President Bush said on Wednesday he was praying for a quick end to the killing spree [our home-grown and our very latest] and offered full government resources to help catch the “ruthless” killer.
Thank God.
Also thank God Dubya is safe in the State of Maine (or wherever), campaigning for the frat brothers.
p.s.
Surely this leak is at least partly intended to help our allies feel good about the competence of their supreme American warlord.
Weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998 without U.N. approval in a predawn evacuation on the orders of their chief, Richard Butler, hours before American and British attacks on Iraq. Butler had been advised by Washington of a possible U.S.-led bombing attack, but the official explanation given for the withdrawal was that Iraq was not cooperating with the inspectors.
Since 1998, the media, which had originally reported the facts basically as described above, has totally revised the story into one which features Iraq throwing inspectors out of the country.
Does anyone need further proof of the media’s collusion with the White House junta?
I have been talking about this for months, and lately I have heard this quite Big Lie repeated even by sources usually critical of Washington propaganda, like The Nation and WNYC’s Brian Lehr.
If the sources of our information are so corrupted, and if even the sceptical are so easily hoodwinked (or become so vulnerable because of just plain laziness), how can we possibly survive as a democracy?
Want more on the story of the “weapons inspectors?”
[from the NYTimes in a 1999 story] WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 — United States officials said today that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms inspectors ferreting out secret Iraqi weapons programs.
Iraq has long condemned the inspectors as tools of American intelligence. In October it issued a statement saying it would never cooperate with United Nations teams riddled with ”American spies and agents.”
I’m borrowing a direct quote from ZNet email message, because it’s so succinct:
The U.S. propels a war on terorism in
order to pursue its entirely different agendas of redistribution at home
and solidifying empire internationally — not least solidifying control
over Iraqi oil — and of course the predictable horrific increase in
terrorism is then used to fuel additional terror war policies and
responses.
Resist!
But of course all Palestinians are terrorists, and G-d says this is our land. How could anyone have a problem with that?
It sure looks like Barry may have had more than a little to do with it. The Daily News now has a story on the deceit of the White House’s North Korea secret.
Tom Tomorrow is just observing. This is not political satire. Our much balleyhooed two-party system ceased to exist a while back.
–is even worse than the smell of secrecy.
The New York Daily News ain’t Big Daddy.
Their own newswriters, their wire services and their columnists apparently weren’t swift enough to pick up on the lie, but whoever is responsible for the letters to the editor department recognizes a news item when it slips through the paper’s mail slot, and he or she also knows something about the placement of a story.
Barry’s words pointing out one of the White House’s latest, and more cynical, manipulations of the news for its agenda appears today as the lead letter (with a double-sized headline and typeface) on its “Voice of the People” page.
SECRECY SMELLS
Manhattan: The Bush administration kept news of North Korea’s nuclear program to itself for 12 days before letting the public, or even Congress, know. Shouldn’t we be asking why they didn’t tell Congress until after they voted on the Iraq resolution?
Barry Hoggard
The information had appeared on his weblog a couple of days ago. Three cheers for Bloggy!
Gary Trudeau looks at the Bushie pack in Doonesbury today.
At least it stayed cold.
Is it possible that some day in the distant future (if a future is possible) we will look back on the period of the Cold War as one of peace and prosperity, when compared to the period in which American power had no equal?
For half a century, the real or imagined Russian threat restrained the American and kept this nation relatively circumpect in its ventures around the world. It seems also to have worked to keep the governments of smaller nations out of the worst trouble, by serving them both the benefits and the burdens of the East-West rivalry.
Today U.S. power and greed is unchecked, except by terrorism, against which conventional weapons are virtually useless. Moreover, in the name of a cynical war against terrorism, the U.S. threatens, now or potentially, the security of every nation on the planet, including, in a peculiar reversal, that of the U.S. itself.
We should not be surprised that many nations have decided to pursue an aggressive course in the development of weapons of mass destruction as the only possible protection from what they view as the monstrous power of a rogue U.S.
[Two points may illustrate the argument. First, the U.S. is the only state ever to have employed nuclear weapons in anger, and those employments were against civiians and in a war already won. Second, there is now speculation that the reason the U.S. government has been particularly soft on North Korea is its belief that that nation already has these weapons in place. It looks like some people still think deterrence works, but unfortunately I don’t think we can any longer trust our own government to understand either the stakes or the rules.]
It’s not going to be a pleasant ride.
The junta itself can’t make it’s arguments consistent, let alone believable for anyone with a mind, but the media eats it up!
The White House insists it isn’t “wagging the dog” to divert attention from domestic issues, an accusation that Fleischer and Vice President Dick Cheney have both pooh-poohed as “reprehensible.” But still, much of the mainstream media is chasing the war ball. After all, it’s a lot sexier than discussing how 41 million Americans have no health insurance.
The media dog has not only been wagged, it’s rolled over at Bush’s feet.