I. McClatchy Shows the Human Face of Guantanamo As DU sings the praises of Tim Russert and NBC which lead the charge to War with Iraq, I would like to remind us all of another news organization, one which doggedly reported the
truth ---without a theme song
http://www.slate.com/id/2081608---about the disagreements over the manufactured case for going to war. No, not Sy Hersch, though he did spend all of early 2002 warning of the plot.
News organization . Knight Ridder, whose efforts to do investigative reporting about the run up to war are described in this article titled
Going It Alone http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=3725 "Knight Ridder is not, in some people's eyes, seen as playing in the same ball field as the New York Times and some major networks," Strobel says. "People at the Times were mainly talking to senior administration officials, who were mostly pushing the administration line. We were mostly talking to the lower-level people or dissidents, who didn't necessarily repeat the party line."
Those sources, Knight Ridder Washington Editor Clark Hoyt adds, were "closest to the information."
"I'm not saying we didn't have any top-level sources," Strobel says, "but we also made a conscious effort to talk to people more in the bowels of government who have a less political approach to things."
In 2006, McClatchy purchased Knight-Ridder. It has continued to focus on old fashioned investigative reporting, even as the so called important papers like the LA Times, New York Times and other slash their reporting staff and increasingly emulate Michael Gordon of the NYTs, the world’s first human voice activated tape recorder.
Today, McClatchy starts a five part series about Guantanamo by Tom Lasseter.
It is a big must read .
Here is the intro with a short, five minute video “Guantanamo: Above the Law”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/In which the project is discussed and former detainees are interviewed
Here is the first article in the series:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38773.htmlLasseter and colleagues followed up on 66 detainees who were released from the detention facility. They interviewed the men, the people who sent them there, their families and acquaintances back home. They discovered how they had ended up being labeled as “enemy combatants”, how they were treated (and mistreated) while being held by the U.S. and why it took so long for so many obviously innocent men to gain release.
While the individual stories of the men are heartrending (like the innocent man working with the U.S. government who was denounced by a rival for revenge or the elderly man who had had two previous strokes before being hauled off as an “enemy combatant) the article is also an indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration which seemed to view the detention camp at Guantanamo as a political symbol where intelligence gathering for the so called “War on Terror” was of only secondary importance. How else can you explain the incompetence of the staff which allows senior Al Qaeda and Taliban officers to indoctrinate those who were innocent when they arrived?
And consider this statement---
McClatchy's interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees' lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees' accounts.
We have known for a long time that the Bush-Cheney administration does not want the truth. Torture---which the article hints at and which tomorrow’s article will discuss---is never used to get at the truth. It is used to instill fear and to indoctrinate and to incite hatred in the enemy so that a fascist state or would be fascist state has some enemy against which to rally its masses. It is quite possible that the incompetence that Lasseter describes----allowing Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders to mingle freely with non political prisoners so that they can indoctrinate them---has been a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration designed to create a stronger Islamic political movement to justify the abuses of the Bush-Cheney regime which uses the Article II exemption to justify everything from the use of the Justice Department as a wing of the Republican Party to the outing of Valerie Plame.
II. Daniel Albright Sees Nukes Everywhere So, what does the “newspaper of record” have on its front page today? Need you ask? The NeoCon New York Times (which learned nothing from Judy Miller except maybe to spread the administration propaganda more evenly around more reporters) has
this http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/world/asia/15nuke.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin WASHINGTON — American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.
Looks like the NYTs is still employing the Michael Gordon reporting model. Why investigate when you can just transcribe administration propaganda? BTW, the administration did not find this blueprint yesterday.The Swiss and the U.N. found it in 2006. Bet you did not know that we have been in mortal danger for two whole years, even when the CIA Iran NIE gave us the "all clear".
Washington Post has the same
two year old story on its front page:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/14/AR2008061402032.html?hpid=topnewsThe article has the same warning at the NYT’s piece----there is no way to be certain that Iran does not have plans for a working nuke. To which sane people might be expected to reply
There is no way to be certain that pigs can’t fly, either . However, if enough TV news anchors start painting graphic verbal images of U.S. cities being incinerated under mushroom clouds, the Bush administration can eliminate that uncertainty problem.
Here is where some investigative reporting would come in handy. For instance, I would like to know why I should trust the
Institute for Science and International Security which is the group which has published the two year old story about the nuke plans. They are funded by the Rockefeller family among others. David Rockefeller has been fingered as the bag man for the hostages for votes deal. The Rockefellers are still up to the neck in oil. And how about Daniel Albright? According to this article,
A Strike in the Dark: Why Did Israel Bomb Syria by Sy Hersch, he is the guy who told Israel that Syria was building a nuclear reactor based upon satellite images that someone (maybe the U.S. government maybe Israel) commissioned. Later, Albright backtracked--after the bombing.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/11/080211fa_fact_hersh?printable=true There is evidence that the preëmptive raid on Syria was also meant as a warning about—and a model for—a preëmptive attack on Iran.
Does this mean that Albright has written this report about how maybe, possibly,
could be Iran bought that nuke plan before the Swiss found and destroyed it two years ago--- not that he is saying yes or no, just that you never can tell---so that Israel can use Albright’s report as an excuse to attack Iran as it used his earlier interpretation of the satellite images to attack Syria?
Wouldn’t it be great if there were investigative journalists like those at McClatchy working at the New York Times and Washington Post covering U.S foreign policy rather than a bunch of stenographers who type up whatever story the office of the Vice President gives them?
Until someone actually investigates this story, here is what I will be forced to conclude, based upon what little I actually know. The two year old story out of Switzerland about the plan for the pint sized nuke is suddenly worthy of being written up by the Rockefeller financed organization and splashed across the front pages of the nation's two NeoCon rags, because it gives the Bush-Cheney administration another excuse to unleash their dog of war---Israel---in a pre-emptive strike against Iran
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