.
What I’m hearing from many young progressives is that they are so resentful of
government intrusions into their lives that they are veering more toward
libertarianism, even though it offers no solutions to most environmental,
economic and social problems. If Obama hopes to stanch this flow of progressive
youth to the right, he needs to finally recognize that the people need
transparency on the government and the government must learn to trust the
people.
An obvious first step would be to override CIA objections and release the report
on torture during the Bush years. And while Obama is at it, he should make
public the secret pages from the 9/11 report relating to Saudi funding for alQaeda terrorists.
I’m also told that Obama has information that contradicts his administration’s
early claims blaming the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack on the Syrian government
and faulting Russia for the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight
17 over Ukraine. Those two incidents fueled dangerous international
confrontations with the United States nearly going to war against the Syrian
government in 2013 and starting a new Cold War with Russia in 2014.
If Obama has U.S. intelligence information that points the finger of blame in
different directions, he should correct the impressions left by Secretary of
State John Kerry and other U.S. officials. The neocons won’t like that and some
“liberal interventionists” may have egg on their faces, too but misleading
propaganda has no place in a democracy. False information must be removed as
quickly as possible.
Similarly, Obama should commit his administration to expediting release of
historical secrets. Currently, it takes many years, even decades, to pry loose
embarrassing “secrets” from the U.S. government, often allowing false historical
narratives to take hold or creating a hot house for conspiracy theories. It’s
way past time for the U.S. government to give the American people their history
back.
By releasing as much information as possible about important topics, Obama could
finally begin to win back the people’s trust, not just in him but in the
government. Nothing is as corrosive to democratic governance as a belief by the
people that the government doesn’t trust them and that they, in turn, have no
reason to trust the government.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
Saudi Arabia’s Oil Politics on Syria
Exclusive: Typically when crude oil prices plummet, Saudi Arabia cuts back
production to stop and reverse the fall, but this time that hasn’t happened,
raising questions about why. Is the reason business or geopolitics, possibly a
way to punish Russia and Iran over Syria, asks Andrés Cala.
By Andrés Cala
Saudi Arabia is keeping its oil taps wide open even as a glut tumbles world
prices to the low $80s per barrel, the lowest level in four years and well below
the level that Saudi Arabia must maintain to avoid running a fiscal deficit. But
the big question is why? Is the motive just business or is it geopolitics,
i.e., punishing oil producers Iran and Russia over Syria?
The mainstream explanation for the Saudi behavior is that it’s acting to defend
its market share in an increasingly oversupplied oil market, which is awash with
robust U.S. production while demand growth from China and Europe has stalled.
The conventional thinking goes: If Saudi Arabia cut exports, prices would rise
but other suppliers might snatch away its clients. So the Saudis would rather
weather the storm of lower prices and hold onto its clients until the market
balances itself.
Other analysts have suggested that Saudi Arabia is undertaking an indirect
assault on the U.S. production of so-called “tight oil,” which is more expensive
to extract from shale than pumping light crude from Saudi oil reserves. The
lower the world’s oil prices, the less viable these more costly oil extractions
become.
But business concerns may not be the main driver of this Saudi oil policy.
Instead, the Saudis may be flexing their muscular dominance of the world’s oil
markets to advance geopolitical interests, from helping the energy-dependent
military government of Egypt a Saudi ally to undermining the adversarial regimes
in Syria and Iran as well as Russia, which has emerged as a key ally for those
two embattled governments.
While falling oil prices certainly do hurt Saudi Arabia, the Saudis with their
vast financial reserves are well-positioned to withstand the economic pain. That
is less the case with Russia and Iran, both heavily invested in the defense of
Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. In other words, the Saudis may see the
precipitous drop in oil prices as a weapon in the broader regional Shiite-Sunni
proxy war, with Saudi Arabia leading the Sunni side versus Shiite-ruled Iran.
The depressed oil prices also dovetail with the Obama administration’s
geopolitical interests by putting the squeeze on Russia and Iran as the West
seeks to consolidate its control over Ukraine and tries to force Iran to
capitulate in talks over its nuclear program.
But the Saudi geopolitical calculation to sustain record production above 9.5
million barrels per day is probably most directed at Syria where the Saudis have
financed the Sunni-led campaign to overthrow Assad, who largely represents
Alawite, Shiite, Christian and other minorities. By toppling Assad and replacing
him with a Sunni-dominated government, Saudi Arabia would deal a severe blow to
Iran and the region’s Shiites.
Thus, Saudi Arabia is willing to resist pressure from its partners in the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in order to advance what the
Saudis see as their broader regional interests. For Riyadh, the self-inflicted
economic pain is acceptable as long as it contributes to the broader imperative
of inflicting pain on Assad and his backers.
The Geostrategic Imperative
For years Saudi Arabia’s Sunni monarchy has maneuvered, at times with allies
such as Turkey and at times alone, to replace Syria’s Assad who comes from the
Alawite community, a spinoff of Shiite Islam. Israel also shares the goal of
ousting Assad, hoping to shatter “the Shiite crescent” reaching from Tehran
through Damascus to Beirut. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Israel Sides with Syrian
Jihadists.”]
But Saudi Arabia’s Syrian-regime-change policy stumbled when President Barack
Obama refused to go to war against Assad last year and Syria’s Iranian-backed
forces began regaining lost ground against the Sunni rebels. Russia, too, came
to Assad’s defense for its own strategic interests. Russia publicly admonished
Saudi Arabia and Qatar for unscrupulously turning Syria into a terrorist haven
that threatened global security, particularly the emergence of al-Qaeda’s Nusra
Front and the even more brutal Islamic State.
As these Sunni extremists took over the anti-Assad rebellion, Saudi Arabia found
itself in the de facto position of aiding and abetting these terrorist elements,
which control large swaths of Syria and after an Islamic State offensive a
significant part of Iraq. Then, the Islamic State’s strategy of using brutality,
including mass executions and beheadings, to intimidate its enemies shocked the
world and created political pressure on Obama to intervene against these
extremists.
Saudi Arabia’s monarchy also sensed a growing danger to its stability if the
Islamic State’s “caliphate” continued to expand. The Royal Family understands
that the Islamic State is popular among some of Saudi Arabia’s conservative
Sunni Salafites who might join the Islamic State in turning their guns on the
monarchy with the goal of seizing the country’s extraordinary oil wealth. The
Islamic State is already active on the Saudi borders with Iraq and Yemen.
So, recognizing these risks and responding to U.S. pressure, the Saudis agreed
to join the U.S.-led coalition mounting airstrikes against Islamic State
positions in Iraq and Syria. But Saudi Arabia has not entirely abandoned its
hopes of dislodging Assad and thus it demanded assurances from Secretary of
State John Kerry during a September visit that Assad would not be allowed to
stay in power, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Saudi Arabia’s use of oil as a weapon supports the longer-range goal of ousting
Assad by raising the costs on Iran and Russia for backing him.
Global Impact of Lower Prices
There are, of course, other risks for Saudi Arabia from its acceptance of lower
oil prices. For one, the lost income undercuts the monarchy’s ability to co-opt
its population by providing financial and other benefits. The oil money has
shielded the country so far from the extreme political instability undercutting
its neighbors, both enemies and allies.
According to the International Monetary Fund, Saudi Arabia risked running a
fiscal deficit as early as 2015, a warning that preceded the recent drop in oil
prices. Saudi public spending soared 50 percent between 2010 and 2013 as
stimulus for an already hyper-inflated welfare state that is trying to fend off
its own Arab Spring. The government is building infrastructure, improving
services and increasing handouts. Spending is forecast to continue increasing
through 2018.
The IMF said Saudi Arabia’s government spending might exceed its income almost
entirely from oil revenue in 2015. This public deficit could increase to 7.4
percent of gross domestic product by 2019. The break-even oil price required to
balance the state budget is $91 for 2015, but the price is currently lower than
that.
Still, the price tumble is disproportionally more damaging to Russia and Iran.
Russia, already coping with Western sanctions over Ukraine, is heavily dependent
on its oil revenue and President Vladimir Putin is well aware of the
destabilization of Russia that falling energy prices can inflict. That said,
Russia is a lot better prepared than it was in the 1980s and 1990s and thus is
in a position to endure for some time.
Iran will suffer, too, but probably not enough to make it flinch in its various
confrontations with the United States and the West. Iran’s economy is weak,
especially under sanctions over its nuclear program and from the costs
of several proxy wars in the region that are draining its budget. But Iran has
historically weathered economic hardship and has recently demonstrated its
resilience when it comes to priorities, such as defending its Shiite allies in
Syria and Iraq.
On the other hand, the Saudis know Western allies will appreciate the decision
to keep prices low and thus give oil-importing countries a financial break. When
the U.S. consumers save on oil imports, which still represent about a third of
the net oil that America uses, that means they have more money in their pockets
for other purchases.
The Saudis also knew that the typical market reaction to instability in the oilrich Middle East is for prices to soar, possibly to $150 a barrel, which would
have had a depressing effect on Western economies and added to the political
pressures across the developed world. By flooding the world markets with oil
now, however, the opposite occurred, with prices sharply declining.
Another geopolitical gain for Saudi Arabia from the lower oil prices is the
relief provided to Egypt’s economy where the Saudis have already lavished
billions of dollars in aid on the military regime that overthrew the elected
Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi. Though the Muslim Brotherhood is
also Sunni, its ideology of Muslim populism represents what the Royal Family
views as an existential threat.
The Muslim Brotherhood has strong supporters, including Qatar, so shielding the
Egyptian military regime economically is vital to the Saudis. Lower oil prices,
more than direct Saudi aid to the government, brings relief to average Egyptians
and thus reduces the likelihood of a popular uprising against the military
regime.
But Saudi Arabia can’t sustain the lower prices indefinitely. OPEC meets in
December and could cut nominal production goals, although Saudi Arabia is the
ultimate decider. Since the beginning of the world economic crisis in 2008,
Saudi Arabia has positioned itself as a central bank of sorts in global oil
markets. It is the only country capable of pumping more oil or less to influence
supply and demand to a significant degree.
The Kingdom also has built hard currency reserves that give it ample time, years
even, to survive lower oil prices. But it’s not about surviving, but expanding,
and thus the likely window of low oil prices will probably close some time in
the first half of 2015.
Saudi Arabia knows there is no reason to panic because its 2014 budget is safe,
and the country could easily survive with prices around $85 in the first half of
2015, as long as prices rise to around $95 in the second half.
Ultimately, Saudi timing on oil prices is anybody’s guess. It likely will be
determined by how the Syrian war evolves and the post-election political
circumstances in the United States. In the meantime, the world will continue
guessing about how much self-inflicted financial pain the Saudi monarchy is
ready to accept in its efforts to inflict more pain on Syria’s allies.
Andrés Cala is an award-winning Colombian journalist, columnist and analyst
specializing in geopolitics and energy. He is the lead author of America’s Blind
Spot: Chávez, Energy, and US Security.
Big Media Has Betrayed the People
For years, Americans relied on the mainstream U.S. news media for information;
some folks were even convinced the MSM was “liberal.” But the current reality is
that the major papers have become mouthpieces for the national security state
while amassing a sorry record of deception, writes Greg Maybury.
By Greg Maybury
In his farewell address to the American people in 1961, President Dwight
Eisenhower delivered what turned out to be his most memorable public utterance,
famously warning Americans about the perils of the growing “military-industrial
complex.” He went on to say: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can
compel the proper meshing of the industrial and military machinery of defense
with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper
together.”
Although it was the “military-industrial” bit that most folks remember, it was
the “alert and knowledgeable” part that also needed to resonate. Unfortunately,
instead of an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” which Ike suggested was the
only bulwark against the continued growth, power and influence of this monster
within, much of the American citizenry remained oblivious to it all. They either
fell asleep at the democratic wheel or chose to remain ignorant of the already
disturbing implications of the military-industrial complex’s encroaching reach
into every aspect of the American demos and polity.
When the torch was passed to the new generation as John F. Kennedy declared in
his Inaugural Address just days after Ike’s warning — the “good life” beckoned.
Few, it seemed, wished to rock the boat. More than a half century after
Eisenhower’s warning and nearly 15 years into what some like to call the New
American Century, the growth of this “military-industrial complex” has far
exceeded anything even the Old Warhorse could have imagined. Yet despite this,
most Americans are still asleep at the wheel. There seems little evidence that
is likely to change anytime soon.
And here we should ponder at least one of the main reasons why this is so.
For those folks who retain any faith or confidence that the mainstream or
corporate media is providing us with all the insight we need to make sense of
the world and the driving forces behind the big trends and developments, a
reality check of the first order is in order. What was once called the Fourth
Estate, a public institution of journalism intended to check on the powerful,
has become a Fifth Column against democracy, a means for the Power Elites in
business, finance and politics to manage the people, not a way for the people to
keep tabs on the powerful.
The big fix is in on behalf of the Agenda Benders of the National Security
State. The game is rigged. And it is decidedly not in favor of equality,
democracy, freedom, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the majority;
nor is it for that matter, designed to nurture “an alert and knowledgeable
citizenry.”
The fundamental principles of journalism sound hunky-dory in theory. But when
the rubber hits the road these standards are all too quickly deep-sixed in favor
of more prosaic and less lofty goals. Professionalism becomes careerism. The
“public interest” becomes “private gain.” But finally much of the public is
figuring this game out.
The extraordinary growth of the independent and alternative media underscores
this premise and surely points to more people looking for news, viewpoints and
opinions outside the MSM. The “marketplace of ideas” isn’t just expanding; the
monopoly is breaking down and whole new niches are opening up.
This is of course a welcome development although no one should underestimate the
residual power of the MSM and the difficulty of producing truly independent
journalism. Although there are promising signs the MSM’s readership is waning,
there remain many folks implacably wedded to their daily fix of “impropaganda”
from the establishment newsmakers and the “opinionocracy” whose positioning
statement might well read: “Here is the news we choose, to give you all today.”
The Great Malaise
Yet, as long as we are not relying on the MSM for our daily dose of context and
perspective, examples underscoring the broader trend abound everywhere we care
to look. Writer Ulson Gunnar reported in an article at the New Eastern
Outlook website that Vladimir Putin’s recent address to the Valdai Discussion
Club was wide ranging and well worth reading.
But it is Gunnar’s article that’s pertinent here. After applauding Putin’s
willingness to point to Washington’s hypocrisy in key foreign policy areas and
noting the seemingly irreversible loss of “respect and legitimacy once
commanded” by the U.S. in the international arena, Gunnar then cites the MSM’s
“utter failure to hold accountable, poor policy driven by corrupt, criminal
special interests” as one of the main reasons:
“Leaving it to Putin to point out the sorry state of American foreign policy
grants Russia the respect and legitimacy the US would have otherwise held onto
were it capable of putting its own house in order. The inability of America’s
media to serve public interests is a symptom of America’s greater malaise.” [My
Emphasis]
But the reality is even worse than that. The major U.S. media has not simply
failed to hold U.S. officials accountable for their destructive arrogance. The
MSM chose to mock Putin for his undeniably accurate remarks. For instance, The
Washington Post published an editorial entitled (in print editions), “Putinoia
on full display,” which said, about Putin’s Valdai remarks, “out poured a
poisonous mix of lies, conspiracy theories, thinly veiled threats of further
aggression and, above all, seething resentment toward the United States.”
The Post editors then cited examples of Putin’s “Putinoia” such as his
statements that the United States had “declared itself the winner of the Cold
War” and promoted a “unipolar world [that] is simply a means of justifying
dictatorship over people and countries.” Other examples of Putin’s madness,
according to the Post, included his observations that Washington’s interventions
have created chaos around the world and that the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected
President Viktor Yanukovych was a “coup d’etat.” In other words, Putin made
observations that were either obviously true or certainly arguably true but the
Post insisted on its own reality, one that grossly misleads its readers and
implicitly sets the boundaries of MSM-approved debate.
For another exemplary case study of this MSM phenomenon of distortion and
deception, we might look at the recently released “Kill the Messenger,” a film
treatment of the life and times of investigative journalist Gary Webb. Webb
attempted in 1996 to shed light on the CIA’s connections to, and knowledge of,
cocaine distribution by the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras and their associates,
and the consequent crack epidemic that spread across America throughout the
1980s.
Ultimately Webb’s career was destroyed by a concerted, relentless character
assassination and disinformation campaign by the Big Three of the U.S. print
media
The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, each
one of which variously, yet ruthlessly distorted, and then refuted, Webb’s
claims, setting up straw men and then knocking them down. Several years later,
in 2004, his career and marriage over, and financially destitute, Webb pulled
the pin by committing suicide.
If Webb’s fate had resulted from a rare manifestation of an unholy mix of
journalistic nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance in the history of
reportage and public opinion-making, we might be tempted to view this case as an
aberration. But sadly it is not. It is part of a pattern of covering up criminal
nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance at the highest levels of the U.S.
government, especially in matters of “national security” or in Eisenhower’s
phrase, the “military-industrial complex.”
In the Webb case, his destruction also camouflaged the MSM’s own venality and
incompetence, since the same Big Three newspapers had missed or disparaged
reports of Contra-cocaine trafficking when the crimes were occurring in the
1980s (and when the American people needed to be informed of what the Reagan
administration was doing and not doing). It is notable that it was not one
but three of the so-called newspapers of record in established MSM circles that
led the attack against a fellow journalist.
Taking into account the extraordinary significance of Webb’s reportage, along
with the fact it is now generally accepted he largely got his story right, his
own personal and professional odyssey is a savage, wholly justifiable indictment
on all things MSM in the Home of the Brave. Yet insofar as we can gather, none
of them has openly or unequivocally acknowledged its complicity in covering up
the details of Webb’s revelations and/or for what they did in destroying his
career, his family and ultimately his life. No one has been held to account, and
no one has forthrightly apologized.
The fact that at least one of these papers
the redoubtable Washington Post
is
still trying to defend the indefensible is surely another nail in the coffin of
the ancien régime of the corporate-controlled media, information and news
industry. It seems though the Post may only be rubbing salt into its own wounds,
as any number of more independent media folk seem determined to set the record
straight on Webb’s behalf.
Weapons of Mass Disinformation
As for the rest of the MSM cohorts who jumped onto the Big Three’s “Get Gary
Webb” bandwagon, it would appear they are letting sleeping dogs lie in the wake
of the film’s release. It’s unknown if they are doing this to preserve whatever
integrity they might have left over their own attacks on Webb and/or failure to
undertake their own investigations, or whether it is because they really don’t
care one way or another. Webb may just have been collateral damage an
“expendable” in the perennial War on Truth in mainstream media circles.
If Watergate was a high-water mark in investigative reportage and political news
coverage in the U.S. and by some accounts there are compelling reasons after all
these years to view this assessment with some skepticism then the Webb affair
would have to qualify as a suitable case study at the other end of the spectrum.
As significant as the destruction of Gary Webb was in its implications for a
free, fair and fearless mainstream press in America, this MSM behavior has now
become the norm, not the exception. (Indeed, President George W. Bush was able
to mislead the American people into the disastrous Iraq War with the MSM
especially the Washington Post and the New York Times
aiding and abetting his
WMD deceptions of the American people).
With this in mind, we can hardly expect that we are going to get the kind of
news and information we need to remain “alert and knowledgeable” from the MSM in
an age when being so has possibly never been more important in homo sap’s sorryass history on the Big Blue Ball. There are now so many examples of that Unholy
Trinity’s nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance in journalistic reportage
that it’s a challenge to list them all, from Vietnam to the Iran-Contra Scandal;
from the first Gulf War to the Balkans War; from Iraq’s WMDs to the War on
Terror. And these only skim the surface. If these bastions of fair and fearless
reportage are the newspapers of record, the record is patchy indeed. Tragically
so.
Moreover, there can be no better example of the double standards that prevail in
U.S. politics and in its relationship with the Fourth Estate than Obama’s 2013
honoring of Ben Bradlee
the iconic Washington Post editor who famously presided
over the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, the outcome of which was the
downfall of an American president with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But the real irony is that Obama the president who has done more to curtail and
then criminalize the activities of investigative journalists, leakers and
whistle-blowers in ways that even Richard Nixon might never have contemplated
extolled Bradlee’s determination to ensure Americans are not denied the truth
about what their increasingly secretive and subversive government does.
Obama’s own home-grown hypocrisy in these matters is itself something to behold.
We should recall this was a president whose government he promised would be
truly accountable and more transparent than previous ones.
In an article in OpEdNews recently, contributor Sherwood Ross takes the
President to task for his stance against investigative reporters in particular.
Among other examples, Ross cites the case of James Risen, whose book State of
War looks like it could land Risen in jail in the foreseeable future for
refusing to betray a source. Briefly the case which has become something of
a cause celebre in the mainstream and alternative media circles involves the
Justice Department under first the Bush administration and now under Obama
seeking to force Risen to reveal a key source for the book, which the journalist
has refused to do.
To an investigative journalist revealing the identity of sources that provide
information on condition of anonymity is akin to a priest revealing someone’s
confession in a sermon from the pulpit at Sunday Mass; to refuse to do so is an
article of faith of the profession. But Risen’s courage in reporting important
facts about the national security state and resisting government pressure to
surrender his source (and thus make other sources much less likely to talk) is
now the exception in the MSM, not the rule. Many such stories simply go
unwritten. Career-wise, that’s a lot safer.
There is also the reality that as resources for real reporting continue to
decline spending on public relations and other manipulation of the public
continues to soar. The highly sophisticated multi-billion dollar lobbying and
public relations industries in America are almost entirely employed on the dime
of the Powers that Be (industry bodies, political parties, think tanks, Super
PACs, sundry foundations, corporations and institutions etc.) Unless the
ordinary news consumers go out of their way to seek out reliable sources of
information, they don’t hazard a chance in Hades of ever getting anything
resembling credible, untainted insight into the zeitgeist, so as to be able to
maintain whatever might remain of their “alert and knowledgeable” status.
Yet, the MSM still commands attention from many folks. Why in this day and age
of accessible and independent-minded news sources is a mystery inside a
conundrum. Perhaps it’s simply because of the MSM’s size and inertia, living off
its past reputation for supplying “responsible” news. Maybe people are too busy
in their frantic lives or too afraid of being deemed “outside the mainstream,”
so they stick with what’s considered traditional and safe.
But it’s no longer possible for anyone who truly wants to be an “alert and
knowledgeable” citizen to ignore the establishment media’s lengthening
reputation as one collective Weapon of Mass Disinformation.
Greg Maybury is a freelance writer based in Perth, Western Australia.
Russia’s Key Role in Iran-Nuke Deal
Though the Ukraine crisis drove a wedge between Presidents Obama and Putin,
their cooperation remains crucial to a negotiated agreement to constrain but not
end Iran’s nuclear program, as Gareth Porter makes clear in reporting on a
possible breakthrough for Inter Press Service.
By Gareth Porter
U.S. and Iranian negotiators are working on a compromise approach to the issue
of Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, which the Barack Obama administration
has said in the past Iran was refusing to make concessions on.
The compromise now being seriously discussed would meet the Obama
administration’s original requirement for limiting Iran’s “breakout capability”
by a combination of limits on centrifuge numbers and reduction of Iran’s
stockpile of low enriched uranium, rather than by cutting centrifuges alone.
That approach might permit Iran to maintain something close to its present level
of operational centrifuges.
The key to the new approach is Iran’s willingness to send both its existing
stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) as well as newly enriched uranium to
Russia for conversion into fuel for power plants for an agreed period of years.
In the first official indication of the new turn in the negotiations, Iranian
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Marzieh Afkham acknowledged in a briefing for the
Iranian press on Oct. 22 that new proposals combining a limit on centrifuges and
the transfer of Iran’s LEU stockpile to Russia were under discussion in the
nuclear negotiations. The briefing was translated by BBC’s monitoring service
but not reported in the Western press.
Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, who heads the U.S. delegation to the
talks, has not referred publicly to the compromise approach, but she appeared to
be hinting at it when she said on Oct. 25 that the two sides had “made
impressive progress on issues that originally seemed intractable.”
Despite the new opening to a resolution of what had been cited for months as the
main obstacle to a comprehensive agreement, the negotiations could nevertheless
stall in the final weeks over the timing of sanctions removal. Iran’s
willingness to negotiate such arrangements with the U.S. delegation will depend
on Russia’s agreement to take the Iranian enriched uranium.
The beginning of discussions on the new approach was reported in September just
days after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Russian President Vladimir Putin
had met to discuss key issues in Iranian-Russian cooperation on the building of
two nuclear power plants and fuel supply for Bushehr.
The proposed reduction of Iran’s accumulation of LEU by shipping it to Russia
could achieve the Obama administration’s original minimum objective for an
acceptable agreement, which was defined by a minimum number of months it would
take Iran to enrich enough uranium for a single nuclear weapon.
Secretary of State John Kerry presented the administration’s requirement for
that period last April as being six to 12 months. The six- to 12-month
requirement has been translated into a demand in the negotiations for a
draconian cut to a few thousand centrifuges. However, that demand is not
justified on technical calculations of a “breakout timeline.”
David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, who
supported the demand for a cut to a few thousand centrifuges,acknowledged in an
analysis published in June that the reduction of the Iranian LEU stockpile to
1,000 kilograms would increase the breakout time for the present level of 10,000
Iranian operational centrifuges to six months, and a reduction to zero would
increase it to nearly a year.
A deal that would reduce Iran’s stockpile to a minimum would be consistent with
the proposal Iran had presented to the P5+1 early in the negotiations. As
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif outlined the proposal to this writer in
June, Iran proposed to guarantee immediate conversion of each batch of lowenriched uranium to oxide powder to be used to make fuel assemblies for the
Bushehr reactor.
But the plan did not explicitly address how Iran would dispose of the existing
stockpile of LEU, and the United States has dismissed any plan in which Iran
maintained large quantities of oxide powder, on the ground that it could be
reversed. Iran could not negotiate such arrangement with the P5+1 without first
reaching agreement with the Russians.
But the problem of shipping LEU to Russia for conversion to nuclear fuel was
linked to a larger set of difficult issues in Iran’s nuclear cooperation with
Russia. Iran and Russia already have a commercial agreement for Russian
provision of fuel for Iran’s Bushehr reactor until 2021. But Iran and Russia
have been negotiating on the construction of two new nuclear reactors by Russia,
and Iran wanted Russia to agree to Iranian participation in enrichment for the
fuel as well as in making the fuel assemblies for the reactors.
A “preliminary agreement” on a contract for building the two new reactors was
announced March 12, but negotiations on key points involving the additional
Iranian demands were still pending. Anton Khlopkov, director of the Center for
Energy and Security Studies in Moscow, told IPS that the Russian acceptance of
Iranian LEU would pose serious commercial issues for Russia.
It would lose significant profits it expected from doing the enrichment itself
by agreeing to use Iranian LEU for conversion into fuel assemblies rather than
uranium available in Russia. Iranian uranium is much more expensive than the
uranium to which Russia has access, Khlopkov said. Iran also wants to do at
least some of the enrichment for the new reactors to be built, which would
increase the compensation required for the deal.
Explaining the rationale for the Iranian enrichment demand, Ali Akbar Salehi,
the director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), said in early
July that Iran had no desire to “carry out all the enrichment inside Iran” but
added that “the other parties must know that if some day they don’t give us the
fuel for power plants, Iran has the ability to produce it.”
The second major commercial issue in the negotiations with Russia is Iran’s
desire to take over the fabrication of fuel assemblies for Bushehr and other
power plants from the Russians after 2021. In a Sept. 29 interview with this
writer, Salehi said that the negotiations with Russia “include a wide spectrum
of issues,” which include Iran’s desire to “share in the technology of the power
plants.”
Iran is years away from having the capacity to do that, however, and it would
need technical assistance from Russia. The United States, meanwhile, has made it
clear it believes Iran could and should continue to rely on Russia to provide
the fuel for the Bushehr reactor, even after the current contract for the fuel
expires in 2021.
Khlopkov did not rule out the possibility of “some kind of partnership for fuel
production,” but only if Iran is ready to compensate Russia for its commercial
losses. Fuel fabrication is a “big business, which nobody wants to lose,”
Khlopkov said.
On June 24, the spokesman for AEOI, Behrooz Kamalvandi, announced that the
contract for the two nuclear power plants would be signed within weeks during a
visit by Salehi to Moscow, but he acknowledged “some elements” in the agreement
remained unresolved.
In a sign that Russia and Iran were close to agreement on the unresolved issues
connected with the reactor deal, the heads of government were brought into
talks. On Sept. 12, Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov said the two
presidents would meet on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and that both bilateral cooperation on nuclear power
and the Iran-P5+1 talks would be among the topics to be discussed.
On Sept. 19, one week after the Rouhani-Putin meeting, the Associated Press
reported that a new U.S. proposal involving a trade-off between reducing the LEU
stockpile and the size of the cut in centrifuges had been discussed in bilateral
talks between the United States and Iran. Iran was reported to have been
“cautiously receptive”.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and winner of the 2012
Gellhorn Prize for journalism. He is the author of the newly published
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can be
contacted at [email protected]
How the Washington Press Turned Bad
Exclusive: There was a time when the Washington press corps prided itself on
holding the powerful accountable
Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Vietnam War but
those days are long gone, replaced by a malleable media that puts its cozy
relations with insiders ahead of the public interest, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Following the death last week of legendary Washington Post executive editor Ben
Bradlee at age 93, there have been many warm remembrances of his tough-guy style
as he sought “holy shit stories,” journalism that was worthy of the oldfashioned demand, “stop the presses.”
Many of the fond recollections surely are selective, but there was some truth to
Bradlee’s “front page” approach to inspiring a staff to push the envelope in
pursuit of difficult stories at least during the Watergate scandal when he
backed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the face of White House hostility. How
different that was from Bradlee’s later years and the work of his successors at
the Washington Post!
Coincidentally, upon hearing of Bradlee’s death on Oct. 21, I was reminded of
this sad devolution of the U.S. news media from its Watergate/Pentagon Papers
heyday of the 1970s to the “On Bended Knee” obsequiousness in covering Ronald
Reagan just a decade later, a transformation that paved the way for the
media’s servile groveling at the feet of George W. Bush last decade.
On the same day as Bradlee’s passing, I received an e-mail from a fellow
journalist informing me that Bradlee’s longtime managing editor and later his
successor as executive editor, Leonard Downie, was sending around a Washington
Post article attacking the new movie, “Kill the Messenger.”
That article by Jeff Leen, the Post’s assistant managing editor for
investigations, trashed the late journalist Gary Webb, whose career and life
were destroyed because he dared revive one of the ugliest scandals of the Reagan
era, the U.S. government’s tolerance of cocaine trafficking by Reagan’s beloved
Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
“Kill the Messenger” offers a sympathetic portrayal of Webb’s ordeal and is
critical of the major newspapers, including the Washington Post, for denouncing
Webb in 1996 rather than taking the opportunity to revisit a major national
security scandal that the Post, the New York Times and other major newspapers
missed or downplayed in the mid-1980s after it was first reported by Brian
Barger and me for the Associated Press.
Downie, who became the Post’s managing editor in 1984 and followed Bradlee as
executive editor in 1991 and is now a journalism professor at Arizona State
University passed Leen’s anti-Webb story around to other faculty members with a
cover note, which read:
“Subject line: Gary Webb was no hero, say[s] WP investigations editor Jeff Leen
“I was at The Washington Post at the time that it investigated Gary Webb’s
stories, and Jeff Leen is exactly right. However, he is too kind to a movie that
presents a lie as fact.”
Since I knew Downie slightly during my years at the Associated Press he had once
called me about my June 1985 article identifying National Security Council aide
Oliver North as a key figure in the White House’s secret Contra-support
operation I sent him an e-mail on Oct. 22 to express my dismay at his “harsh
comment” and “to make sure that those are your words and that they accurately
reflect your opinion.”
I asked, “Could you elaborate on exactly what you believe to be a lie?” I also
noted that “As the movie was hitting the theaters, I put together an article
about what the U.S. government’s files now reveal about this problem” and sent
Downie a link to that story. I have heard nothing back. [For more on my
assessment of Leen’s hit piece, see Consortiumnews.com’s “WPost’s Slimy Assault
on Gary Webb.”]
Why Attack Webb?
One could assume that Leen and Downie are just MSM hacks who are covering their
tracks, since they both missed the Contra-cocaine scandal as it was unfolding
under their noses in the 1980s.
Leen was the Miami Herald’s specialist on drug trafficking and the Medellin
cartel but somehow he couldn’t figure out that much of the Contra cocaine was
arriving in Miami and the Medellin cartel was donating millions of dollars to
the Contras. In 1991, during the drug-trafficking trial of Panama’s Manuel
Noriega, Medellin cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder even testified, as a U.S.
government witness, that he had chipped in $10 million to the Contras.
Downie was the Washington Post’s managing editor, responsible for keeping an eye
on the Reagan administration’s secretive foreign policy but was regularly behind
the curve on the biggest scandals of the 1980s: Ollie North’s operation, the
Contra-cocaine scandal and the Iran-Contra Affair. After that litany of
failures, he was promoted to be the Post’s executive editor, one of the top jobs
in American journalism, where he was positioned to oversee the takedown of Gary
Webb in 1996.
Though Downie’s note to other Arizona State University professors called the
Contra-cocaine story or “Kill the Messenger” or both a “lie,” the Huffington
Post’s Ryan Grim recounted recently in an article about the big media’s assault
on Webb that “The Post’s top editor at the time, Leonard Downie, told me that he
doesn’t remember the incident well enough to comment on it.”
But there’s more here than just a couple of news executives who find it easier
to pile on a journalist no longer around to defend himself than to admit their
own professional failures. What Leen and Downie represent is an institutional
failure of American journalism to protect the American people, choosing instead
to protect the American power structure.
Remember that in the mid-1980s when Barger and I exposed the Contra-cocaine
scandal, the smuggling was happening in real time. It wasn’t history. The
various Contra pipelines were bringing cocaine into American cities where some
was getting processed into crack. If action had been taken then, at least some
of those shipments could have been stopped and some of the Contra traffickers
prosecuted.
Yet, instead of the major news media joining in exposing these ongoing crimes,
the New York Times and Washington Post chose to look the other way. In Leen’s
article, he justifies this behavior under a supposed journalistic principle that
“an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.” But any such standard
must also be weighed against the threat to the American people and others from
withholding a story.
If Leen’s principle means in reality that no level of proof would be sufficient
to report that the Reagan administration was protecting Contra-cocaine
traffickers, then the U.S. media was acquiescing to criminal activity that
wreaked havoc on American cities, destroyed countless lives and overflowed U.S.
prisons with low-level drug dealers while powerful people with political
connections went untouched.
That assessment is essentially shared by Doug Farah, who was a Washington Post
correspondent in Central America at the time of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series in
1996. After reading Webb’s series in the San Jose Mercury News, Farah was eager
to advance the Contra-cocaine story but encountered unrealistic demands for
proof from his editors.
Farah told Ryan Grim: “If you’re talking about our intelligence community
tolerating — if not promoting — drugs to pay for black ops, it’s rather an
uncomfortable thing to do when you’re an establishment paper like the Post. … If
you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it
more solid than it could probably ever be done.”
In other words, “extraordinary proof” meant you’d never write a story on this
touchy topic because no proof is 100 percent perfect, apparently not even when
the CIA’s inspector general confesses, as he did in 1998, that much of what
Webb, Barger and I had reported was true and that there was much, much more.
[See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Sordid Contra Cocaine Scandal.”]
What Happened to the Press?
How this transformation of Washington journalism occurred from the more
aggressive press corps of the 1970s into the patsy press corps of the 1980s and
beyond is an important lost chapter of modern American history.
Much of this change emerged from the political wreckage that followed the
Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal and the exposure of CIA
abuses in the 1970s. The American power structure, particularly the Right,
struck back, labeling the U.S. news media as “liberal” and questioning the
patriotism of individual journalists and editors.
But it didn’t require much arm-twisting to get the mainstream news media to bend
into line and fall on its knees. Many of the news executives that I worked under
shared the view of the power structure that the Vietnam protests were disloyal,
that the U.S. government needed to hit back against humiliations like the Iranhostage crisis, and that the rebellious public needed to be brought back into
line behind more traditional values.
At the Associated Press, its most senior executive, general manager Keith
Fuller, gave a 1982 speech in Worcester, Massachusetts, hailing Reagan’s
election in 1980 as a worthy repudiation of the excesses of the 1960s and a
necessary corrective to the nation’s lost prestige of the 1970s. Fuller cited
Reagan’s Inauguration and the simultaneous release of the 52 U.S. hostages in
Iran on Jan. 20, 1981, as a national turning point in which Reagan had revived
the American spirit.
“As we look back on the turbulent Sixties, we shudder with the memory of a time
that seemed to tear at the very sinews of this country,” Fuller said, adding
that Reagan’s election represented a nation “crying, ‘Enough.’
“We don’t believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam
and Eve in the eyes of Creation. We don’t believe that people should cash
welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don’t really believe
that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest
in the classroom.
“We’re sick of your social engineering. We’re fed up with your tolerance of
crime, drugs and pornography. But most of all, we’re sick of your selfperpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.”
Fuller’s sentiments were not uncommon in the executive suites of major news
organizations, where Reagan’s reassertion of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy
was especially welcomed. At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal,
an early neocon, vowed to steer his newspaper back “to the center,” by which he
meant to the right.
There was also a social dimension to this journalistic retreat. For instance,
the Washington Post’s longtime publisher Katharine Graham found the stresses of
high-stakes adversarial journalism unpleasant. Plus, it was one thing to take on
the socially inept Richard Nixon; it was quite another to challenge the socially
adroit Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom Mrs. Graham personally liked.
The Graham family embraced neoconservatism, too, favoring aggressive policies
against Moscow and unquestioned support for Israel. Soon, the Washington Post
and Newsweek editors were reflecting those family prejudices.
I encountered that reality when I moved from AP to Newsweek in 1987 and found
executive editor Maynard Parker, in particular, hostile to journalism that put
Reagan’s Cold War policies in a negative light. I had been involved in breaking
much of the Iran-Contra scandal at the AP, but I was told at Newsweek that “we
don’t want another Watergate.” The fear apparently was that the political
stresses from another constitutional crisis around a Republican president might
shatter the nation’s political cohesion.
The same was true of the Contra-cocaine story, which I was prevented from
pursuing at Newsweek. Indeed, when Sen. John Kerry advanced the Contra-cocaine
story with a Senate report issued in April 1989, Newsweek was uninterested and
the Washington Post buried the story deep inside the paper. Later, Newsweek
dismissed Kerry as a “randy conspiracy buff.” [For details, see Robert Parry’s
Lost History.]
Fitting a Pattern
In other words, the vicious destruction of Gary Webb following his revival of
the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 when he examined the impact of one Contracocaine pipeline into the crack trade in Los Angeles was not out of the
ordinary. It was part of the pattern of subservience to the national security
apparatus, especially under Republicans and right-wingers but extending to
Democratic hardliners, too.
This pattern of bias continued into last decade, even when the issue was whether
the votes of Americans should be counted. After the 2000 election, when George
W. Bush got five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the counting of
votes in the key state of Florida, major news executives were more concerned
about protecting the fragile “legitimacy” of Bush’s tainted victory than
ensuring that the actual winner of the U.S. presidential election became
president.
After the Supreme Court’s Republican majority made sure that Florida’s electoral
votes and thus the presidency would go to Bush, some news executives, including
the New York Times’ executive editor Howell Raines, bristled at proposals to do
a media count of the disputed ballots, according to a New York Times executive
who was present for these discussions.
The idea of this media count was to determine who the voters of Florida actually
favored for president, but Raines only relented to the project if the results
did not indicate that Bush should have lost, a concern that escalated after the
9/11 attacks, according to the account from the Times executive.
Raines’s concern became real when the news organizations completed their
unofficial count of Florida’s disputed ballots in November 2001 and it turned
out that Al Gore would have carried Florida if all legally cast votes were
counted regardless of what standards were applied to the famous chads dimpled,
hanging or punched-through.
Gore’s victory would have been assured by the so-called “over-votes” in which a
voter both punched through a candidate’s name and wrote it in. Under Florida
law, such “over-votes” are legal and they broke heavily in Gore’s favor. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White House” or our book, Neck
Deep.]
In other words, the wrong candidate had been awarded the presidency. However,
this startling fact became an inconvenient truth that the mainstream U.S. news
media decided to obscure. So, the major newspapers and TV networks hid their own
scoop when the results were published on Nov. 12, 2001.
Instead of stating clearly that Florida’s legally cast votes favored Gore and
that the wrong man was in the White House the mainstream media bent over
backwards to concoct hypothetical situations in which Bush might still have won
the presidency, such as if the recount were limited to only a few counties or if
the legal “over-votes” were excluded.
The reality of Gore’s rightful victory was buried deep in the stories or
relegated to data charts that accompanied the articles. Any casual reader would
have come away from reading the New York Times or the Washington Post with the
conclusion that Bush really had won Florida and thus was the legitimate
president after all.
The Post’s headline read, “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush.” The Times
ran the headline: “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast
the Deciding Vote.” Some columnists, such as the Post’s media analyst Howard
Kurtz, even launched preemptive strikes against anyone who would read the fine
print and spot the hidden “lede” of Gore’s victory. Kurtz labeled such people
“conspiracy theorists.” [Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001]
An Irate Reporter
After reading these slanted “Bush Won” stories, I wrote an article for
Consortiumnews.com noting that the obvious “lede” should have been that the
recount revealed that Gore had won. I suggested that the news judgments of
senior editors might have been influenced by a desire to appear patriotic only
two months after 9/11. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Gore’s Victory.”]
My article had been up for only a couple of hours when I received an irate phone
call from New York Times media writer Felicity Barringer, who accused me of
impugning the journalistic integrity of executive editor Raines.
Though Raines and other executives may have thought that what they were doing
was “good for the country,” they actually were betraying their most fundamental
duty to the American people to give them the facts as fully and accurately as
possible. By falsely portraying Bush as the real winner in Florida and thus in
the Electoral College, these news executives infused Bush with false legitimacy
that he then abused in leading the country to war in Iraq in 2003.
Again, in that run-up to the Iraq invasion, the major news media performed more
as compliant propagandists than independent journalists, embracing Bush’s false
WMD claims and joining in the jingoism that celebrated “the troops” and the
initial American conquest of Iraq.
Despite the media’s embarrassment that later surrounded the bogus WMD stories
and the disastrous Iraq War, mainstream news executives faced no accountability.
Howell Raines lost his job in 2003 not because of his unethical handling of the
Florida recount or the false Iraq War reporting, but because he trusted reporter
Jayson Blair who fabricated sources in the Beltway Sniper Case.
How distorted the Times’ judgment had become was underscored by the fact that
Raines’s successor, Bill Keller, had written a major article “The I-Can’tBelieve-I’m-a-Hawk Club” hailing “liberals” who joined him in supporting the
Iraq invasion. In other words, you got fired if you trusted a dishonest reporter
but got promoted if you trusted a dishonest president.
Similarly, at the Washington Post, editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt, who
reported again and again that Iraq was hiding stockpiles of WMD as “flat-fact,”
didn’t face the kind of journalistic disgrace that was meted out to Gary Webb.
Instead, Hiatt is still holding down the same prestigious job, writing the same
kind of imbalanced neocon editorials that guided the American people into the
Iraq disaster, except now Hiatt is pointing the way to deeper confrontations in
Syria, Iran, Ukraine and Russia.
So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that this thoroughly corrupted
Washington press corps would lash out again at Gary Webb as his reputation has
the belated chance for a posthumous rehabilitation.
But how far the vaunted Washington press corps has sunk is illustrated by the
fact that it has been left to a Hollywood movie of all things to set the record
straight.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
Treating Putin Like a Lunatic
Exclusive: Official Washington treats whatever comes out of Russian President
Putin’s mouth as the ravings of a lunatic, even when what he says is obviously
true or otherwise makes sense, as the New York Times has demonstrated again,
writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
When reading the New York Times on many foreign policy issues, it doesn’t take a
savant to figure out what the newspaper’s bias is. Anything, for instance,
relating to Russian President Vladimir Putin drips of contempt and hostility.
Rather than offer the Times’ readers an objective or even slightly fair-minded
account of Putin’s remarks, we are fed a steady diet of highly prejudicial
language, such as we find in Saturday’s article about Putin’s comments at a
conference in which he noted U.S. contributions to chaos in countries, such as
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.
That Putin is correct appears almost irrelevant to the Times, which simply
writes that Putin “unleashed perhaps his strongest diatribe against the United
States yet” with his goal “to sell Moscow’s view that American meddling has
sparked most of the world’s recent crises.”
Rather than address the merits of Putin’s critique, the Times’ article by Neil
MacFarquhar uncritically cites the “group think” of Official Washington: “Russia
is often accused of provoking the crisis in Ukraine by annexing Crimea, and of
prolonging the agony in Syria by helping to crush a popular uprising against
President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow’s last major Arab ally. Some analysts have
suggested that Mr. Putin seeks to restore the lost power and influence of the
Soviet Union, or even the Russian Empire, in a bid to prolong his own rule.”
Yes, “some analysts” can be cited to support nearly any claim no matter how
wrongheaded, or you can use the passive tense “is often accused” to present any
charge no matter how unfair. But a more realistic summary of the various crises
afflicting the world would note that Putin is correct when he describes past
U.S. backing for various extremists, from Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle
East and Central Asia to neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
For example, during the 1980s, the Reagan administration consciously encouraged
Islamic fundamentalism as a strategy to cause trouble for “atheistic communism”
in Afghanistan and in the Muslim provinces of the Soviet Union.
To overthrow a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan, the CIA and its Saudi
collaborators financed the mujahedeen “holy warriors” who counted among their
supporters Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden. Some of those Islamists later
blended into the Taliban and al-Qaeda with dire consequences for the United
States on Sept. 11, 2001.
By invading Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush toppled a secular dictator,
Saddam Hussein, but saw him replaced by what amounted to a Shiite theocracy
which pushed Iraq’s Sunni minority into the arms of “Al-Qaeda in Iraq,” which
has since rebranded itself as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or simply the
Islamic State. Those extremists now control large swaths of Iraq and Syria and
have massacred religious minorities and Western hostages, prompting another U.S.
military intervention.
Obama’s Interventions
In Libya in 2011, President Barack Obama acquiesced to demands from “liberal
interventionists” in his administration and authorized an air war to overthrow
another secular autocrat, Muammar Gaddafi, whose ouster and murder have sent
Libya spiraling into political chaos amid warring Islamist militias. It turns
out Gaddafi was not wrong when he warned of Islamist terrorists operating around
Benghazi.
Similarly, Official Washington’s embrace of protests and violence aimed at
removing another secular Arab leader, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, contributed to
the bloody civil war that has devastated that country and created fertile ground
for the Islamic State and the Nusra Front, the official al-Qaeda affiliate.
Though Obama balked at demands from neocons and “liberal interventionists” that
he launch an air war against the Syrian military in 2013, he did authorize
secret shipments of weapons and training for the supposedly “moderate” Syrian
rebels who have generally sided with Islamist fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda
and the Islamic State.
Many of these same neocons and “liberal interventionists” have been eager to
ratchet up the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program, including
neocon dreams to “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” also a desire of hardliners in Israel.
In some of these crises, one of the few international leaders who has cooperated
with Obama to tamp down tensions has been Putin, who helped negotiate conflictavoiding agreements with Syria and Iran. But those peaceful interventions made
Putin an inviting target for the neocons who began in fall 2013 arranging a coup
d’etat in Ukraine on Russia’s border.
As Obama and Putin each paid too little attention to these maneuvers, neocons
such as National Endowment for Democracy president Carl Gershman, Sen. John
McCain, R-Arizona, and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs
Victoria Nuland went to work on the Ukrainian coup.
However to actually overthrow Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the
coup makers had to collaborate with neo-Nazi militias which were organized in
western Ukraine and dispatched to Kiev where they provided the muscle for the
Maidan uprising. Neo-Nazi leaders were given several ministries in the new
government, and neo-Nazi militants were incorporated into the National Guard and
“volunteer” militias dispatched to crush the ethnic Russian resistance in the
east.
Putin for the Status Quo
The underlying reality of the Ukraine crisis was that Putin actually supported
the country’s status quo, i.e. maintaining the elected president and the
constitutional process. It was the United States along with the European Union
that sought to topple the existing system and pull Ukraine from Russia’s orbit
into the West’s.
Whatever one thinks about the merits of that change, it is factually wrong to
accuse Putin of initiating the Ukraine crisis or to extrapolate from Official
Washington’s false conventional wisdom and conclude that Putin is a new Hitler,
an aggressor seeking to reestablish the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire.
But the Times and other major U.S. news outlets have wedded themselves to that
propaganda theme and now cannot deviate from it. So, when Putin states the
obvious that the U.S. has meddled in the affairs of other nations and that
Russia did not pick the fight over Ukraine his comments must be treated like the
ravings of a lunatic unleashing some “diatribe.”
Among Putin’s ranting was his observation, according to the Times article, that
“the United States supports ‘dubious’ groups ranging from ‘open neo-fascists to
Islamic radicals.’
“‘Why do they support such people,’ he asked the annual gathering known as the
Valdai Club, which met this year in the southern resort town of Sochi. ‘They do
this because they decide to use them as instruments along the way in achieving
their goals, but then burn their fingers and recoil.’
“The goal of the United States, he said, was to try to create a unipolar world
in which American interests went unchallenged.
“Mr. Putin specifically denied trying to restore the Russian Empire. He argued
Russia was compelled to intervene in Ukraine because that country was in the
midst of a ‘civilized dialogue’ over its political future when the West staged a
coup to oust the president last February, pushing the country into chaos and
civil war.
“‘We did not start this,’ he said. ‘Statements that Russia is trying to
reinstate some sort of empire, that it is encroaching on the sovereignty of its
neighbors, are groundless.’”
Of course, all the “smart people” of Official Washington know how to react to
such statements from Putin, with a snicker and a roll of the eyes. After all,
they’ve been reading the narratives of these crises as fictionalized by the New
York Times, the Washington Post, etc.
Rationality and realism seem to have lost any place in the workings of the
mainstream U.S. news media.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
Citizenfour’s Escape to Freedom in
Russia
Exclusive: An international community of resistance has formed against pervasive
spying by the U.S. National Security Agency with key enclaves in Moscow (with
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden) and in London (with WikiLeaks’ Julian
Assange), way stations visited by ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
In early September in Russia, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward
Snowden told me about a documentary entitled “Citizenfour,” named after the
alias he used when he asked filmmaker Laura Poitras to help him warn Americans
about how deeply the NSA had carved away their freedoms.
When we spoke, Snowden seemed more accustomed to his current reality, i.e.,
still being alive albeit far from home, than he did in October 2013 when I met
with him along with fellow whistleblowers Tom Drake, Coleen Rowley and Jesselyn
Radack, as we presented him with the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in
Intelligence.
A year ago, the four of us spent a long, relaxing evening with Snowden and
sensed his lingering wonderment at the irony-suffused skein of events that
landed him in Russia, out of reach from the U.S. government’s long arm of
“justice.”
Six days before we gave Snowden the award, former NSA and CIA director Michael
Hayden and House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Rogers had openly expressed
their view that Snowden deserved to be on the “list,” meaning the “capture or
kill” list that could have made Snowden the target of a drone strike. When I
asked him if he were aware of that recent indignity, he nodded yes with a
winsome wince of incredulity.
This September, there was no drone of Damocles hanging over the relaxed lunch
that the two of us shared. There were, rather, happier things to discuss. For
example, I asked if he were aware that one of his co-workers in Hawaii had
volunteered to Andy Greenberg of Forbes Magazine that Snowden was admired by his
peers as a man of principle, as well as a highly gifted geek.
The co-worker told Greenberg: “NSA is full of smart people, but Ed … was in a
class of his own. I’ve never seen anything like it. … He was given virtually
unlimited access to NSA data [because] he could do things nobody else could.”
Equally important, the former colleague pointed out that Snowden kept on his
desk a copy of the U. S. Constitution to cite when arguing with co-workers
against NSA activities that he thought might be in violation of America’s
founding document. Greenberg’s source conceded that he or she had slowly come to
understand that Snowden was trying to do the right thing and that this was very
much in character, adding, “I won’t call him a hero, but he’s sure as hell no
traitor.”
Snowden spoke of his former co-workers with respect and affection, noting that
most of them had family responsibilities, mortgages, etc. burdens he lacked. He
told me he was very aware that these realities would make it immeasurably more
difficult for them to blow the whistle on NSA’s counter-Constitutional
activities, even if they were to decide they should. “But somebody had to do
it,” said Snowden in a decidedly non-heroic tone, “So I guess that would be me.”
Following the intelligence world’s axiom of “need-to-know,” Snowden had been
careful to protect his family and Lindsay Mills, his girlfriend, by telling no
one of his plans. I found myself thinking long and hard at how difficult that
must have been to simply get out of Dodge without a word to those you love.
Perhaps he felt Mills would eventually understand when he explained why it was
absolutely necessary in order to achieve his mission and have some chance of
staying alive and out of prison. But, not having discussed with her his plans,
how could he be sure of that?
And so, learning recently of the interim “happy-ending” arrival of Mills in
Russia was like a shot in the arm for me. I thought to myself, it is possible to
do the right thing, survive and not end up having to live the life of a hermit.
Equally important, that reality is now out there for the world to see. What an
encouragement to future whistleblowers and to current ones, as well, for that
matter.
Snowden was delighted when I told him that Bill Binney, the long-time and highly
respected former NSA technical director, had just accepted the Sam Adams Award,
which will be presented in 2015. It was Snowden’s own revelations that finally
freed up Binney and other courageous NSA alumni to let the American public know
what they had been trying, through official channels, to tell the overly timid
representatives in Washington.
Seeing ‘Citizenfour’
Snowden was happy to tell me about the documentary, “Citizenfour,” explaining
that during his sessions in Hong Kong with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and
The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill, Poitras seemed to have the camera always rolling
during the eight days they shared in Hong Kong including during the grand escape
from the hotel. With a broad smile, Snowden said, “Ray, when people see my
makeshift disguise, well, it is going to be really hard to argue that this thing
was pre-planned!”
All I have seen so far is the trailer, but I have tickets for a showing Friday
night when “Citizenfour” opens in Washington and other cities. With Snowden, I
figured I could wait to witness the grand escape until I saw the film itself, so
I avoided asking him for additional detail. Like: “Don’t spoil it for me, Ed.”
I was encouraged to read, in one of the movie reviews, that the documentary does
allude to the key role played by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in enabling
Snowden’s escape. I had long since concluded that WikiLeaks’s role and that of
Sarah Harrison, in particular, was the sine qua non for success. I hope
“Citizenfour” gives this key part of the story the prominence it deserves.
I feel it is an equal honor to spend time with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian
embassy whenever I’m in London. In early September, Assange was a welcoming host
and we had a long chat over dinner while I was en route to Russia via London and
Berlin. (I had been invited to present at the U.S.-Russia Forum in Moscow later
last month and stayed there an extra day in order to visit with Snowden.)
I had been unaware of “Citizenfour” before visiting Assange. The film came up
spontaneously when I volunteered to him that the safe extrication of Snowden
from Hong Kong sits atop my gratitude list of the many things he has
accomplished. That drew a very broad smile and some words about the world’s most
powerful country and intelligence service, “and we still got him out!”
Assange shared how important it was not only to rescue Snowden himself but, in
so doing, to provide for potential whistleblowers some real-life proof that it
is possible to do the right thing and avoid spending decades in prison where
WikiLeaks’ most famous source Chelsea Manning now sits. This was among the main
reasons why WikiLeaks cashed in so many chips in its successful effort to bring
Snowden to safety. It was surely not because Assange expected Snowden to share
reportable information with WikiLeaks. He gave none.
Assange was in good spirits and hoping for some break in the Kafkaesque
situation in which he has found himself for several years now (receiving asylum
in Ecuador’s Embassy to avoid arrest in Great Britain and extradition to Sweden
for questioning regarding alleged sexual offenses).
A Stop in Berlin
I also planned to spend a few days in Berlin to coincide with the NATO summit in
Wales (Sept. 4-5). On Aug. 30, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
sent a Memorandum to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, warning her about the
dubious “intelligence” adduced to blame Russia for the troubles in Ukraine. Our
memo had some resonance in German and other European media, but I was saddened
to find the media in the UK and Germany as co-opted and Putin-bashing as the
U.S. media.
It was 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. What I said in my various
talks and interviews on NATO’s reneging on its promise to Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev not to move NATO one inch eastward, once Germany was reunited, seemed
to come as a major revelation to most listeners.
“Really?” was the predominant reaction when I explained that 25 years ago there
was a unique, realistic chance for a Europe “whole and free” (in words then used
by President George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev) from Portugal to the
Urals. Instead, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia was
excluded. NATO crept steadily east toward Russia’s border.
And last February, the U.S. and EU orchestrated a coup d’état in Kiev to foster
Ukraine’s “European aspirations” to cast its lot with the West and dislodge
itself from Russia’s sphere of influence. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Whys
Behind the Ukraine Crisis.”]
The squandering of a historic chance for lasting peace in Europe remains atop
the list of severe disappointments encountered during my professional life. The
fact that, to this day, so few seem aware of what happened, and who was and is
to blame, is also a major frustration.
In Berlin, consolation and affirmation came in renewing friendships there and
getting to know others many of them expatriates. First and foremost among the
latter is Sarah Harrison, the main figure in executing WikiLeaks’s plan to get
Snowden out of Hong Kong and onward to Latin American via Moscow, where his
planned journey has so far stalled.
Because the U.S. Justice Department charged Snowden with espionage and the U.S.
State Department revoked his passport, his stay in Moscow ended up being quite a
long one. But Harrison stayed on for as long as seemed necessary to accompany
and support Snowden, as well as to be able to testify to the fact that the
Russians were not using anything like “enhanced interrogation techniques” on
him.
I had last seen Harrison in Moscow at the Sam Adams Award presentation to
Snowden; it was great to have a chance to chat with her over a long lunch.
Flying home from Moscow, having had lunch there with Edward Snowden, lunch in
Berlin with Sarah Harrison, and dinner with Julian Assange in that little piece
of Ecuadorian territory in London, what came first to mind was Polonius’s advice
to Laertes: “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to
thy soul with hoops of steel.”
But then, above the din of the jet engines, came a more familiar and more
insistent voice. It was that of Jane Fahey, my Irish grandmother, who for some
reason seemed 33,000 feet closer than usual: “Show me your company, and I’ll
tell you who you are!” she would say, often very often. I think my grandmother
would be as pleased with my “company” as I am and as grateful.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. Co-founder of Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), he served as an Army infantry/intelligence
officer and then as a CIA analyst from the administration of John Kennedy to
that of George H. W. Bush.
He is also co-founder of Sam Associates for
Integrity in Intelligence.
In Case You Missed…
Some of our special stories in September focused on the new Cold War over
Ukraine, President Obama plunging back into the Iraq War while expanding U.S.
airstrikes into Syria, and the revival of the Contra-cocaine scandal.
“Warning Merkel on Russian ‘Invasion’ Intel” by Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, Sept. 1, 2014
“Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine” by Robert Parry, Sept. 2, 2014
“The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis” by Robert Parry, Sept. 3, 2014
“Sidestepping Ukraine’s N-Word for Nazi” by Robert Parry, Sept. 6, 2014
“Fleshing Out Nixon’s Vietnam Treason” by James DiEugenio, Sept. 7, 2014
“Seeing No Neo-Nazi Militias in Ukraine” by Robert Parry, Sept. 8, 2014
“Malaysia Airlines Whodunnit Still a Mystery” by Robert Parry, Sept. 9, 2014
“The Earlier 9/11 Acts of Terror” by Jonathan Marshall, Sept. 10, 2014
“Will Scots Heed Ancient Call for Freedom?” by Don North, Sept. 10, 2014
“‘Money-in-Politics Amendment Ignored” by Nat Parry, Sept. 11, 2014
“Neocons Revive Syria ‘Regime Change’ Plan” by Robert Parry, Sept. 11, 2014
“A Third Decade of Bombing Iraq” by Nat Parry, Sept. 12, 2014
“Perfecting ‘Regime Change’ in Ukraine” by Ted Snider, Sept. 12, 2014
“Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers” by Robert Parry, Sept. 15, 2014
“The Lost Logic of Perpetual War” by Nat Parry, Sept. 16, 2014
“Reported US-Syrian Accord on Air Strikes” by Robert Parry, Sept. 17, 2014
“Cameras to Detect ‘Abnormal’ Behavior” by Sander Venema, Sept. 18, 2014
“Blocking a ‘Realist’ Strategy on the Mideast” by Robert Parry, Sept. 19, 2014
“How Money Silences Criticism of Israel” by Lawrence Davidson, Sept. 22, 2014
“High Cost of Bad Journalism on Ukraine” by Robert Parry, Sept. 22, 2014
“Obama’s Novel Lawyering to Bomb Syria” by Robert Parry, Sept. 23, 2014
“Argentina v. the Hedge Funds” by Andres Cala, Sept. 24, 2014
“Obama’s Propagandistic UN Address” by Robert Parry, Sept. 25, 2014
“The CIA/MSM Contra-Cocaine Cover-up” by Robert Parry, Sept. 26, 2014
“Neocons’ Noses into the Syrian Tent” by Robert Parry, Sept. 29, 2014
“Beheadings v. Drone Assassinations” by Coleen Rowley, Sept. 30, 2014
“Oh What a Webb We Weave” by Greg Maybury, Sept. 30, 2014
To produce and publish these stories and many more costs money. And except for
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So, please consider a tax-deductible donation either by credit card online or by
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contributions to our account, which is named “[email protected]”).
Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case
Exclusive: For months, Western governments and media have accused Russia of
supplying the anti-aircraft missile that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight
17 killing 298 people. But now German intelligence has reportedly determined the
missile came from a Ukrainian military base, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The West’s case blaming Russia for the shoot-down of a Malaysia Airlines
plane over Ukraine last July appears to be crumbling as the German foreign
intelligence agency has concluded that the anti-aircraft missile battery
involved came from a Ukrainian military base, according to a report by the
German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
The Obama administration and other Western governments have pointed the finger
of blame at Russia for supposedly supplying a sophisticated BUK missile system
to ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who then allegedly used the weapon
on July 17 to shoot down what they thought was a Ukrainian military plane but
turned out to be Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing all 298 people onboard.
The Russians denied providing the rebels with the weapon and the rebels denied
shooting down the plane. But the tragedy gave the U.S. State Department the
emotional leverage to get the European Union to impose tougher economic
sanctions on Russia, touching off a trade war that has edged Europe toward a new
recession.
But now the narrative has shifted. The German intelligence agency, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, asserted that while it believes rebels were
responsible for shooting down the plane, they supposedly did so with an antiaircraft battery captured from a Ukrainian military base, according to Der
Spiegel.
The BND also concluded that photos supplied by the Ukrainian government
about the MH-17 tragedy “have been manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported. And, the
BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been
flying close to MH-17 just before it crashed, the magazine said.
None of the BND’s evidence to support its conclusions has been made public — and
I was subsequently told by a European official that the evidence was not as
conclusive as the magazine article depicted.
Der Spiegel said the information given to members of a parliamentary committee
on Oct. 8 included satellite images and other photography. What’s less clear,
however, is how the BND could determine the precise command-and-control of the
anti-aircraft missile system amid the chaotic military situation that existed in
eastern Ukraine last July.
At the time, the Ukrainian army and allied militias were mounting an offensive
against ethnic Russian rebels who were resisting a U.S.-backed coup regime that
ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February, touching off what
quickly became a nasty civil war.
Spearheading Kiev’s summer offensive were pro-government militias, some of which
were filled with neo-Nazi extremists and financed by Ukrainian billionaire
oligarchs including Ihor Kolomoisky, who had been appointed governor of the
southeastern Dnipropetrovsk Region. The ethnic Russian rebels also were a
disorganized lot with poor command and control.
Rushing to Anti-Russian Judgment
Yet, the Obama administration was quick to pin the blame for the MH-17 crash on
Russia and the rebels. Just three days after the crash, Secretary of State John
Kerry went on all five Sunday talk shows fingering Russia and the rebels and
citing evidence provided by the Ukrainian government through social media.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” David Gregory asked, “Are you bottom-lining here that
Russia provided the weapon?”
Kerry: “There’s a story today confirming that, but we have not within the
Administration made a determination. But it’s pretty clear when there’s a buildup of extraordinary circumstantial evidence. I’m a former prosecutor. I’ve tried
cases on circumstantial evidence; it’s powerful here.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“Kerry’s Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment.”]
But some U.S. intelligence analysts offered conflicting assessments. After
Kerry’s TV round-robin, the Los Angeles Times reported on a U.S. intelligence
briefing given to several mainstream U.S. news outlets. The story said, “U.S.
intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine the nationalities or
identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was
possible the SA-11 [anti-aircraft missile] was launched by a defector from the
Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar missile systems.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery of a Ukrainian ‘Defector,’”]
A source who was briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that
some analysts had concluded that the rebels and Russia were likely not at fault
and that it appeared Ukrainian government forces were to blame, although
possibly a unit operating outside the direct command of Ukraine’s top officials.
The source specifically said the U.S. intelligence evidence did not implicate
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko or Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk but
rather suggested an extremist element of the armed forces funded by one of
Ukraine’s oligarchs.
Regarding the alleged Russian role, the source said the U.S. analysts had found
no evidence that the Russian government had given the rebels a BUK missile
system, which would be capable of shooting down a commercial airliner at 33,000
feet, the altitude of MH-17.
According to the Der Spiegel story, the BND reached the same conclusion, that
Russia was not the source of the missile battery. But the BND and these U.S.
analysts apparently differ on who they suspect fired the fateful missile. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was Putin
Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?”]
What has been curious about the handling of the MH-17 case is the failure of the
Obama administration and other Western governments to present whatever evidence
they have, whether satellite, electronic or telephonic so the investigation can
proceed more quickly in determining who was responsible.
By withholding this evidence for nearly three months, the West has benefited
from keeping alive the anti-Russian propaganda blaming Moscow and President
Vladimir Putin for the tragedy but the secrecy has given the perpetrators time
to scatter and cover their tracks.
With Der Spiegel’s report, it’s now clearer why the delay and the secrecy. If
the missile responsible for bringing down MH-17 came from a Ukrainian military
base not from the Russian government then a very potent anti-Putin propaganda
theme would be neutralized. More attention also would focus on whether the
missile battery was really under the control of a rebel unit, as the BND
suggests
or was in the hands of anti-rebel extremists.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
WPost’s Slimy Assault on Gary Webb
Exclusive: The movie, “Kill the Messenger,” portrays the mainstream U.S. news
media as craven for destroying Gary Webb rather than expanding on his
investigation of the Contra-cocaine scandal. So, now one of those “journalists”
is renewing the character assassination of Webb, notes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Jeff Leen, the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor for investigations,
begins his
renewed attack on the late Gary Webb’s Contra-cocaine reporting with a
falsehood.
Leen insists that there is a journalism dictum that “an extraordinary claim
requires extraordinary proof.” But Leen must know that it is not true. Many
extraordinary claims, such as assertions in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding
arsenals of WMDs, were published as flat-fact without “extraordinary proof” or
any real evidence at all, including by Leen’s colleagues at the Washington Post.
A different rule actually governs American journalism that journalists
need “extraordinary proof” if a story puts the U.S. government or an “ally” in a
negative light but pretty much anything goes when criticizing an “enemy.”
If, for instance, the Post wanted to accuse the Syrian government of killing
civilians with Sarin gas or blame Russian-backed rebels for the shoot-down of a
civilian airliner over Ukraine, any scraps of proof no matter how dubious would
be good enough (as was the actual case in 2013 and 2014, respectively).
However, if new evidence undercut those suspicions and shifted the blame to
people on “the U.S. side” say, the Syrian rebels and the Ukrainian government
then the standards of proof suddenly skyrocket beyond reach. So what you get is
not “responsible” journalism as Leen tries to suggest but hypocrisy and
propaganda. One set of rules for the goose and another set for the gander.
The Contra-Cocaine Case
Or to go back to the Contra-cocaine scandal that Brian Barger and I first
exposed for the Associated Press in 1985: If we were writing that the leftist
Nicaraguan Sandinista government the then U.S. “enemy” was shipping cocaine to
the United States, any flimsy claim would have sufficed. But the standard of
proof ratcheted up when the subject of our story was cocaine smuggling by
President Ronald Reagan’s beloved Contras.
In other words, the real dictum is that there are two standards, double
standards, something that a careerist like Leen knows in his gut but doesn’t
want you to know. All the better to suggest that Gary Webb was guilty of
violating some noble principle of journalism.
But Leen is wrong in another way because there was “extraordinary proof”
establishing that the Contras were implicated in drug trafficking and that the
Reagan administration was looking the other way.
When Barger and I wrote the first story about Contra-cocaine trafficking almost
three decades ago, we already had “extraordinary proof,” including documents
from Costa Rica, statements by Contras and Contra backers, and admissions from
officials in the Drug Enforcement Administration and Ronald Reagan’s National
Security Council staff.
However, Leen seems to dismiss our work as nothing but getting “tips” about
Contra-cocaine trafficking as if Barger and I were like the hacks at the
Washington Post and the New York Times who wait around for authorized handouts
from the U.S. government.
Following the Money
Barger and I actually were looking for something different when we encountered
the evidence on Contra-cocaine trafficking. We were trying to figure out how the
Contras were sustaining themselves in the field after Congress cut off the CIA’s
financing for their war.
We were, in the old-fashioned journalistic parlance, “following the money.” The
problem was the money led, in part, to the reality that all the major Contra
organizations were collaborating with drug traffickers.
Besides our work in the mid-1980s, Sen. John Kerry’s follow-on Contra-cocaine
investigation added substantially more evidence. Yet Leen and his cohorts
apparently felt no need to pursue the case any further or even give respectful
attention to Kerry’s official findings.
Indeed, when Kerry’s report was issued in April 1989, the Washington Post ran a
dismissive story by Michael Isikoff buried deep inside the paper. Newsweek
dubbed Kerry “a randy conspiracy buff.” In Leen’s new article attacking Gary
Webb — published on the front-page of the Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook
section — Leen just says:
“After an exhaustive three-year investigation, the committee’s report concluded
that CIA officials were aware of the smuggling activities of some of their
charges who supported the contras, but it stopped short of implicating the
agency directly in drug dealing. That seemed to be the final word on the
matter.”
But why was it the “final word”? Why didn’t Leen and others who had missed the
scandal as it was unfolding earlier in the decade at least try to build on
Kerry’s findings. After all, these were now official U.S. government records.
Wasn’t that “extraordinary” enough?
In this context, Leen paints himself as the true investigative journalist who
knew the inside story of the Contra-cocaine tale from the beginning. He wrote:
“As an investigative reporter covering the drug trade for the Miami Herald, I
wrote about the explosion of cocaine in America in the 1980s and 1990s, and the
role of Colombia’s Medellin Cartel in fueling it.
“Beginning in 1985, journalists started pursuing tips about the CIA’s role in
the drug trade. Was the agency allowing cocaine to flow into the United States
as a means to fund its secret war supporting the contra rebels in Nicaragua?
Many journalists, including me, chased that story from different angles, but the
extraordinary proof was always lacking.”
Again, what Leen says is not true. Leen makes no reference to the groundbreaking
AP story in 1985 or other disclosures in the ensuing years. He just insists that
“the extraordinary proof” was lacking — which it may have been for him given his
lackluster abilities. He then calls the final report of Kerry’s
investigation the “final word.”
But Leen doesn’t explain why he and his fellow mainstream journalists were so
incurious about this major scandal that they would remain passive even in the
wake of a Senate investigation. It’s also not true that Kerry’s report was the
“final word” prior to Webb reviving the scandal in 1996.
Government Witnesses
In 1991, during the narcotics trafficking trial of Panamanian dictator Manuel
Noriega, the U.S. government itself presented witnesses who connected the
Contras to the Medellin cartel.
Indeed, after testimony by Medellin cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder about his $10
million contribution to the Contras, the Washington Post wrote in a Nov. 27,
1991 editorial that “The Kerry hearings didn’t get the attention they deserved
at the time” and that “The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the
Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention.”
But the Post offered its readers no explanation for why Kerry’s hearings had
been largely ignored, with the Post itself a leading culprit in this
journalistic misfeasance. Nor did the Post and the other leading newspapers use
the opening created by the Noriega trial to do anything to rectify their past
neglect.
In other words, it didn’t seem to matter how much “extraordinary proof” the
Washington Post or Jeff Leen had. Nothing would be sufficient to report
seriously on the Contra-cocaine scandal, not even when the U.S. government
vouched for the evidence.
So, Leen is trying to fool you when he presents himself as a “responsible
journalist” weighing the difficult evidentiary choices. He’s just the latest
hack to go after Gary Webb, which has become urgent again for the mainstream
media in the face of “Kill the Messenger,” a new movie about Webb’s ordeal.
What Leen won’t face up to is that the tag-team destruction of Gary Webb in
1996-97 by the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times
represented one of the most shameful episodes in the history of American
journalism.
The Big Papers tore down an honest journalist to cover up their own cowardly
failure to investigate and expose a grave national security crime, the Reagan
administration’s tolerance for and protection of drug trafficking into the
United States by the CIA’s client Contra army.
This journalistic failure occurred even though the Associated Press far from a
radical news outlet and a Senate investigation (not to mention the Noriega
trial) had charted the way.
Leen’s Assault
Contrary to Leen’s column, “Kill the Messenger” is actually a fairly honest
portrayal of what happened when Webb exposed the consequences of the Contra
cocaine smuggling after the drugs reached the United States. One channel fed
into an important Los Angeles supply chain that produced crack.
But Leen tells you that “The Hollywood version of [Webb’s] story, a truth-teller
persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media, is pure fiction.”
He then lauds the collaboration of the Big Three newspapers in destroying Webb
and creating such enormous pressure on Webb’s newspaper, the San Jose Mercury
News, that the executive editor Jerry Ceppos threw his own reporter under the
bus. To Leen, this disgraceful behavior represented the best of American
journalism.
Leen wrote: “The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times,
in a rare show of unanimity, all wrote major pieces knocking the story down for
its overblown claims and undernourished reporting.
“Gradually, the Mercury News backed away from Webb’s scoop. The paper
transferred him to its Cupertino bureau and did an internal review of his facts
and his methods. Jerry Ceppos, the Mercury News’s executive editor, wrote a
piece concluding that the story did not meet the newspaper’s standards, a
courageous stance, I thought.”
“Courageous”? What an astounding characterization of Ceppos’s act of career
cowardice.
But Leen continues by explaining his role in the Webb takedown. After all, Leen
was then the drug expert at the Miami Herald, which like the San Jose Mercury
News was a Knight Ridder newspaper. Leen says his editors sought his opinion
about Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series.
Though acknowledging that he was “envious” of Webb’s story when it appeared in
1996, Leen writes that he examined it and found it wanting, supposedly because
of alleged overstatements. He proudly asserts that because of his critical
analysis, the Miami Herald never published Webb’s series.
But Leen goes further. He falsely characterizes the U.S. government’s later
admissions contained in inspector general reports by the CIA and Justice
Department. If Leen had bothered to read the reports thoroughly, he would have
realized that the reports actually establish that Webb and indeed Kerry, Barger
and I grossly understated the seriousness of the Contra-cocaine problem which
began at the start of the Contra movement in the early 1980s and lasted through
the decade until the end of the war.
Leen apparently assumes that few Americans will take the trouble to study and
understand what the reports said. That is why I published a lengthy account of
the U.S. government’s admissions both after the reports were published in 1998
and as “Kill the Messenger” was hitting the theaters in October. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Sordid Contra-Cocaine Saga.”]
Playing It Safe
Instead of diving into the reeds of the CIA and DOJ reports, Leen does what he
and his mainstream colleagues have done for the past three decades, try to
minimize the seriousness of the Reagan administration tolerating cocaine
trafficking by its Contra clients and even obstructing official investigations
that threatened to expose this crime of state.
Instead, to Leen, the only important issue is whether Gary Webb’s story was
perfect. But no journalistic product is perfect. There are always more details
that a reporter would like to have, not to mention compromises with editors over
how a story is presented. And, on a complex story, there are always some nuances
that could have been explained better. That is simply the reality of journalism,
the so-called first draft of history.
But Leen pretends that it is the righteous thing to destroy a reporter who is
not perfect in his execution of a difficult story and that Gary Webb thus
deserved to be banished from his profession for life, a cruel punishment that
impoverished Webb and ultimately drove him to suicide in 2004.
But if Leen is correct that a reporter who takes on a very tough story and
doesn’t get every detail precisely correct should be ruined and disgraced what
does he tell his Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward, whose heroic Watergate
reporting included an error about whether a claim regarding who controlled the
White House slush fund was made before a grand jury?
While Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein were right about the substance,
they were wrong about its presentation to a grand jury. Does Leen really believe
that Woodward and Bernstein should have been drummed out of journalism for that
mistake? Instead, they were lionized as heroes of investigative journalism
despite the error as they should have been.
Yet, when Webb exposed what was arguably an even worse crime of state the Reagan
administration turning a blind eye to the importation of tons of cocaine into
the United States Leen thinks any abuse of Webb is justified because his story
wasn’t perfect.
Those two divergent judgments on how Woodward’s mistake was understandably
excused and how Webb’s imperfections were never forgiven speak volumes about
what has happened to the modern profession of journalism at least in the
mainstream U.S. media. In reality, Leen’s insistence on perfection and
“extraordinary proof” is just a dodge to rationalize letting well-connected
criminals and their powerful accomplices off the hook.
In the old days, the journalistic goal was to “comfort the afflicted and afflict
the comfortable,” but the new rule appears to be: “any standard of proof works
when condemning the weak or the despised but you need unachievable
‘extraordinary proof’ if you’re writing about the strong and the politically
popular.”
Who Is Unfit?
Leen adds a personal reflection on Webb as somehow not having the proper
temperament to be an investigative reporter. Leen wrote:
“After Webb was transferred to Cupertino [in disgrace], I debated him at a
conference of the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization in Phoenix in
June 1997. He was preternaturally calm. While investigative journalists are
usually bundles of insecurities and questions and skepticism, he brushed off any
criticism and admitted no error. When asked how I felt about it all, I said I
felt sorry for him. I still feel that way.”
It’s interesting and sadly typical that while Leen chastises Webb for not
admitting error, Leen offers no self-criticism of himself for missing what even
the CIA has now admitted, that the Contras were tied up in the cocaine trade.
Doesn’t an institutional confession by the CIA’s inspector general constitute
“extraordinary proof”?
Also, since the CIA’s inspector general’s report included substantial evidence
of Contra-cocaine trafficking running through Miami, shouldn’t Leen offer some
mea culpa about missing these serious crimes that were going on right under his
nose in his city and on his beat? What sort of reporter is “preternaturally
calm” about failing to do his job right and letting the public suffer as Leen
did?
Perhaps all one needs to know about the sorry state of today’s mainstream
journalism is that Jeff Leen is the Washington Post’s assistant managing editor
for investigations and Gary Webb is no longer with us.
[To learn how you can hear a December 1996 joint appearance at which Robert
Parry and Gary Webb discuss their reporting, click here.]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.