November 2005: Lies, Spies, Pies

With no major elections to propagandize this year, Bill O'Reilly has been busy with his "War on Christmas" publicity grabbing shtick.

Yes, the threat is all around—as in the incessant Christmas fundraising at the public institution where I work.

But anything to distract the masses is a win for Republicans.

On another, highly orchestrated, win: Rolling Stone publishes James Bamford's, The Man Who Sold the War. Bamford documents the activities of—and publicly-funded fortune taken in by—"Bush's general in the propaganda war," John Rendon.

After the CIA, in an "extraordinary transfer of secret authority," hired the Rendon Group in 1991—

Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress [INC] -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

Rendon helped to install as head of the INC Ahmad Chalabi— whose "primary focus was to drag us into a war," former Baghdad CIA chief Whitley Bruner tells Bamford. On Chalabi's behalf—

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow.

Under Chalabi's direction in 2001—and with the new political opportunities after September 11 of that year—came Adnan al-Hadieri's fake testimony to being a civil engineer who had helped bury tons of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons still hidden in Iraq. The phony information then needing to be disseminated, Paul Moran, a freelancer in Bahrain with access to Australian Broadcasting Corporation work—as well as being an employee of Rendon's—was in place to broadcast the story.

Next—

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers...despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline...

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.[my bold]

Bamford describes more levels of the post-9/11 war propaganda effort—

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq...The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

In a suicide bombing on day three of the invasion, Paul Moran—

freelance journalist and Rendon employee [became] the first member of the media to be killed in the war – a war he had covertly helped to start.

...

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he...had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Which brings us to the little matter of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, on one count of obstruction of justice, and two each of perjury and making false statements.

At work, the topic is raised by one of the occasional visitors who braves trying to inject a little reality into the room. Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant drops her normal mask of feverishly happy righteousness, to say—with quite the cold little sneer—"How can there be an indictment? There was no crime! Everyone knew she wasn't undercover!"

"She" being Valerie Plame, and Jesus' BAA sure has received her instructions on this subject.

Talking points of the delusional aside, it's easy to see that, if Cheney's immediate objective was to discredit and silence Plame's husband, it was an unexpected win for the warmongers to simultaneously sabotage years of undercover work in weapons of mass destruction proliferation.

There is no shortage of bizarre twists to be found in observing the criminal outfit that runs this country. This reminds me of how, after Plame's cover was blown two years ago, some outraged former CIA people appeared on Nightline.

Clever Sister and I watched the program together. And were amazed to realize: the CIA are the good guys in this!

Watching interviewees with their identities concealed, we were struck by hearing a woman whose peculiar vocal quality was apparent even through electronic distortion.

It took no more than a second or two for CS to catch on: "It's Julia Child, former spy!"

A couple days later, we happen be browsing in a remainder bookstore, when CS spots the book at top. Recipes not from the Culinary Institute of America, but courtesy of the United States Central Intelligence Agency Family Advisory Board.

But, hey: that mango pie recipe sure is tastier and more wholesome than the concoctions cooked up by our neocons and their subcontractors...

In other literary efforts, Libby himself made a notable contribution to the crowded genre of salacious novels written by members of the Party of Family Values. Lauren Collins, on Scooter's Sex Shocker–

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction...from Safire...to Buckley...to Ehrlichman...to O'Reilly...extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney's books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.

...

So, how does Libby stack up against the competition? This question was put to Nancy Sladek, the editor of Britain's Literary Review, which, each year, holds a contest for bad sex writing in fiction. (In 1998, someone nominated the Starr Report.) Sladek agreed to review a few passages from Libby. "That's a bit depraved, isn't it, this kind of thing about bears and young girls? That's particularly nasty, and the other ones are just boring," she said. "God, they’re an odd bunch, these Republicans." Unlike their American counterparts, she said, Tories haven't taken much to sex writing. "They usually just get caught," she said.

Well, ours certainly have much worse crimes to answer for. And they've been "caught," all right—just not stopped.

Instead, we get what happens to someone like Steven Kurtz–

...a Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo and a founding member, with his late wife, Hope, of the internationally acclaimed art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble...

In May 2004 the Kurtzes were preparing to present Free Range Grain, a project examining GM agriculture, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art... when Hope Kurtz died of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz's 911 call deemed the couple's art suspicious, and called the FBI. The art materials consisted of several petri dishes containing three harmless bacteria cultures, and a mobile lab to test food labeled "organic" for the presence of genetically modified ingredients. As Kurtz explained, these materials had been safely displayed in museums and galleries throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public.

The next day, however, as Kurtz was on his way to the funeral home, he was illegally detained by agents from the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, who informed him he was being investigated for "bioterrorism."

This month, Prof. Kurtz is released from pre-trial supervision, over the objections of the DOJ.

And it will take fours years before Kurtz is finally cleared of all charges. When he will say, after being asked for a statement–

I don't have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?

These have become sadly mundane questions we can all ask of this regime.