Spies, Lies and No Video Tape

September 30, 2009

A major, major story, though few in the US are even aware of it.


(Illustration found here).

Via The Brad Blog on Monday, Marc Grossman, a former US ambassador to Turkey and George Jr.’s third-ranking State Department honcho — right behind Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — was targeted as part of a “decade-long investigation” by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the bureau’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.
The disclosure for the first time confirms that the US is lying to everybody about just about everything, especially when it comes to nukes, money and power.
And the news also further authenticates under-oath testimony of Sibel Edmonds, a 39-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, who turned whistleblower after too much stupid, ugly shit began to pile up around her.
The Edmonds’ saga has now endured way-more than half-a-decade, since before being “fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States’ security.”
Whoa! A mouthful that, especially if one’s mouth is gagged.

Despite US Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in the summer of 2002, despite all kinds of mounting evidence calling for Congressional investigations, all were nil as efforts were stifled by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft with mutant-use of the State Secrets Privilege in order “to make her statements “classified” — including previously public statements and journalism quoting her on the case.”
I myself didn’t connect onto Edmonds’ story until a piece appeared in the UK’s Sunday Times in January 2008.
She’d skirted Ashcroft’s order by the written word: In a series of open letters to various officials and news media, Edmonds pleaded her case, but only since last August has she been able to talk freely about the the whole affair.

In a most-recent interview in The American Conservative magazine, Edmonds detailed the whole ugly story, including this bottom line on if any of this would ever make it to the general public:

“When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.”

(Illustration found here).

There have been few news stories in the US press on Edmonds — a partial list can be found here — and NONE by broadcast journalism — a damn-sad state of affairs.
The situation is not all that remarkable, considering the MSM news people and reminds me of the black-out on the New York Times‘ Pulitzer Prize winning story on the Pentagon pundit caper from last year — the story won journalism’s top award, for shit’s sake — and most US peoples haven’t a clue.
The media is a big chunk of the problem.

Take Bob Woodward (please!) of the Washington Post.
Woodward, of Watergate fame and books on everybody fame, and one of the more notorious talking heads of Washington DC “insider” journalists, broke the story last week on Gen. Stan McChrystal’s “secret assessment” of the Afghanistan war as a perfect example of a major reporter playing political tag with the DOD.
McChrystal followed that up with a “60 Minutes” interview on the same damn thing — push President Obama into sending more US troops into the Afghan wilderness.
Woodward is nothing more than a lackey for the rich and the established, the same spot were the vast, vast majority of top-tier US journalists play and practice their so-called craft.
And for instance, how does the Arab media feel about US reporters?
Via Think Progress — Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC:

I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.
So for them the foreign media is invisible. … So I think they’re opportunistic, rude, as I said, really self-centered. … I find them, not even on like a – people again, the people at the State Department, it’s a different story altogether.
But what I’m talking to now are the people in the White House that occupy the first two, three rows, with exception to two or three people you know.
I’m talking about all the networks and all the organizations.
So I find the relationship is a bit strange.

The rest of the planet knows a lot more than the average US person.
In other words, the US media can not to be trusted.
An example just this week — the hysteria over a “newly” discovered Iranian nuke facility, which according to the New York Times on Monday (with all kinds of satellite and high-altitude photos), the mullahs are building a nuclear device to strike the US heartland within scant minutes.
A similar smell as the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
Chris Floyd has a good post here on the bat-shit crazy warmongers, and so does antiwar.com‘s Justin Raimondo, dipping into another bad-sounding bottom line:

The pro-war ads have already begun and the “liberal” media lining up behind its commander in chief.
All the actors are in their places, and now the drama — an all-too-familiar drama — begins.
“Weapons of mass destruction,” phony intelligence, a compliant media: all the ingredients are there.
All that’s needed is a spark that sets off the conflagration…

And absolutely no film at 11.

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