... The Al Jazeera cable channel in Qatar has led an existence filled with severe ups and downs. It has simultaneously become the most popular TV channel among Arabs living along the Persian Gulf, while being reviled by many of the governments in the region, along with the U.S. government. While showing a much more gruesome and hyper-realistic side of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (including dead soldiers on both sides), Al Jazeera has also come under attack by American forces in both conflicts, with cameraman Tarek Ayoud losing his life in a U.S. bombing on the Baghdad office.... "We report objectively," al-Sheikh says. "We leave it to the reader to decide." At times, he sounded eerily like the Fox News' motto: "We report. You decide."

Following is an edited transcript of a question and answer OJR conducted with al-Sheikh over the telephone. ...

... TERENCE SMITH: We should point out for the record that we invited Bob Novak to join this discussion. He told me this afternoon that he had said all he had to say on this. Your reaction, Larry?

LARRY JOHNSON: I say this as a registered Republican. I'm on record giving contributions to the George Bush campaign. This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal, a political smear of an individual with no relevance to the story. Publishing her name in that story added nothing to it. [Novak's] entire intent was correctly as Ambassador Wilson noted: to intimidate, to suggest that there was some impropriety that somehow his wife was in a decision making position to influence his ability to go over and savage a stupid policy, an erroneous policy and frankly, what was a false policy of suggesting that there were nuclear material in Iraq that required this war. This was about a political attack. To pretend that it's something else and to get into this parsing of words, I tell you, it sickens me to be a Republican to see this.

... The results [for polls taken] throughout this year suggest that a good portion of the public didn't do its homework. Polls have revealed people harbor a number of misconceptions or bits of false information about Iraq. For instance:

?• In a January Knight Ridder poll, half of the respondents said that one or more of the 9/11 hijackers was an Iraqi.

?• Fifty-three percent of respondents in an April CBS/New York Times poll said Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks.

?• In May, a poll for the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland revealed that 34 percent of those surveyed believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, and 22 percent said Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons in the recent war.

?• The next month, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a similar result: Twenty-four percent said Iraq had used such weapons against American soldiers. (Six percent said U.S. had used those weapons against the Iraqis.)

We could cite these statistics as more evidence that the American public doesn't care about what happens outssideU.S. borders or isn't paying attention to the news. The funny thing is, people are paying attention. Or at least they say they are.

In August, a time when most Americans have traditionally shunned news coverage in favor of serious beach time, 84 percent said they were either very closely or fairly closely following news about the situation in Iraq. That's according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, which has been measuring publics'ic's levels of interest in news since 1986. Other polls have found high levels of news consumption as well.

And consuming news usually--and logically--leads to greater understanding. Studies have shown that when the public is following a story and the press is covering a subject well, public knowledge increases. With the war in Iraq, it seems, this hasn't happened. Who is at fault? Did the news media fall down on the job? Could they have done something differently to better inform their audiences?

September 30, 2003 | Daily Mislead Archive
Tax Cuts Lead to Largest Deficit Ever in Complete Reversal of Bush's Prediction


Despite President Bush's assurance in 2001 that his tax cuts "could happen without fear of budget deficit, even if the economy softens,"1 the estimated $455 billion budget deficit this fiscal year will be the highest in U. S. history.2

In the President's 2002 State of the Union message he tried to shift blame onto Congress, saying "our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short-term so long as Congress restrains spending,"3 but earlier this month [Bush] admitted his tax cuts account for 25% of the deficit.4

The record-setting debt is at complete odds from the President's first year in office when he promised, "Many of you have talked about the need to pay down our national debt. . . I agree. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now."5

Instead the Bush tax cuts will pass an extraordinary hardship onto the next generation that faces paying a minimum of $43 trillion in Social Security and Medicare benefits to Baby Boomers. Even if the government limited itself to paying only for retirement benefits, health benefits and interest on the national debt, federal taxes would still have to be raised by 70 percent - permanently - to meet those obligations.6

Sources:
1. "A Sound Bite So Good, the President Wishes He Had Said It," Washington Post, 7/2/02.
2. "U.S. Deficit Goes Over $400 Billion," Los Angeles Times, 9/18/03, p.29.
3. 2002 State of the Union, 1/29/02.
4. Presidential Speech, 9/5/03.
5. Presidential Address to Joint Session of Congress. 2/27/01.
6. "What do record deficits mean for you?", MSNBC, 7/18/03.

... While Clark is making hay over his military record, his judgment as a leader of our armed forces is something that his potential supporters should ponder. In 1994, prior to serving as the NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Western Europe, Clark was a representative for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in war-torn Bosnia. There, against State Department advisories, Clark not only met, but jovially exchanged army caps and gifts of brandy and a firearm with Ratko Mladic, the notorious Serbian war criminal. According to the Washington Post, one U.S. official described the embarrassing incident as, "like cavorting with Hermann Goering." Five years later, during the Kosovo war, Clark ordered the British Gen. Michael Jackson to intercept Russian forces as they made their way to Pristina airport. Jackson rightly replied, "Sir, I'm not going to start World War III for you." Clark was ultimately fired from his position as Allied Commander, and few in our nation's military brass consider him a friend.

But the real bone I have to pick with Wesley Clark lies in his stance on the war in Iraq. Earlier this year, Clark was hitting all the right notes; he was cognizant that Saddam Hussein either possessed weapons of mass destruction or was developing a weapons of mass destruction program that had to be halted by the use of force. But in trumpeting Clark as Howard Dean in fatigues, the mainstream media has aptly displayed its short-term memory. Suddenly, Clark has emerged as the "anti-war general." Soon after he announced, the liberal media-watchdog group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) sent out a concise press release comparing Clark's current statements on the war to the positions he took leading up to and during the conflict[right now FAIR's search engine isn't working, and I can't locate this post-- otherwise I would have linked it] ; two such comments are displayed above. In a Jan. 18 CNN interview, Clark said that Saddam, "does have weapons of mass destruction." Same network, same issue, three months later, he said, "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this." Only a few days after, in a column for the Times of London, Clark wrote that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush, the man whom he just last week derided as "reckless," "should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt -- Let's have those parades on the Mall and down Constitution Avenue." So far, so good.

... democratize democratically. Be democratic in the way you go about trying to do this: consult, and don’t dictate; achieve consensus, and don’t issue ultimatums.


Perhaps the most common obstacle in the way of American hopes to promote democracy in the Middle East is the perception in the region of American double standards, on issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, implementation of UN resolutions, promoting democracy, and weapons nonproliferation. This suggests that the fastest way for the US to be accepted as a credible purveyor of democracy in the Middle East is to be much more consistent in its practical policies in the region. Simply stated, the US should apply the same standards in its policies abroad as it does at home. This will require greater sensitivity to local Middle Eastern cultural and religious values, and more consistency in promoting democratic values among all the countries of the region, including the ones that the US has long viewed as strategic allies that it has exempted from promoting....

.... Although [Dean's] totals are modest by Republican standards, [he] continues to outpace anyone else in his own party. As of last night, Dean had already far surpassed his $7.6 million second quarter by raising $12.9 million, breaking the single-quarter record for Democrats set by President Bill Clinton, $9.95
million in September 1995.

The third-quarter declines for Sens. John Edwards (N.C.), Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) and John F. Kerry (Mass.) threaten their ability to pay for two expensive contests in Iowa and New Hampshire and still have enough cash for the "Super Tuesday" seven-state battleground on Feb. 3, 2004. Aides to Sen. Bob Graham (Fla.) and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) declined to estimate the amount of money they expect to raise by tonight.

But Bush demonstrated why his 2004 campaign is likely to be the most expensive in history. In the second quarter of this year, he raised $34.5 million, so he is already well on his way to eclipsing his 2000 campaign total of $101 million. The maximum amount an individual can give a presidential candidate is $2,000....

. ... Dean was the choice for 26 percent of voters, followed by Kerry with 17 percent and Clark with 10 percent, according to the poll by WHDH-TV and Suffolk University conducted between Sept. 26-28. The poll was released Monday.

"I will not accept the feeble excuse that they are looking out for our welfare, ..." Fuller added. "We all know that tobacco is not a safe product, but the government allows the sale of tobacco. Citizens are allowed to make a choice if they want to take the chance of smoking. I want that same choice, and believe me, I will take my chances on Canadian drugs, most of which are produced by companies in the United States."..."Why do we allow the drug companies to make 18.6 percent net profit after taxes?" Nyquist asked. "Telecommunications is the next highest, and they're at just 10 percent, and pharmacies make 2.7 percent. Congress tells us they can't put price controls on the drug companies, but every other entity in the United States is subject to price controls."

Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is sporting a double-digit lead over Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts among New Hampshire's Democratic voters, a poll reported Thursday.

The poll, from Marist College's Institute for Public Opinion, had Dean at 36 percent among Democratic voters; Kerry at 24 percent; and former Gen. Wesley Clark, who entered the race just last week, at 8 percent. The seven other candidates trailed those three.

..."We signed on for Draft Clark, not Draft Mary," an unsigned post on DraftClark.com read Friday, referring to Clark's cry to his press aide Mary Jacoby of "Mary, help!" when asked his position on the Iraq War by The New York Times....

....Did Miller break credible hard news -- or only flack for hawks in the government, an all-too-familiar role for her over the last two years as she wrote a batch of stories supporting allegations that Iraq was developing and producing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? ...

... If the Burns allegation is true, elementary news judgment ... would dictate that any reporter who knows the mystery reporter’s identity and the circumstances surrounding the incident should clear the cloud by writing the story, or at the very least speak for the record. That of course includes Burns, who has not responded to an e-mail request for an interview, but who has also not disputed the accuracy of his interview, which have been discussed on the Fox News channel and written about in the New York Daily News, the Weekly Standard Web site, the New York Sun, and elsewhere. (The reporters interviewed for this story who worked alongside Burns in Baghdad either didn’t know the mystery reporter’s identity or declined to discuss the details of the incident.) ...

President Bush's Inspectors Failure to Weapons of Mass Destruction to Support his Claims about Imminent Threat

A desperate five-month search by a team of 1,400 U. S. investigators
reportedly has failed to find any new physical evidence of nuclear, chemical
or biological weapons in Iraq, despite President Bush's continuing
insistence the weapons not only existed but posed an imminent threat to the
United States.

The failure of the U. S. team, led by Bush appointee David Kay, seriously
undermines the integrity of the President's assertion two days prior to the
war: "Intelligence gathered...leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues
to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

According to polls, barely a third of the American people support Bush's request for another $87 billion for Iraq. A small but growing minority of Americans is even insisting that we pull our troops out altogether, a sentiment that grows with each new casualty.

Administration supporters have taken comfort in dismissing those signs of trouble as the work of the usual culprits: a treasonous U.S. media, disloyal Democratic presidential candidates, an increasingly spoiled American public, etc. But they're fooling themselves.

This is what happens when you pull a bait-and-switch on the American people. This is the downside of the Bush gamble. The good people at Mary Ann's Restaurant, and at thousands of similar places around the country, agreed to war and meant to honor that commitment. They understood that no war ever goes according to plan.

But at a grass-roots level, they are now coming to understand the level of deceit used against them by leaders they trusted. Under such circumstances, it's almost inevitable that they would start to reconsider their commitment.

That's dangerous. Domestically, it is fair, even necessary, for the American people to hold their leaders accountable for what's happened. But overseas, it doesn't really matter how we got into this mess -- you can't return a war just because it doesn't live up to its advertising. There is simply no conceivable replacement for the U.S. military in Iraq, and if we pull out, we would leave behind a civil strife that would make life under Saddam seem like the good old days.

We're stuck, and we're stuck for a while.

First but not foremost, Bush's detractors despise him viscerally, as a man. Where working-class populists see him as a smug, effeminate frat boy who wouldn't recognize a hard day's work if it kicked him in his self-satisfied ass, intellectuals see a simian-faced idiot unqualified to mow his own lawn, much less lead the free world. Another group, which includes me, is more patronizing than spiteful. I feel sorry for the dude; he looks so pathetic, so out of his depth, out there under the klieg lights, squinting, searching for nouns and verbs, looking like he's been snatched from his bed and beamed in, and is still half asleep, not sure where he is. Each speech looks as if Bush had been beamed from his bed fast asleep. And he's willfully ignorant. On Fox News, Bush admits that he doesn't even read the newspaper: "I glance at the headlines just to kind of [sic] a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read [sic] the news themselves." All these takes on Bush boil down to the same thing: The guy who holds the launch codes isn't smart enough to know that's he's stupid. And that's scary. ...

Bush is guilty of a single irredeemable act so heinous and anti-American that Nixon's corruption and Reagan's intellectual inferiority pale by comparison. No matter what he does, Democrats and Republicans who love their country more than their party will never forgive him for it.

Bush stole the presidency.

Concentrating on My Tho, a populous rural province near Saigon, Elliott takes us deep inside the world of the Vietnamese revolution over a period of forty-five years. He describes the ideologies of the revolutionaries and how they fought, as well as their policies on taxation, land redistribution, and recruitment. He gives a strong account of their internal disputes and rivalries, and their periods of despair and triumph. From it we sense what it was like to be the target of American military might.

Had American leaders known this history would they still have attempted to crush the revolution? Daniel Ellsberg, for years a high-ranking Defense and State Department official, wrote in 1972: "...There has never been an official of Deputy Assistant Secretary rank or higher (including myself) who could have passed in office a midterm freshman exam in modern Vietnamese history."[2] This claim is astonishing considering the materials on the subject that by 1972 were well known to millions of people in the antiwar movement. Even earlier, in 1968, James C. Thomson Jr., who had worked in the National Security Council from 1961 to 1967, wrote:

In the first place, the American government was sorely lacking in real Vietnam or Indochina expertise [Could this also be an issue currently in our policy with iraq -- what espertise on the middle east is possessed by the neocons?].... The more sensitive the issue, and the higher it rises in the bureaucracy, the more completely the experts are excluded while the harassed senior generalists take over (that is, the Secretaries, Undersecretaries, and Presidential Assistants). The frantic skimming of briefing papers in the back seats of limousines is no substitute for the presence of specialists; furthermore, in times of crisis such papers are deemed "too sensitive" even for review by the specialists.[3] ...

Of the many lessons in Elliott's book perhaps the most important is that the long revolutionary struggle was homegrown and not initiated as part of Soviet or Chinese global strategy. Indeed, American policymakers' eventual understanding that Vietnam had little to do with the cold war made them increasingly willing to abandon their long campaign, although only very slowly and very destructively. Elliott makes clear that the historic roots of this struggle were long and deep. That is why he starts his study in 1930.

"What's at stake in this election is democracy itself," he said. "James Madison and Thomas Jefferson spoke of the fear that economic power would one day seize political power. That fear has been realized in this administration."
.
Dean used the language of the Constitution's preamble to condemn the president's record on court appointments, race, education, domestic security and the war on terrorism. "This democracy and the flag of the United States," he then said, "do not belong to Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell and Tom DeLay and John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney."

Not many of the U.S. soldiers in Iraq are quite troops either. Some are ”regular army” mobilised from Germany, but many are reservists called to duty early this year.

They were told at first they would be in Iraq for just a few just months.. Now they are being told they must stay in Iraq until next spring.

Without uniforms, they would be the Joe or Jane you see on the streets of the United States. Before they were called to duty, many were students or government workers. ... But with guns and power in their hands, many now play 'boss' on the streets of Baghdad.

Officially too, these are not combat troops, but ”military police” out to catch ”the very bad people” from Saddam's regime.

”They do not have basic skills in civilian policing, and they are unaware of the law they are supposed to be applying,” says Curt Goerig from Amnesty International. At the military camp of the 1st Battalion of the 37th Armoured Division in Baghdad, that shows.

that Washington's occupation of their country represents not only a serious liability to their own political futures in Iraq, but is also the focus of a mounting anger among ordinary Iraqi civilians that apparently is feeding resistance to the occupation. ...

Adding to civilian anger, of course, are sweeps carried out by U.S. forces in which scores of people have been rounded up and taken away. Some 6,000 people are currently detained by the military in Iraq; most of them are being held incommunicado.

''The predictable results are an increase in guerrilla recruits, intensified repression by occupation forces and an ever-escalating spiral of violence,'' according to Richard Rubinstein, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University outside Washington....

... Bush's approval rating was 44 percent in the New York poll, down from 58 percent in April and a high of 79 percent in December 2001, just three months after the terrorist attacks brought down the World Trade Center towers and sent Bush's approval ratings soaring in New York.

But in the latest Marist poll, 48 percent of New York voters surveyed, including 23 percent of Republicans, said they definitely planned to vote against Bush in the 2004 election. ...

... they [the bushies, including neocons have] discover[ed] that force alone is not a sufficient basis for stable and mutually meaningful relationships with the rest of the world. [Says Khouri], we may be witnessing, in fact, the belated entry of the United States into modern world history, ending the long period during which the US dealt with the world’s countries and peoples essentially as either markets or targets ­ ie, the US engaged others around the world primarily through war or trade, without going through the more complex and humbling process of negotiating political relationships that were both stable and mutually productive.

The sense one gets here [i.e., Lebanon] of Washington’s Iraq policy is primarily a strange combination of irritation, confusion, concern and determination. All the key players here and globally seem to appreciate the severe consequences if the US were to stay in Iraq too long or get out too quickly. This is why we suddenly have a novel and important situation in which the US no longer simply barks orders and issues threats and ultimatums to the rest of the world. We now witness the Bush administration negotiating seriously ­ with Congress, with the world ­ to devise a more realistic, acceptable, and humble policy in Iraq. This is a process that should be encouraged, for the well-being of all. ....

Rep. Charles Rangel, who talked Hillary Clinton into running for the Senate seat she now holds, is about to endorse retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who wants to be president.

But first he cleared that endorsement with Clinton.

"I talked to her for an hour the other day and told her I was leaning toward endorsing the general," the Harlem congressman told me yesterday.

"She told me that she thought he would make a great candidate and that whoever the Democrats backed, she would campaign for that person.

"She talked glowingly about General Clark and what a fine president he would make, but then she said, 'Charlie, I want to make it clear that I am not endorsing General Clark.'"

CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour [posted on blogleft earlier] says the US media allowed themselves to be 'intimidated' into following the US official line in Iraq. Veteran journalist Nicholas von Hoffman takes a tougher view... Simply put,' he argues, 'the American mass media put itself at the service of the state'. ...

If it wasn’t a war, then what was it? Probably something akin to a turkey shoot. The press duly and diligently reported on the tens of thousands of bombs dropped on the Iraqi military. What got skipped over was that the turkeys could not or would not shoot back.

It is the tales of heroic derring-do in the face of a completely defenceless opponent that cause the cynical to cock a suspicious eyebrow. We can only speculate as to why so little was made of the battle-free nature of the conflict. At least three reasons suggest themselves.

1) The lazy intellectual torpor afflicting not a few American journalists.

2) The embarrassment print and broadcast media would face if they were to tell their publics: ‘Whoops! That war, those heroes, those bloodcurdling, tear-jerking scenes we have been entertaining you with for weeks on end – well, it didn’t happen.’

3) Although you might conclude that the United States government would have a motive to step forward and claim for itself a humane, non-lethal, non-destructive kind of warfare, that’s not the reputation which the fire-eating, Israelised bellicists in the Pentagon want. The public relations policy pursued in those precincts is the old Roman one of oderint dum metuant. In short it’s fear, not love, they seek to inspire.

Does anyone really imagine that after spending most of his adult life in the Army, Clark will win the Democratic nomination because a large number of voters believe he's developed better ideas for improving school performance or covering the uninsured than former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean or Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts?

If Clark takes off — still a big if — he will almost certainly do so by convincing Democrats that he can express their hostility toward Bush's national security strategy and repel Republican efforts to paint the party as weak or unpatriotic....

McClellan and his supporters placed themselves unambiguously on the wrong side of history by failing to recognize the importance of ending slavery; history's verdict on the Iraq war won't be in for some time and isn't likely to ever be so unequivocal. Yet, like McClellan, Clark has the potential of bridging a war-torn party by expressing views mostly acceptable to the doves from a background attractive to hawks.

George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.

From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.....

"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."

The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on"....

President Bush goes to the United Nations on Tuesday, where he hopes to convince the rest of the world that he's the one headed in the right direction. It's going to be a hard sale.

And even if we somehow manage to negotiate a supportive U.N. resolution, it won't matter much. Other nations clearly aren't going to commit enough troops or resources to improve the situation in Iraq. We're on our own.....

I've long considered CNN's Christiane Amanpour an outstanding journalist. Last week, my opinion of her rose further when she ignited a storm of controversy when asked by a TV interviewer about the U.S. media's coverage of the Iraq war.

Breaking a taboo of silence in the mainstream media, Amanpour courageously replied, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. Television ... was intimidated by the (Bush) administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News."

Right on cue, faithful to Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's advice to attack all dissenting views as treason, Fox accused Amanpour of being a "spokeswoman for al-Qaida." I felt for Amanpour, having myself been slandered by the U.S. neo-conservative media as "a friend of Saddam" for disputing White House claims about Iraq - whose secret police had threatened to hang me on my last visit to Baghdad.

The warlike momma's boys at the neo-con National Review actually had the chutzpah to call me "unpatriotic." Columnists at my own paper pilloried me for opposing the Iraq misadventure.

Now, as White House lies and distortions are being exposed daily, these critics are not man enough to admit that their parroting of administration war propaganda - Amanpour politely calls it "high level disinformation" - was foolish and unprofessional.

Christiane Amanpour is absolutely right. The U.S. media was muzzled and censored itself.