Filed under: 2-party system, Barack Obama, bush = obama, Congress, Credit Crisis, DEBT, deficit, deficit spending, deflation, Dollar, dollar collapse, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, George Bush, george w. bush, Great Depression, Greenback, health care reform, House, hyperinflation, Inflation, left right paradigm, Mitch McConnell, national debt, Neolibs, obama, obama = bush, obama stimulus, obamacare, Senate, stimulus, Stock Market, US Economy, Wall Street
Dems Looking To Raise Debt Ceiling To $13 Trillion
Washington Post
October 22, 2009
Within the next few weeks, probably as soon as the votes on health-care reform have been taken, the Senate faces the painful duty of once again raising the statutory limit on the national debt, as the House already has done.
It is never fun for the party in power, but this year will be harder than ever on the Democrats. The final accounting on the just-ended fiscal year, delivered last week, showed a record deficit of $1.4 trillion, a gap that is the largest since the end of World War II when measured against the size of the overall economy.
This is what $1 Trillion dollars looks like. The Obama administration spent One-Trillion-Four-Hundred-Billion dollars in just one year.
The Republicans are poised to pounce. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell accused the Democrats of “acting like a teenager on a spending spree with his parent’s credit card with no regard to who pays the bill.”
The Democrats, in turn, blamed the George W. Bush administration for starting the deficit spending and say that they themselves had no choice but to spread the red ink in order to deal with the potential economic collapse they inherited.
The one barely possible benefit from this predictably futile partisan bloodbath is the opportunity it could offer to leverage support for a long-standing bipartisan effort to force Congress to confront the hard steps needed to put the nation on a safer fiscal course.
Filed under: 2004 election, 9/11, alqaeda, Dictatorship, domestic terror, domestic terrorism, double agent, Empire, fake alqaeda, FBI, florida, George Bush, george w. bush, informant, intimidation, islam, islamic community, Jose Padilla, mccarthy, Miami, middle east, muslim, neocons, Oppression, Provocateurs, stasi, stasi tactics, War On Terror | Tags: Imam Foad Farahi
FBI tries to deport Muslim man for refusing to be an informant
After Imam Foad Farahi declined to become a federal informant, the government tried to destroy him.
FederalJack.com
October 17, 2009
(MIAMI NEW TIMES) Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards signs littered the lawns of North Miami Beach as Imam Foad Farahi walked from a mosque to his apartment a few blocks away. It was November 1, 2004, the day before George W. Bush would win a second term in office. But the Muslim holy man had been too busy fasting and praying to pay much attention to the presidential election.
For Farahi, an Iranian citizen who had lived in the United States for more than a decade, it was simply another month of Ramadan in South Florida. Then, around 5 p.m., as he neared his apartment, he saw two men standing outside. They were waiting for him.
“We’re from the FBI,” one of the men said.
“OK,” he responded.
They wanted to know about José Padilla and Adnan El Shukrijumah, two South Florida men linked to the Al-Qaedaterrorist network. Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber, was arrested in May 2002 and initially given enemy combatant status. He eventually stood trial in Miami, was convicted on terrorism charges, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Shukrijumah is a Saudi Arabian and an alleged Al-Qaeda member whose last known address was in Miramar. The FBI is offering up to $5 million for information leading directly to his capture.
“I know José Padilla, but I don’t know Adnan,” Farahi told the agents.
Of course, Farahi knew of Shukrijumah. As imam of theShamsuddin Islamic Center in North Miami Beach, Farahi was in a unique position to know about local Muslims, including Padilla and Shukrijumah. Padilla had prayed at Farahi’s mosque and was once among his Arabic students. Shukrijumah was the son of a local Islamic religious leader.
“I have had no contact with Padilla since 1998, when he left the country,” Farahi told the government agents. He had once met Shukrijumah but had no contact with him after that. “I don’t know anything about his activities.”
“We want you to work with us,” Farahi remembers the agents telling him.
And this is when the imam’s five-year battle with the federal government began.
“I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out,” Farahi said. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community or translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be public; others would have to know he was helping the government.
But that wasn’t what the FBI had in mind, Farahi says. The agents wanted him to become a secret informant who would investigate specific people. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position. His student visa had expired, and he had asked the government for a renewal. He had also applied for political asylum, hoping one of those legal tracks would offer a way for him to stay in the United States indefinitely.
“We’ll give you residency,” the agents promised. “We’ll give you money to go to school.”
Farahi considered the offer for a moment and then shook his head.
“I can’t,” he told them.
The slender, bearded 34-year-old Farahi frowns as he recalls all of this while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center on a recent afternoon. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” he says, remembering the choice he faced. “That’s where the problem is.”
Farahi soon discovered the FBI’s offer wasn’t optional. The federal government used strong-arm tactics — including trying to have him deported and falsely claiming it had information linking him to terrorism — in an effort to force him to become an informant, he says.
The imam has resisted the government at every step, having most recently taken his political asylum case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
“As long as you’re not a citizen, there are lots of things [the government] can do,” says Ira Kurzban, Farahi’s attorney. “They can allege you’re a terrorist and try to bring terrorist charges against you, or they can get you deported.” Terrorism, he explains, can even be defined as giving “money to a hospital in the West Bank that turns out to be run by Hamas.”
Farahi asserts unequivocally he is innocent of any terrorism charges the government could bring against him. In fact, he says, he would report anyone in the Muslim community supporting terrorism. “From the Islamic perspective, it’s your duty to respect the law, and if there’s anything going on, any crime about to be committed, or any kind of harm to be caused to people or property, it should be reported to the police,” he says.
The FBI’s intense efforts to pressure Farahi into becoming an informant reveal the bureau’s desperation to infiltrate local Muslim communities. The hard-line tactics have become so widespread in the United States that the San Francisco-based civil rights group Muslim Advocates distributes a video advising how to respond if FBI agents approach.
In fact, relations between the FBI and U.S. Islamic communities are so strained that a coalition of Muslim-American groups in March accused the government of using “McCarthy-era tactics” and threatened to sever communication with the FBI unless it “reassessed its use of agent provocateurs in Muslim communities.”
Despite this public conflict, few specific cases of Muslims being recruited as informants have become public. Farahi’s battle with the government is not only daring but also unusual.
“People have two choices,” Farahi says. “Either they end up working with the FBI, or they leave the country on their own. It’s just sometimes when you’re in that situation, not many people are strong enough to stand up and resist and fight — to reject their offers.”
Filed under: 9/11, 9/11 coverup, 9/11 Explosions, 9/11 Eyewitness, 9/11 Firefighters, 9/11 heros, 9/11 investigation, 9/11 Mysteries, 9/11 Truth, 9/11 whistleblowers, 9/11 workers, CIA, False Flag, FBI, FDNY, first responders, gag order, George Bush, george w. bush, Ground Zero, Hegelian Dialectic, inside job, James Woolsey, New York, NYC CAN, NYPD, Official 9/11 Story, OKC, Problem Reaction Solution, reichstag, truth movement, twin towers, War On Terror, Whistleblowers, World Trade Center | Tags: Lou Cacchioli, Paul Isaac Jr.
Ex-CIA Chief James Woolsey handed down gag-order to 9/11 Firefighters
Jerry Mazza
Infowars
October 20, 2009
 Former CIA director Robert Woolsey |
This tale begins during and shortly after 9/11/2001, when a writer named Randy Lavello published a story at Prison Planet, Bombs in the Building: World Trade Center ‘Conspiracy Theory’ is a Conspiracy Fact. Among the many tales in this article, a number of which were picked up in Mike Rivero’s web site, what really happened, is a conversation between Lavello and Lieutenant Fireman and former Auxiliary Police Officer, Paul Isaac Jr. It’s a head-spinner…
The Woolsey gag order created an Omerta-like mob silence that Firefighters and Police Officers have had to deal with to this day.
“[Lieutenant Fireman and former Auxiliary Police Officer, Paul Isaac Jr.] explained to me [Lavello] that, ‘many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings, but they’re afraid for their jobs to admit it because the ‘higher-ups’ forbid discussion of this fact.” Paul further elaborated that former CIA director Robert Woolsey, as the Fire Department’s Anti-terrorism Consultant, is sending a gag order down the ranks. ‘There were definitely bombs in those buildings,’ he told me.”
Isaac also addressed the FBI gag order in an article by Greg Syzmanski, saying “It’s amazing how many people are afraid to talk for fear or retaliation or losing their jobs.” He mentions that the FBI gag order placed on law enforcement and fire department officials prevented them from openly talking about any inside knowledge of 9/11. Syzmansky praised Isaacs in a highly interesting article titled One-Man Investigative Team.
Syzmansky wrote that “When he [Isaacs] worked as an auxiliary fireman specializing in emergency and disaster communications response, Isaac said after 9/11 he began monitoring all emergency units to see if any patterns or information about the perpetrators could be learned.
“Over the last four years he’s compiled information and names of civilians and firefighters, whose identities he keeps anonymous for their safety, who all claim to have either witnessed explosions in the towers or have information that a controlled demolition took place.” Isaacs is quoted as saying, “It’s just amazing how many people are afraid to talk for fear of retaliation or losing their jobs,” again regarding Woolsey’s FBI gag order placed on law enforcement and fire department officials, preventing them from openly talking about any inside knowledge of 9/11.
Researcher Vincent Sammartino, also in attendance at the WTC ‘open grave site’ on September 11, 2005, wrote the following on APFN, “I just got back from Ground Zero. People know the truth! Half of the police and firemen were coming up to us and telling us that they know 9/11 was an inside job. They were told not to talk about it. But they were supporting what we were doing! I had tears in my eyes.”
So, why would former CIA director Woolsey, as the Fire Department’s Anti-terrorism Consultant, be gagging Isaac and his colleagues about what they saw and heard, i.e. bombs exploding in the building if not to cover up the government conspiracy, the inside job behind the supposed demolition of the WTC by two jetliners, whose fuel fire supposedly melted the redundant steel frames which caved and caused a pyroplastic free-fall of each building in some ten seconds. All at once the conspiracy of the lone Muslim airliner hijackers destroying the towers goes down the drain, glub, glub! That’s why Firefighters and Police Officers were gagged.
In fact, click Rivero’s “what really happened” site above to get to get more linked interviews of Firefighters talking about explosions shortly after 9/11 occurred. Rivero is amazing at collecting data, classifying it, and incorporating it into his encyclopedic 9/11 site. Read what the heroes had to say.
For instance, “Lou Cacchioli, Firefighter in WTC 1: At that point, Cacchioli found one of the only functioning elevators, one only going as high as the 24th floor … ‘Tommy Hetzel was with me and everybody else also gets out of the elevator when it stops on the 24th floor,’ said Cacchioli. ‘There was a huge amount of smoke. Tommy and I had to go back down the elevator for tools and no sooner did the elevators close behind us, we heard this huge explosion that sounded like a bomb. It was such a loud noise, it knocked off the lights and stalled the elevator.’
Lou continues, ‘Luckily, we weren’t caught between floors and were able to pry open the doors. People were going crazy, yelling and screaming. And all the time, I am crawling low and making my way in the dark with a flashlight to the staircase and thinking Tommy is right behind me… I somehow got into the stairwell and there were more people there. When I began to try and direct down, another huge explosion like the first one hits. This one hits about two minutes later, although it’s hard to tell, but I’m thinking, ‘Oh. My God, these bastards put bombs in here like they did in 1993!’” Unfortunately, the bastards in 1993 and in 2001 had considerable help from the bastards in our government.
The Woolsey gag order created an Omerta-like mob silence that Firefighters and Police Officers have had to deal with to this day. Imagine their anger, seeing their buddies disappear in explosions, fire and smoke. Imagine having to swallow that anger, that grief and humiliation, for the grand purpose of America sinking into the grizzly War on Terror in a matter of days. Imagine having to work on the pile at Ground Zero knowing what you knew. Or having to play deaf, dumb and blind, as 340 Firefighters died, two fire paramedics and one FDNY Chaplain and as 23 New York Police officers and 36 Port Authority officers went down. Not to mention the 2800 plus civilians taken from their lives senselessly.
Is it any wonder then that Justice John Lehner recently killed the NYC CAN ballot initiative to reinvestigate 911. The Justice called the initiative “irrelevant,” and rejected the will of 80,000 New Yorkers who had signed petitions to make it to happen. Is it the specter of James Woolsey gagging the Justice, or Mayor Bloomberg? Bloomberg rejected the will of the people after they had twice voted against a third term for New York Mayors. And since Mayor Bloomberg is in the middle of a political campaign for his illegal third term, he might want to assure us that we’re not being gagged, like Justice Lehner or the Fire and Police Departments. We would like to hear the full 9/11 story presented by a truly independent and expert commission.
What Bush did, what is still being done, is in keeping with Hitler’s axiom: If you tell a lie, make sure it’s a big lie, and keep telling it till everyone believes or has to believe it for fear of seeming unpatriotic. And so it’s time to take the gag off, one way or the other. Let those Firefighters and Police officers speak without fear of retribution. Let the facts, the real facts of 911, gathered by engineers, architects, pilots, retired military men, first responders, citizens of New York and the world, speak for once loud and clear.
New Yorkers should take to the streets to protest the Justice’s gag order. Case in point: a few days ago the governor of Puerto Rico announced that he would fire 20,000 government workers to close his $4 billion deficit, once again balancing deficits on the backs of labor. This caused the people of Puerto Rico to pour into the streets in a spontaneous one-day strike! In fact, their Puerto Rican brothers and sisters in New York City joined in a March at the Puerto Rican government offices here. Their collective reaction made waves from the mainland to the island.
We don’t want to end up with an Emperor instead of a duly-elected Mayor, Governor, or President, and silence instead of justice. Why not bring the wheels of New York to a squealing halt in a similar strike? So for once we can hear the voice of truth on those scratchy fire and policeman’s walkie talkies. Then Mr. Woolsey can gag his old friends at the CIA or his new friends at the Wall Street Journal where he now writes guest columns. Or perhaps be gagged himself by Rupert “The Fox” Murdoch, yellow press media mogul of our time.
Filed under: 2-party system, afghan casualties, Afghanistan, airstrikes, alqaeda, Barack Obama, Censorship, CIA, civilian casualties, Colonialism, George Bush, george w. bush, ISI, left right paradigm, Mainstream Media, Media, media blackout, media censorship, Military, Military Industrial Complex, military strike, nation building, neocons, Neolibs, obama, obama deception, occupation, Pakistan, Pentagon, Preemptive Strike, Propaganda, Taliban, Troops, uav, war crime, War Crimes, War On Terror, White House
Obama Steps Up Drone Bombings Despite Civilian Deaths
Sherwood Ross
Prisonplanet.com
October 20, 2009
“Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the October 26th The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.”
Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports.
In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age.
At any time, the C.I.A. apparently has “multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets,” the magazine reports. So many Predators and its more heavily armed companion, the Reaper, are being purchased that defense manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, of Poway, Calif., can hardly make them fast enough. The Air Force is said to possess 200.
Mayer writes, “the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” Today, Mayer writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.” And according to Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center, nobody in the government calls it assassination. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did,” Solis is quoted as saying.
David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare authority who co-authored a study for the Center for New American Security, of Washington, D.C., has suggested the drone attacks have backfired. As he told The New Yorker, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”
And because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, Mayer writes, “there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.”
The New Yorker further reports the Obama Administration has also expanded the sphere of authorized drone assaults in Afghanistan. An August Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the Pentagon’s list of approved terrorist targets held 367 names and included some 50 Afghan drug lords “who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban,” Mayer reports. She quotes the Senate report as stating, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.”
It is the military’s version of the drone assaults that operates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the C.I.A.’s drones hunt terror suspects in countries where U.S. troops are not based and is “aimed at terror suspects around the world,” Mayer writes. The C.I.A. effort was launched by Obama’s predecessor, and a former aide to President George W. Bush says Obama has left nearly all the key personnel in place.
Running the C.I.A. program is a team of operators that handle Predator flights off runways in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once aloft, the Predators are passed over to controllers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., who maneuver joysticks and monitor events from a live video feed from the drone’s camera.
The magazine article reports the government plans to commission “hundreds more” of the drones, including “new generations of tiny ‘nano’ drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”
Obama tops Bush in troop buildup
Filed under: 9/11, 9/11 Truth, Afghanistan, Ahmadinejad, alqaeda, Barack Obama, BBC, blackops, Britain, CIA, Coup, destabilization, destabilize, Dictatorship, Empire, european union, fake alqaeda, George Bush, george w. bush, intel cenyer, Iran, Israel, Jundollah, Jundullah, khalid sheikh mohammed, KSM, london, MEK, Mi6, middle east, Military, Military Industrial Complex, MKO, Mossad, mujahideen, mullahs, nation building, New World Order, NGOs, Nuke, NWO, obama, occupation, Oil, Pakistan, Revolutionary Guard, Revolutionary Guards, Shiite, State Sponsored Terrorism, suicide bomber, suicide bombing, sunni, Tehran, terrorist funding, terrorist training, truth movement, United Kingdom, us military, War On Terror, Whistleblowers, WW3, ww4, Zionism | Tags: Iran meddling, mirza, Mirza Aslam Baig, Mirza Aslam Beig, Pishin, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh, Sistan-Baluchistan, US meddling, Zahedan
US-Backed Terrorist Group Kills Iran Military Officers
Bankrolling and arming Al-Qaeda offshoot part of 2007 White House directive to destabilize Iranian government
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
October 19, 2009
The U.S. government effectively attacked Iran yesterday after its proxy terror group Jundullah launched a suicide bomb attack against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at their headquarters in Pishin, near the border with Pakistan.
Leaders of the Al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni terrorist group Jundullah have claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Iran that killed over 40 people yesterday. The group is funded and trained by the CIA and is being used to destabilize the government of Iran, according to reports out of the London Telegraph and ABC News.
In the aftermath of the attack, which killed at least five commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard along with scores of others, media reports have swung between Iranian accusations of US and British involvement and blanket denials on behalf of the U.S. State Department.
However, the fact that Jundullah, who have since claimed responsibility for the attack and named the bomber as Abdol Vahed Mohammadi Saravani, are openly financed and run by the CIA and Mossad is not up for debate, it has been widely reported for years.
“President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran, intelligence sources have revealed. Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs,” reported the London Telegraph in May 2007.
Part of that destabilization campaign involved the the CIA “Giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan,” stated the report.
Jundullah is a Sunni Al-Qaeda offshoot organization that was formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The fact that it is being directly supported by the U.S. government under both Bush and now Obama destroys the whole legitimacy of the “war on terror” in an instant.
The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad’s government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.
The group also produces propaganda tapes and literature for al-Qaeda’s media wing, As-Sahab, which is in turn closely affiliated with the military-industrial complex front IntelCenter, the group that makes available Al-Qaeda videos to the western media.
In May 2008, ABC News reported on how Pakistan was threatening to turn over six members of Jundullah to Iran after they were taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.
“U.S. officials tell ABC News U.S. intelligence officers frequently meet and advise Jundullah leaders, and current and former intelligence officers are working to prevent the men from being sent to Iran,” reported ABC news, highlighting again the close relationship between the terror group and the CIA.
In July 2009, a Jundullah member admitted before a court in Zahedan Iran that the group was a proxy for the U.S. and Israel.
Abdolhamid Rigi, a senior member of the group and the brother of the group’s leader Abdolmalek Rigi, who was one of the six members of the organization extradited by Pakistan, told the court that Jundullah was being trained and financed by “the US and Zionists”. He also said that the group had been ordered by America and Israel to step up their attacks in Iran.
Jundullah is not the only anti-Iranian terror group that US government has been accused of funding in an attempt to pressure the Iranian government.
Multiple credible individuals including US intelligence whistleblowers and former military personnel have asserted that the U.S. is conducting covert military operations inside Iran using guerilla groups to carry out attacks on Iranian Revolution Guard units.
It is widely suspected that the well known right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, is now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and carrying out remote bombings in Iran.
After a bombing inside Iran in March 2007, the London Telegraph also reported on how a high ranking CIA official has blown the whistle on the fact that America is secretly funding terrorist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program.
A story entitled, US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran, reveals how funding for the attacks carried out by the terrorist groups “comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget,” a fact that is now “no great secret”, according to a former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.
Former US state department counter-terrorism agent Fred Burton backed the claim, telling the newspaper, “The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.”
John Pike, the head of the influential Global Security think tank in Washington, said: “The activities of the ethnic groups have hotted up over the last two years and it would be a scandal if that was not at least in part the result of CIA activity.”
The timing of the bombing that targeted Iranian Revolutionary Guard members yesterday was clearly orchestrated to coincide with talks between representatives from Iran, Russia, France, the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna today concerning Iran’s nuclear intentions.
Iranian Unrest: Evidence Of Western Intelligence Meddling
Filed under: 9/11, airstrikes, Bloggers, bush surge, George Bush, george w. bush, Iraq, journalism, Military, Military Industrial Complex, military strike, nation building, neocons, occupation, Ronald Reagan, Shock and Awe, Texas, Troops, war crime, War Crimes | Tags: Family of Secrets, Herskowitz, Karen Hughes, media in crisis, Mickey Herskowitz, Russ Baker, William Morrow
Governor Bush told Houston Journalist: If Elected. “I’m Going to Invade Iraq”
Global Research
June 2, 2009
Two years before the 9/11 attacks on America, George W. Bush told a Houston journalist if elected president, “I’m going to invade Iraq.”
Bush made the comments about starting an aggressive war to veteran Houston Chronicle reporter Mickey Herskowitz, then working with Bush on his book “A Charge To Keep,” later brought out by publisher William Morrow.
This disclosure was uncovered by Russ Baker, an award-winning investigative reporter when he interviewed Herskowitz for his own book, “Family of Secrets” (Bloomsbury Press) about the Bush dynasty. However, Baker says, when he approached The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times with the potentially devastating story to President Bush prior to the 2004 presidential election, they declined to publish it.
In a new book, “Media In Crisis”(Doukathsan), Baker quotes Herskowitz as telling him: “He (Bush) said he wanted to do it(invade Iraq), and the reason he wanted to do it is he had been led to understand that you could not really have a successful presidency unless you were seen as commander-in-chief, unless you were seen as waging a war.”
Bush told Herskowitz that his father (President George H.W. Bush) knew that from Panama and (President Ronald)Reagan knew that from Grenada and…(UK Prime Minister)Maggie Thatcher knew this from the Falklands.”
According to Baker, Bush told Herskowitz, “The ideal thing was a small war, and this is why Bush said nobody was going to be killed in Iraq because he thought it would be small war.”
Bush co-authored his book “A Charge To Keep” with Karen Hughes. In his introduction to the work, Bush wrote, “I thank Mickey Herskowitz for his help and work in getting the project started.”
Baker said he believed if a major daily ran his Herskowitz interview it “could have changed the election” but “I could not get it published.” The story was turned down by both The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. He described the Post as “scared because of the Dan Rather thing, and they said to me, ‘What do you have in the way of evidence?’” Baker replied, “Here’s a tape of Mickey Herskowitz, who’s published 20-some books, long-time journalist of the Houston Chronicle, friend of the Bush family, telling me this story.” The Post said, “It’s not enough. In this climate, we need Bush on tape saying this.” Expressing his disappointment over the rejection, Baker said, “Well, that standard has never applied anywhere.”
The story about Bush’s comments to Herskowitz is one of many about the frustrations journalists face in getting the truth to the public that appear in “Media In Crisis.” The book contains the comments of five Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, among others, and officials of various journalism foundations, as well as veteran broadcasters. The book also covers the economic woes of daily newspapers and their future, the rise of Internet bloggers and other news-purveying media, the quality of reporting, and the quality of instruction in journalism schools.
noworldsystem.com 