Saturday, May 3, 2008

AGITPROP MADE IN THE USA NYTimes: "In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded 'the gulag of our times' by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure. The administration's communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo. To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as 'military analysts' whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized. Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse - an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks." PRWatch's John Stauber appears on PBS NewsHour to talk about the Pentagon Pundits scandal. PRWatch: "The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week's exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, 'No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.'" Fiore's animation. PRWatch: "As part of its plan to expand online 'information operations', the Pentagon is launching 'a global network of foreign-language news websites ... and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests', reports Peter Eisler. The Pentagon launched Matawani.com last year, an Arabic-language site with Iraq news; other sites are being developed for Asian and Latin American audiences. Like the Pentagon's older 'news' sites, aimed at North Africa and Southeast Europe, the new sites only disclose U.S. Defense Department involvement on a single page reached via a small 'about' link at the bottom of the site. The goal of the Pentagon's 'Trans Regional Web Initiative' is to launch 'a minimum of six' websites run by regional U.S. military commands." George W. Bush has announced he is going to spend some money on world hunger. Let me guess what will happen: he will pay all this money to a few American multinationals who will then send some stuff abroad. In fact, it is more a 'help American industry' program. World hunger is the result of the machinations by neocons like Bush and the World Bank. Their spin and lies cover all aspects of their policies. Of course, America's first agitprop sorties date from much earlier. Chalmers Johnson: "The RAND Corporation of Santa Monica, California, was set up immediately after World War II by the U.S. Army Air Corps (soon to become the U.S. Air Force). The Air Force generals who had the idea were trying to perpetuate the wartime relationship that had developed between the scientific and intellectual communities and the American military, as exemplified by the Manhattan Project to develop and build the atomic bomb. Soon enough, however, RAND became a key institutional building block of the Cold War American empire. As the premier think tank for the U.S.'s role as hegemon of the Western world, RAND was instrumental in giving that empire the militaristic cast it retains to this day and in hugely enlarging official demands for atomic bombs, nuclear submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. Without RAND, our military-industrial complex, as well as our democracy, would look quite different." And the system has now embraced torture within its own ranks (previously relegated to their pawns in South America, or the Middle East). CommonDreams: "'Why are we talking about this in the White House?' John Ashcroft nervously asked his fellow members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee. (The Principals were Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General Ashcroft.) 'History will not judge this kindly,' Ashcroft predicted. 'This' is torture. Against innocent people. Conducted by CIA agents and American soldiers and marines. Sanctioned by legal opinions issued by Ashcroft's Justice Department. Directly ordered by George W. Bush. An April 11th report by ABC News describes how CIA agents, asked by previous presidents to carry out illegal 'black ops' actions (torture and killings), had become tired of getting hung out to dry whenever their dirty deeds were revealed by the press. When the Bush Administration asked the CIA to work over prisoners captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, Director George Tenet demanded legal cover. The Justice Department complied by issuing a classified 2002 memo, the so-called 'Golden Shield', authored by Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee. 'Enhanced interrogation techniques' - i.e., torture - were legal, Bybee assured the CIA." 2:55:28 PM

MI6 FIASCO IN RUSSIA Independent: "Alexander Litvinenko died on 23 November 2006, after a mysterious and painful illness. The cause was identified, less than two hours before his death, by scientists at the British government's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. They found that he had been poisoned, with the radioactive isotope polonium-210. A long and detailed article by the veteran US investigative journalist, Edward Jay Epstein, was printed in The New York Sun (19 March 2008) and has been avidly read and critiqued on the internet. What he says struck him above all about the papers was the flimsiness of the British case and the lack of even a post-mortem report. This is that Alexander poisoned himself while handling radioactive material. Epstein posits that Litvinenko was poisoned by accident - the post mortem, he says, would have determined whether he ingested the polonium-210 or inhaled it. Part of his thesis is that the isotope had been smuggled to London not to murder someone, but as part of an illegal nuclear transaction. And while coroners officially enjoy substantial independence, there are points where political pressure can be exerted. So the more time that elapses without an inquest being scheduled into one of London's most high-profile deaths, the more the delay looks suspicious. After all, if the case is as cut and dried as the British government has consistently made out, what has anyone possibly to lose? The answer, if the persistent digging of informed sceptics, such as Epstein, has come anywhere near the truth, could be an awful lot. The most obvious relate to the polonium-210 that was identified as the cause of his illness just before he died. Then there is the role of Andrei Lugovoi. The Crown Prosecution Service says it has enough evidence to charge with murder, but the only third party to have seen the papers, Edward Epstein, says the case is extremely thin. Third, there are the mysterious activities of Litvinenko himself. The fourth cluster of questions concerns the part, if any, played by the British secret services, and, last, the role of the exiled Russian oligarch, the enigmatic Boris Berezovsky. What is certain is that Russia is not the only producer of polonium-210. Epstein (among others) reports that, while Russia produces it for export to the United States (!), any country with a nuclear reactor not subject to IAEA inspection can produce it - they include China, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea. So the consolation that there is only Russia to worry about is flat wrong. But there is another, and perhaps bigger, problem. Scientists who know anything about polonium-210 find it hard to believe that anyone would choose it as a murder weapon against one individual, even if the purpose was to evade detection. For a start, it is extremely expensive. But it also fits much more comfortably into another scenario: that of nuclear smuggling. It seems far more likely that the polonium tracked in London was part of some sort of deal - a deal that, for whatever reason, went disastrously wrong. Demand for polonium-210 on the illegal international market is as a key element in detonating a nuclear explosion. This is why it commands such a fantastically high price - hundreds of thousands, if not the many millions, of dollars mentioned by some. Money, and even nuclear terrorism, thus emerge as plausible motives to compete with the theory of a Putin-inspired political assassination. Either would entail embarrassment for the British authorities, for it would suggest that illegal nuclear trafficking was going on under their very noses, with all the attendant dangers to the population. It also raises the question of border security. The small matter of how such a lethal substance got into the country pertains, of course, regardless of its intended purpose. So far, however, this crucial question has been successfully muffled by the horror of the presumed crime and the blanket allegation that 'the Russians did it'. The second cluster of questions relates to Andrei Lugovoi, charged in Britain with Litvinenko's murder. As Lugovoi tells it, a long, calculated effort was made by MI6 to recruit him - an effort he eventually rebuffed. What we have here, then, is a chief suspect with no motive, who may not have been the source of the polonium, and who says he was set up by MI6. If this last point is true, then there may be other reasons why he has been accused - and why the British might not want him in a London witness box. This could explain something else that has long been a mystery to me. I always found it difficult to believe that the British ever seriously expected to obtain Lugovoi's extradition, especially against a Russian constitutional provision that expressly protects Russian nationals against being delivered to a foreign country. I never understood, either, why the British were so furious about Russia's non-compliance that almost the first act of David Miliband as Foreign Secretary was to up the ante by expelling four Russian diplomats. British official fury becomes more much more comprehensible, however, if Lugovoi's real crime in their eyes was not to have killed Litvinenko, but to have fled the clutches of British intelligence - with, perhaps, information valuable enough to buy his safety back home. Fast-tracked into the Russian parliament last December, he now enjoys immunity not only from extradition, but from prosecution in his own country. Mystery surrounds precisely how Litvinenko occupied himself when he was not at home watching old videos. He and his family received a house and an income from Boris Berezovsky's charitable foundation, but it is not clear what his paymaster might have asked of him in return. There has been speculation that towards the end he had money worries, precipitated perhaps by a desire to break with Berezovsky. Others say this is disinformation. What is not in dispute is that he had known Andrei Lugovoi in the 1990s and that they shared a connection with Boris Berezovsky. They had not been in touch, however, for almost 10 years, when Litvinenko suddenly approached Lugovoi from London, and suggested meeting up. Lugovoi says they then did some - unidentified - projects together, though he suggests that Litvinenko did little more than sit in on his meetings, in the hope, perhaps, of drumming up some business for himself. No evidence has emerged that either was involved in nuclear smuggling - or, if they were, on whose behalf. One person who definitely was involved in such murky dealings, however, is Mario Scaramella, the Italian businessman and academic, whom Litvinenko met on 1 November at the Itsu restaurant in Piccadilly. It is also worth noting that one of the few instances of nuclear smuggling to have come to light in recent years (of uranium) concerned a Russian man caught in Georgia in 2007 as part of an FBI 'sting' operation. Which introduces another dimension. It has been confidently reported that, at the time of his death, Litvinenko was receiving a retainer from MI6. For obvious reasons, This will never be confirmed, although irregular payments to exiles for particular pieces of information are routinely made. A retainer, though, would suggest more systematic cooperation. It seems safe to say that Litvinenko had a relationship with MI6, which could be seen as providing a motive for Russia - or rival Russian exiles - to eliminate him. But it could also be seen as a hint of desperation: perhaps he could find no other line of paying business. Whatever the truth, MI6 probably knows more about what happened to Litvinenko, and why, than might be concluded from its complete non-appearance in the authorised British version of his death. If the shadowy hand of MI6 can be detected in the Litvinenko affair, then so can that of Boris Berezovsky. The Russian exile, multi-millionaire property magnate, and perpetual thorn in Putin's side, was a constant presence behind the scenes. It was he who sponsored Litvinenko's entry to Britain - out of gratitude, it is said, for Litvinenko's refusal, in the late Nineties, to act on orders to kill him. He appears to have been Litvinenko's main source of employment in Britain, and his charity continues to support his widow. In the last week of Litvinenko's life, it was also Berezovsky's money that bought the publicity campaign, so expertly fronted by Alex Goldfarb. Thus the view that the British public had of Litvinenko's illness and death was essentially dictated by Berezovsky. Some have asked whether so comprehensive a PR effort might not have been intended as a diversion - to disguise, say, a catastrophic accident to Berezovsky's employee and recast it as a Kremlin-ordered assassination. That cannot be excluded. The discovery that the poison was not thallium, but polonium-210, however - a substance that would be intended for mass, rather than individual, annihilation - suggests that the context was not political vendetta, but illicit nuclear trading. The careless handling of radioactive material then becomes by far the most likely explanation for Litvinenko's death. That the polonium might also have been tracked as part of an attempted security services 'sting' would also explain why British officials have stuck so rigidly to their version. Why, after all, would they choose to pick a quarrel with the Kremlin, rather than present Litvinenko as the accidental victim of Russian émigré nuclear trafficking - unless there was something in the latter explanation they needed to hide? In fact, any softening so far is to be discerned on the British side. We have not heard any furious public statements about Russia's iniquities for a while. It was announced recently that a new ambassador had been appointed to take over from Sir Anthony Brenton, who had angered the Kremlin by consorting with opposition figures. Sad to say, there may be those in Britain who are even more interested than the new overlord of the Kremlin in seeing this divisive case consigned to oblivion." 2:19:02 PM

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