Altruistic World Online Library

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:53 am

Bush & the L-Word
by Nat Parry
March 29, 2004

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Over the past four years, one of the most powerful U.S. media taboos has been against calling George W. Bush’s pattern of false statements lies. Among Washington journalists, the l-word is casually applied to people who have gotten in the way of the Bush Dynasty – from Bill Clinton and Al Gore to more recently John Kerry and now Richard Clarke – but almost never to Bush.

Sen. Kerry’s credibility took a thrashing when he remarked that many world leaders say they hope Bush will be defeated. Now, top Republicans are calling former counter-terrorism czar Clarke a liar for his comments about Bush’s handling of the war on terror. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist used the l-word repeatedly in attacking Clarke from the Senate floor, even suggesting that Clarke should be charged with perjury.

In these cases, the major newspapers and the TV networks have added to the impact by giving credence to the liar-liar charges. When Clarke appeared for a full hour on NBC's "Meet the Press" on March 28, host Tim Russert spent nearly the entire time buffeting Clarke with the Republican attacks, demanding responses to each charge, even flashing on the screen a "liar" accusation from conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer. But opposite rules apply to Bush. Calling him a liar remains out of bounds in the mainstream press.

Indeed, when Kerry made another off-hand remark about the Bush team as “the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen,” his comments were reported as a bizarre slander and the media puzzled over why Kerry would say such a ridiculous thing, even acting as if Kerry was talking about all Republicans, not just Bush's inner circle.

Whatever the media’s excuse for this double standard, it has thrown the U.S. political balance out of whack. Bush and his surrogates now know they have virtual carte blanche to smear their critics as liars while knowing that the major media will not permit counter-attacks.

Case Study

A recent example of bending over backwards to avoid connecting Bush and the l-word was the Wall Street Journal’s March 22 lead story about gaps between Bush’s account of his actions on Sept. 11, 2001, and the public record.

The story's headline, “Detailed Picture of U.S. Actions On Sept. 11 Remains Elusive,” didn’t give much of a clue what to expect. While avoiding the l-word or anything close to a synonym, the article told the story of how Bush and his aides made statements at variance with the verifiable record about the events of that tragic day.

The Journal article by Scot J. Paltrow gave six examples of Bush or his top aides offering Sept. 11 accounts – all portraying Bush as a decisive leader – that didn’t square with the factual record. Some of the discrepancies relate to important historical facts; others amount to political spin to help build a heroic myth around George W. Bush as “war president.” The Journal’s examples included:

--Did Bush watch the first plane hit one of the Twin Towers?

Bush’s arrival for a photo op at a second-grade classroom in Sarasota, Fla., on Sept. 11, 2001, coincided with the first news reaching the presidential entourage that a plane had struck the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. On Dec. 4, 2001, Bush told a town-hall meeting in Orlando, Fla., “I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘Well, there’s one terrible pilot.’” But, as the Journal reported, there was no footage of the first plane until late that night and the TV in the room where Bush waited was unplugged.

--Did Bush quickly respond when Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered in Bush’s ear, “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack”?

Card has said “not that many seconds later, the president excused himself from the classroom, and we gathered in the holding room and talked about the situation.” An uncut videotape of the scene, however, shows that Bush – after having been told “America is under attack” – waited in the classroom for at least seven more minutes, as he listened to children read a story about a pet goat and asked the children questions. Card later said Bush’s “instinct was not to frighten the children by rushing out of the room.”

--Who raised the U.S. defense level to Defcon III, the highest state of military threat since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War?

Bush told the town-hall meeting in Orlando that “one of the first acts I did was to put our military on alert.” But the Journal reported that the evidence is that Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the decision, as Bush was rushing from the school in Florida to Air Force One and then westward to Louisiana and Nebraska.

--Did Bush activate the government’s emergency response plans as he claimed in his nationally televised speech on the night of Sept. 11?

Federal officials, interviewed by the Journal, said the emergency plans were implemented by lower-level officials, not by Bush. FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said the so-called “Conplan” was activated without any input from Bush or the White House. A former White House official told the Journal that Bush was not involved until he signed a disaster declaration on Sept. 14.

--Was there a threat against Air Force One?

White House officials insisted at the time that Bush’s decision to flee first to Louisiana and then to Nebraska was driven by a credible terrorist threat against Air Force One. But White House spokesman Dan Bartlett now acknowledges that there was no credible threat, only misunderstood rumors.

--Did Bush delay his return flight to Washington until 4 p.m. because there were still unaccounted for aircraft in the skies?

In explaining Bush’s tardy return to Washington, political adviser Karl Rove said there were still reports about civilian jetliners aloft until 4 p.m. and thus still a threat to Air Force One. But Benjamin Sliney, the top Federal Aviation Administration official responsible for air-traffic control, said the agency informed the White House and the Pentagon at 12:16 p.m. that there were no more hijacked planes in the air and all commercial planes were out of U.S. airspace, the Journal reported.

A Life Pattern

This pattern of big and little distortions about Bush’s actions on Sept. 11 also does not stand in isolation. Bush has often made claims about his personal life, his decision-making and his role in historical events – such as the reasons for invading Iraq – that are patently untrue.

For instance, on three occasions since the invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, Bush has justified his decision by telling the American people that Saddam Hussein had refused to cooperate with United Nations weapons inspectors. In July 2003, only four months after the invasion, Bush said about Hussein, “we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.” [For details, see the White House Web site.]

The reality, of course, was that Iraq had allowed the UN inspectors in and had given them access to any suspected weapons site of their choosing. It was Bush who forced the UN inspectors out to make way for the invasion. But he has since revised the history to make his actions appear more reasonable. In most normal circumstances, Bush's statement would be considered a lie, but the national press corps has chosen not to mention that comment or two similar remarks. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Terror Hysteria."

Bush stretched the truth again when he used the Sept. 11 catastrophe as part of his excuse for reneging on his promise to run balanced budgets. As he began to amass record federal deficits, Bush claimed that he had given himself an escape hatch during the 2000 campaign.

In speech after speech in the months after Sept. 11, Bush recounted his supposed caveat from the 2000 campaign, that he would keep the budget balanced except in event of war, recession or national emergency. Bush then delivered the punch line: "Little did I realize we'd get the trifecta."

The joking reference to the trifecta – a term for a horseracing bet on the correct order of finish for three horses – always got a laugh from his listeners, although some families of the Sept. 11 victims found the joke tasteless. (Similarly, some families of U.S. war dead in Iraq were disgusted by Bush joking about his failed search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction at a March 2004 dinner of Washington journalists, many of whom laughed uproariously at the presidential humor.)

But beyond the question of taste, Bush's trifecta claim about having set criteria for going back into deficit spending appears to have been fabricated. Neither the White House nor independent researchers could locate any such campaign statement by Bush.

Missed Warnings

In 2002, as questions were finally raised about whether the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented, Bush's aides tried to give him some political cover for his failure to follow up on a classified CIA briefing he received on Aug. 6, 2001, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

The briefing had described a mounting threat of al-Qaeda attacks inside the United States, but appeared to have little effect on Bush. After the briefing, he went fishing, padded around the ranch and continued with a month-long vacation. There has been no evidence that the startling warning prodded Bush into any new sense of urgency.

But National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has tried to put some heroic shine on the Aug. 6 briefing. On May 12, 2002, Rice said the briefing was a response to Bush's questions about the domestic al-Qaeda threats. In other words, Bush was the prescient president who was alert to the danger and was demanding bureaucratic action.

Rice's story, however, has since been contradicted. The CIA informed the 9/11 commission in mid-March 2004 that the briefing's author doesn't recall a request from Bush for the report and that the idea of the briefing generated from inside the CIA, not from the Oval Office, according to commission member Richard Ben-Veniste. [Washington Post, March 26, 2004]

Bush's defenders maintain that many of Bush's false statements are either insignificant or result from understandable lapses of memory. However, Bush's critics see a larger and consistent pattern in the big and little lies: all seek to present Bush in a more favorable light and they fit with a disdain for fact that has become a hallmark of Bush's administration.

One explanation might be that Bush and the people around him can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Another is that they simply don’t care, such as when they used dubious intelligence to scare the American public about Iraq's alleged WMD. Bush’s ease with lying also may reflect deeper personal problems: a lack of intellectual discipline, a pattern of deception set during earlier periods of substance abuse, an entrenched sense of privilege, an awareness that his family connections guarantee that he'll never be held accountable.

Yet it is still striking how audaciously Team Bush steps out of its glass house to hurl stones at the credibility of any critic who gets in the way. When former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill questioned Bush’s leadership in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, the White House portrayed O’Neill as a disgruntled flake who couldn’t be trusted.

Bush v. Clarke

Now, the White House and its allies are going after the credibility of former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke. He asserts in his new book, Against All Enemies, and in testimony before the 9/11 commission that Iraq was a Bush obsession while al-Qaeda was not viewed as an urgent priority during Bush’s first eight months in office.

Though Clarke's comments match with much of the known evidence, senior congressional Republicans appear to be laying the groundwork for destroying Clarke's credibility and possibly indicting him for perjury. Senate Majority Leader Frist went to the Senate floor on March 26 to accuse Clarke of leaving out much of his criticism about Bush in July 2002 when Clarke gave classified testimony to the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Clarke, then a special adviser to the president, said he told the truth in his congressional testimony though he emphasized the positive as a White House representative. He also noted that the testimony occurred before the invasion of Iraq, which solidified Clarke's assessment that Bush was bungling the war on terror.

But in a scathing Senate speech, Frist demanded that Clarke's sworn Capitol Hill testimony be declassified and examined for discrepancies from his testimony to the 9/11 commission. "Loyalty to any administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied to Congress," said Frist, R-Tenn.

The Republican assault on Clarke came as the White House sensed that the counter-terrorism expert was making a powerful impression on the public and undermining the carefully crafted image of Bush as an infallible leader.

As the war against Clarke has escalated, Bush even pitted his personal credibility against Clarke's by disputing Clarke’s account of meeting Bush in the White House Situation Room on Sept. 12, 2001, a day after the terrorist attacks. Clarke said he was told by Bush to seek a link between the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq. “See if Saddam did this,” Bush said, according to Clarke. “See if he’s linked in any way.” Clarke said he told Bush that the evidence was clear that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, not Iraq.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan sought to poke a hole in Clarke’s credibility by telling reporters that Bush didn’t recall the conversation and that no records show Bush was in the Situation Room at that time. However, Clarke’s former deputy, Roger Cressey, corroborated that the conversation between Bush and Clarke had occurred. [New York Times, March 23, 2004.]

The White House subsequently acknowledged that the Bush-Clarke meeting in the Situation Room did occur, but the Washington press corps did not cite this reversal as evidence of a Bush lie. The taboo remains in place.

When reporting on Bush's attempts to discredit or destroy whistleblowers, the Washington press corps typically lets Bush, his aides and conservative pundits gang up on one individual in a kind of they-said-he-said dispute, much as Russert did to Clarke on "Meet the Press." There's never any counter-balancing context of Bush’s now long record of distortion and deception. It’s like every day is a new day for Bush’s credibility.

Tip-Toeing

This media pattern goes back to Campaign 2000 when Bush was hailed as a "straight-shooter" despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Protecting Bush-Cheney."] After Bush took office, the media's kid-gloves treatment continued despite Bush's growing reputation as a guy who never lets the facts get in the way of a politically advantageous story.

The Washington Post gingerly approached this question of Bush's dishonesty in fall 2002, couching the issue in euphemisms and rationalizations. The Post story was entitled "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable," with a subhead reading "Presidential Tradition of Embroidering Key Assertions Continues," as if Bush was carrying forward some historic mission.

In contrast to tip-toeing around the l-word for Bush, the major news media stomped all over the credibility of Al Gore in 2000 and is starting to do the same to presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. A case in point was Kerry's off-hand remark on March 8 that he had spoken with “more leaders” who hoped he would defeat Bush. Initially, a pool reporter disseminated a misquote of the comment, which reported Kerry saying “foreign leaders.”

Using the original misquote, the Republican attack machine quickly began churning out suggestions that Kerry might be less than a red-blooded American. “Kerry’s imaginary friends have British and French accents,” said Republican National Chairman Ed Gillespie on March 11, quickly setting out the themes that Kerry is both delusional and suspect for hanging out with foreigners.

But the story didn’t switch into high gear until the right-wing Washington Times, controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, blared the results of its investigation of Kerry’s remarks across the front page of its March 12 issue. Though it's been well known for more than a year that many foreign leaders are troubled by Bush's unilateral foreign policy, the Washington Times acted like Kerry's claim was so strange that it merited some major sleuthing.

The article asserted that Kerry “cannot back up foreign ‘endorsements,’” in part because he declined to identify the leaders whom he had spoken with in confidence about Bush. Kerry had “made no official foreign trips since the start of last year,” the newspaper wrote. Plus, “an extensive review of Mr. Kerry’s travel schedule domestically revealed only one opportunity for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to meet with foreign leaders here,” the Washington Times wrote.

The point was obvious: Kerry is a liar. The possibility that Kerry might have talked to anyone by phone or some other means of communication apparently was not contemplated by Rev. Moon’s newspaper, which saw the furor as a way to advance a Bush campaign theme about Kerry's supposed unreliability.

“Mr. Kerry has made other claims during the campaign and then refused to back them up,” the Washington Times wrote. Then came the ridicule: “Republicans have begun calling Mr. Kerry the ‘international man of mystery,’ and said his statements go even beyond those of former Vice President Al Gore, who was besieged by stories that he lied or exaggerated throughout the 2000 presidential campaign.”

Soon, Bush was personally suggesting that Kerry was a liar. “If you’re going to make an accusation in the course of a campaign, you’ve got to back it up,” Bush said. Vice President Dick Cheney added even uglier implications that Kerry may have engaged in acts close to treason. “We have a right to know what he is saying to them that makes them so supportive of his candidacy,” Cheney said.

Rev. Moon’s Washington Times also kept stirring the pot. On March 16, it quoted Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H., as saying “I think there’s a real question as to whether or not the claim was a fabrication.”

That same day, again implying that Kerry perhaps suffers from mental illness, Bush’s campaign chief Ken Mehlman accused the senator of living in a “parallel universe.” Mehlman then made a preemptive strike to protect Bush from any Kerry counter-attack against Bush's lies. Mehlman said Kerry already had shown a “willingness to try to project onto the president what are his own weaknesses.” [Washington Post, March 17, 2004]

True Comment

The Republican allegations about Kerry’s supposed lie that world leaders favored Bush's defeat dominated the TV pundit shows for a week. But the larger absurdity of the controversy was that Kerry’s comment about many leaders privately wishing for Bush’s defeat was certainly true.

Many leaders around the world are alarmed at what they consider Bush’s reckless leadership, and they fear what another four years would mean. Though many leaders obviously do not want their countries to suffer from the vindictiveness of the Bush administration, others have spoken with surprising candor.

The newly elected Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has called Bush’s Iraq War a “disaster,” has vowed to withdraw Spanish forces from Iraq unless the operation is put under United Nations control, and has said he would favor new U.S. leadership. Honduras and the Netherlands have also expressed growing concern about their roles in the military coalition occupying Iraq.

Even before the war, world leaders were speaking out forcefully against Bush’s invasion plans. Former South African president Nelson Mandela tried and failed to get Bush on the phone, before settling on a call to Bush’s father to voice his displeasure. Mandela was quoted as saying the younger George Bush was “introducing chaos into international affairs.”

Other world leaders have criticized other aspects of Bush’s foreign and security policies, including his opposition to the Kyoto global warming treaty, the prisoner camps in Guantanamo Bay, and human rights abuses associated with the war on terror.

Some critics have paid for their outspokenness with their jobs as the Bush administration demonstrated the spitefulness that would explain why many leaders would want comments kept confidential.

Mary C. Robinson, former president of Ireland and widely respected human rights champion, was one such victim. As the UN Human Rights Commissioner, she was an early critic of the prosecution of the war on terror and raised concerns about civilian casualties from the use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan.

But her independence rubbed Washington the wrong way. The Bush administration lobbied hard against her reappointment, and was successful in forcing her out of the UN. Officially, she was retiring on her own accord. [http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/14/feature1.shtml]

The Bush administration also forced out Robert Watson, the chairman of the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]. Under his leadership, the panel had reached a consensus that human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, contributed to global warming.

But this science stood in opposition to the Bush administration's claims that there is no conclusive evidence linking human activities to climate change. The science is also opposed by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. The oil giant sent a memo to the White House asking the administration, "Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?" [http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/commentary/2002/0204un_body.html]

On April 19, 2002, ExxonMobil got its wish. The administration succeeded in replacing Watson with Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian economist. Commenting on his removal, Watson said, "U.S. support was, of course, an important factor. They [the IPCC] came under a lot of pressure from ExxonMobil who asked the White House to try and remove me." [Independent, April 20, 2002]

Keeping Quiet

With that kind of track record, it should not be a surprise if world leaders decide to keep their opinions quiet about Election 2004. But considering how unpopular Bush is in many countries, foreign leaders also are in a tricky position when allying with the United States. Whatever some of these world leaders may have told Kerry, there is abundant evidence that most of the world’s people would like to see Bush gone.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators have turned out to protest Bush's presence whenever he visits a foreign capital, a sign of public disdain that is reinforced by recent opinion polls that reveal widespread disapproval of U.S. policies and of Bush’s leadership.

In a major new public opinion poll of nine countries by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, large majorities of each country surveyed (except for the United States) said Washington pays little or no attention to their countries’ interests. At least two-thirds in each of those countries (with the exception of Great Britain) expressed a desire for the European Union to become as powerful as the United States, as a means to check American power. In the seven countries that were surveyed that did not take part in the Iraq war, disapproval of the war hovered at around 85 percent.

In today’s interdependent world, international leaders are left trying to balance an alliance with the United States, which is vital for trade and long-term national interests, and their electorates who object to Bush’s foreign policies. Obviously, it would be much more convenient for these leaders to have a U.S. president that is not disliked as much as George W. Bush is.

As the voters showed in Spain in March – and earlier in Germany and South Korea – criticizing Bush's policies and calling for a more independent course can be a winning political strategy.

A key question in this fall's U.S. election, however, will be whether Bush can maintain his image as a "straight-shooter" by destroying the credibility of those who question his leadership and honesty. The ferocity of the Bush assaults on former Treasury Secretary O'Neill and now former counter-terrorism chief Clarke reveals how important Bush and his political advisers see the threat from these whistleblowers.

Central to Bush's success in his new war against his ex-assistants will be whether the major news media will continue its obsequious behaviour. Bush's strategy can only work if he and his surrogates are allowed to throw around the l-word without fear that it might finally be tossed back at them.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:54 am

President Reaffirms Strong Position on Liberia
Remarks by the President and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in Photo Opportunity
The Oval Office
July 14, 2003

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

2:11 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: I'm so honored that Kofi Annan has come back to the Oval Office. We've had a great discussion. I briefed him on my trip to Africa, his native continent. And I told him that I was most impressed with the possibilities of the continent. I saw the potential and I also saw many of the problems. And I want to thank the Secretary General for his work on hunger and HIV/AIDS. We have got a -- we're going to work closely with him to help defeat the pandemic.

The other thing we talked about was Liberia. I assured him that our government's position is a strong position. We want to enable ECOWAS to get in and help create the conditions necessary for the cease-fire to hold, that Mr. Taylor must leave, that we'll participate with the troops. We're in the process, still, of determining what is necessary, what ECOWAS can bring to the table, when they can bring it to the table, what is the timetable, and be able to match the necessary U.S. help to expediting the ECOWAS' participation.

I told the Secretary General that we want to help, that there must be a U.N. presence, quickly, into Liberia. He and I discussed how fast it would take to blue helmet whatever forces arrived, other than our own, of course. We would not be blue helmeted. We would be there to facilitate and then to -- and then to leave.

And we had a good discussion. And I think we had a meeting of minds on that subject.

We talked about Iraq. And I told him and assured him that the United States would stay the course because we believe freedom is on its way to the Iraqi people. And by that, I mean that the Iraqi people are beginning to assume more and more responsibility in their society. Free society requires a certain kind of responsible behavior. And we're seeing more and more of that amongst the Iraqi citizens. Our deep desire is to make sure that the infrastructure is repaired, that people are educated, and health care delivery systems are good.

I was honest in my appraisal when I told him that I recognize certain elements of the former regime are interested in keeping the infrastructure blown up because of -- for pure power reasons. And that, I told him, and I will continue to speak as clearly as I can that an attack on the Iraqi infrastructure by the Baathist is an attack on the Iraqi people. And it's those Iraqis are causing the continued suffering, where there's suffering in Iraq.

But we're making good progress. I'm proud of Jerry Bremer's work. And then the -- we also talked about other issues that are on his mind and my mind. The long/short of it is we had a great discussion. Mr. Secretary General, I'm honored you're here.

SECRETARY GENERAL ANNAN: Thank you very much, Mr. President. I think it is fair to say that it's wonderful that I should be meeting the President soon after the return -- his return from Africa, my own continent. We weren't too far away. I was in Mozambique when he was in South Africa and Botswana.

But I would want to thank the President for the interest in the continent and his determination to help defeat the AIDS pandemic. I think it is a tragedy that is not only taking away the future of Africa, it is really destroying the present.

And this is -- it's a disease that takes parents away from children, teachers away from students, doctors away from hospitals. So the effort that is going in is absolutely worthwhile. And at the African Union Summit, this topic was very much on everyone's mind.

We also discussed, as the President has indicated, the situation in Liberia. And I'm satisfied with the discussions we've had and the approach the U.S. government is taking. And, of course, there is an assessment team in West Africa, but we have more or less agreed to a general approach on the Liberian issue. And I'm very pleased with that.

We talked about at least where the President has made a difference. Over the past couple of weeks, things are going in the right direction. We have bumps in the road, but I think with the determination of the leaders and the support of the international community, we will make progress on this very difficult issue.

In Iraq, we were encouraged to see the formation of the government council yesterday. And I must say that my special representative, Sergio Vieira and Mr. Bremer are working very well together.

And on the Hill, I indicated that regardless of the differences that existed between nations before the war, now we have a challenge. The challenge is to stabilize Iraq, to help Iraq to become a peaceful, stable and prosperous state. And I think everyone needs to help. An Iraq that is at peace with itself and its neighbors, what's in the interest of the neighbors and the entire international community.

So I would want to see the entire community, international community, come together to assist the Iraqi people, and to help us stabilize a region.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Kofi.

Q Mr. President, thank you. On Iraq, what steps are being taken to ensure that questionable information, like the Africa uranium material, doesn't come to your desk and wind up in your speeches?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me first say that -- I think the intelligence I get is darn good intelligence. And the speeches I have given were backed by good intelligence. And I am absolutely convinced today, like I was convinced when I gave the speeches, that Saddam Hussein developed a program of weapons of mass destruction, and that our country made the right decision.

We worked with the United Nations -- as Kofi mentioned, not all nations agreed with the decision, but we worked with the United Nations. And Saddam Hussein did not comply. And it's the same intelligence, by the way, that my predecessor used to make the decision he made in 1998.

We are in the process now of interrogating people inside of Iraq, looking at documents, exploring documents to determine the extent that -- what we can find as quickly as possible. And I believe, firmly believe, that when it's all said and done, the people of the United States and the world will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program.

Q On Liberia, are you now telling us that you will send U.S. troops to Liberia, and how many, and when will this happen?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, see, that's -- what I'm telling you is that we want to help ECOWAS, it may require troops, but we don't know how many yet. And, therefore, it's hard for me to make a determination until I've seen all the facts. And as Kofi mentioned -- or the Secretary General mentioned, excuse me -- (laughter) -- a little informal here. They are still -- our teams, our military is assessing ECOWAS' strength, how soon, how quick, what kind of troops, who they are, to determine what is necessary, from our side, to fulfill the commitment I have made, that we will help maintain the cease-fire.

By the way, this is conditional upon Mr. Taylor leaving. He's got to leave. I think everybody understands that. We discussed that, by the way, in Nigeria, with President Obasanjo, who clearly understands that, as well. But we're still, Steve, determining the facts. It is very difficult for me to make a decision until I see the facts.

Q Well, what do you think?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I don't know. That's an interesting question. We asked that question today at a national security briefing. And as soon as we can get it -- the Secretary General has been very helpful in urging nations to move forward with these plans. We hear numbers all the time as to -- you know, Nigeria may be able to contribute this, or so and so may be able to contribute that. Maybe you'd like to answer the question -- I mean, as soon as possible is the answer. We'd like to get the assessment teams. There has been two such teams out and about, and we'd like to get the information as soon as possible.

SECRETARY GENERAL ANNAN: And Jacques Klein is going to be the special representative, the gentleman with the red tie, in Liberia. So you'll be seeing a lot of him, and you can talk to him.

Q No long term commitments --

THE PRESIDENT: Correct. I think everybody understands, any commitment we had would be limited in size and limited in tenure. Our job would be to help facilitate an ECOWAS presence which would then be converted into a U.N. peacekeeping mission.

SECRETARY GENERAL ANNAN: Maybe I should add something here. The understanding which is emerging now is for the ECOWAS forces to send in a vanguard of about 1,000 to 1,500 troops. And I think this is something that they have worked out amongst themselves and now discussing in Accra with the -- also with the U.S. team. After that, from what I gather, Taylor -- President Taylor will leave Liberia, and then the force will be strengthened, hopefully with U.S. participation, and additional troops from the West African region. Eventually, U.N. blue helmets will be set up to stabilize the situation, along the lines that we've done in Sierra Leone, and once the situation is calmer and stabilized, U.S. would leave and the U.N. peacekeepers would carry on the situation.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, Dana, one last question.

Q Mr. President, back on the question of Iraq, and that specific line that has been in question --

THE PRESIDENT: Can you cite the line? (Laughter.)

Q I could, if you gave me some time.

THE PRESIDENT: When I gave the speech, the line was relevant.

Q So even though there has been some question about the intelligence -- the intelligence community knowing beforehand that perhaps it wasn't, you still believe that when you gave it --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the speech that I gave was cleared by the CIA. And, look, the thing that's important to realize is that we're constantly gathering data. Subsequent to the speech, the CIA had some doubts. But when I gave the -- when they talked about the speech and when they looked at the speech, it was cleared. Otherwise, I wouldn't have put it in the speech. I'm not interested in talking about intelligence unless it's cleared by the CIA. And as Director Tenet said, it was cleared by the CIA.

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.

Thank you.

END 2:24 P.M. EDT

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:55 am

Bush's Terror Hysteria
by Robert Parry
March 22, 2004

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Commemorating the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush gave the American people a glimpse of his vision of the future: a grim world where a near endless war is waged against forces of evil by forces loyal to Bush who represents what is good.

“There is no neutral ground – no neutral ground – in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death,” Bush said on March 19. “The terrorists are offended not merely by our policies; they’re offended by our existence as free nations. No concession will appease their hatred. No accommodation will satisfy their endless demands.”

So to Bush, the "war on terror" is a fight to the finish. Eliminate everyone who would or might engage in terrorism before they destroy civilization and impose slavery on the rest of us. To Bush’s supporters, this black-and-white analysis represents “moral clarity.” To others around the world, it is taking on the look of madness.

Religious Calling

Two and a half years since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Bush still shows no sign that he understands what counter-insurgency experts have taught for decades, that confronting terrorism requires both targeting those who perpetrate the crimes and addressing the root causes – poverty, powerlessness, humiliation – that drive young people to strap on explosives and blow themselves up.

According to counter-insurgency experts, the goal must be to remove the causes of the broader political anger, isolate the hard-core enemy and gradually transform a war into a police action. A major part of defeating terrorism, therefore, is satisfying legitimate grievances that may be stoking its fires. To do so may require making practical concessions and reasonable accommodations, just the things that Bush has ruled out.

In contrast to these experts, Bush sees crushing terrorism – or "evil" as he frequently puts it – as a religious duty that must be carried out regardless of the costs.

In his March 19 speech, Bush employed quasi-religious language when he said the war on terror “is an inescapable calling of our generation.” The concept of a “calling” has a powerful meaning among Bush's fundamentalist Christian political base, meaning a divine duty, much like Bush's earlier characterization of his wars in the Middle East as a “crusade.”

In other words, Bush's strategy is not about a practical means to reduce tensions, resolve political differences and gradually ease the hardliners to the sidelines. It's about the opposite, elevating a low-intensity conflict into a full-scale war with a goal of not simply prevailing over a foe but of eradicating evil itself. It is an undertaking that reeks of hubris and totalitarianism.

If the United States were a healthy democracy, Bush’s speech would have been cause for alarm, possibly outrage, certainly a fierce debate.

But Bush’s grim vision has been greeted with remarkably little debate in the United States even though it could have calamitous real-life consequences: generations of young Americans dying in a worldwide version of a Hundred Years War; the U.S. national treasury drained; and the Founding Fathers’ grand experiment of a democratic Republic ended.

Lying Again

Given his fight-to-the-death framework, it is also no wonder that Bush feels no guilt about continuing to mislead the American people on questions of fact. Since he has heard his own “inescapable calling” to wage this decisive struggle between good and evil, the ends must justify the means. After all, if preserving “good” and ending “evil” don’t justify something like lying to the people, what would?

This concept of grander truth may help explain why Bush has not apologized for his false assertions about weapons of mass destruction or his misleading comments linking Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Indeed, even in his March 19 address, Bush continued to lie with impunity about the facts leading up to war.

Bush’s latest version of the Iraq War history is that a year ago, Hussein refused to cooperate with UN demands for weapons inspections, leaving the U.S. and its “coalition of the willing” no choice but to invade Iraq in defense of the UN’s resolutions and to protect the United States from Iraq’s WMD.

“One year ago, military forces of a strong coalition entered Iraq to enforce United Nations demands, to defend our security, and to liberate that country from the rule of a tyrant,” Bush said in his anniversary speech.

This deceptive rendition also wasn't just a glossing over of some inconvenient facts in a celebratory speech. On two other occasions, Bush has made the same false assertion.

In July 2003, Bush said about Hussein, “we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.” [For details, see the White House Web site.]

Bush reiterated that war-justifying claim on Jan. 27. Bush said, “We went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution -- 1441 -- unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he did not let us in.”

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spun the same historical point in an op-ed article in the New York Times also on March 19.

“In September 2002, President Bush went to the United Nations, which gave Iraq still another ‘final opportunity’ to disarm and to prove it had done so,” Rumsfeld wrote, adding that “Saddam Hussein passed up that final opportunity” and then rejected a U.S. ultimatum to flee. “Only then, after every peaceful option had been exhausted, did the president and our coalition partners order the liberation of Iraq,” Rumsfeld wrote.

But as anyone with the slightest memory from a year ago knows, Iraq did let the UN weapons inspectors in and allowed them free rein of any sites that they wished to inspect. It was the Bush administration that forced the inspectors out in order to press ahead with the invasion.

The historical point about Iraq’s cooperation was made anew by the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, who writes in his new book, Disarming Iraq, that the final round of UN inspections, launched in November 2002, was progressing well in March 2003 with full Iraqi cooperation.

“Although the inspection organization was now operating at full strength and Iraq seemed determined to give it prompt access everywhere, the United States appeared as determined to replace our inspection force with an invasion army,” Blix wrote.

Double Standards

Despite this clear historical record, the New York Times, the self-described “newspaper of record,” published Rumsfeld’s falsehood without any effort to correct the record.

This is the same New York Times that took great pains in 2000 to flyspeck every comment by Vice President Al Gore looking for any hint of exaggeration and is now joining the rest of the press corps in similar diligence about Sen. John Kerry. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Protecting Bush-Cheney” about Campaign 2000 or "Protecting Bush-Cheney Redux" about the start of Campaign 2004]

But the press always seems to have another standard for Bush. Some suggest the press gives Bush a free pass on factual errors because journalists don't think he's very bright, but a more likely explanation is that Washington journalists are afraid of the career consequences that might result from taking him on over his lies, especially on issues related to national security.

Bush's March 19 speech also shows that he has learned little about the history of terrorism. It is an age-old problem, not a new phenomenon. Violent attacks against civilians have been committed by movements and governments in all regions in all time periods. Indeed, from an historical perspective, the "war on terror" is no more winnable than a "war on evil," in large part, because the terms are subjective, reflected in the old saying, that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Some Iraqis, for instance, might argue that the killing of civilians by the U.S. "shock and awe" bombing campaign a year ago is not that morally different from the Sept. 11 attacks, especially since the principal justifications of the U.S. bombing – Iraq's alleged possession of WMD and Saddam Hussein's supposed links to al-Qaeda – turned out to be bogus.

But history is full of moral ambiguity about terror. For instance, in the cause of American independence, Revolutionary War leader Sam Adams employed terror tactics against British sympathizers, including the brutal practice of tar and feathering. Over the next century, terror tactics, even acts of genocide, were used against the Native American population in settling the frontier.

More recent U.S. leaders were not innocent of association with terrorism either. In the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration backed Nicaraguan contra rebels who committed killings of civilians and other terrorist acts in their campaign to destabilize the Sandinista government. Meanwhile, U.S. allies in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were engaged in death squad operations that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, all in the alleged cause of defeating communism.

Simultaneously, half a world away, the CIA was backing Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, including a young Saudi militant named Osama bin Laden, as they fought Soviet and Afghan government forces. On the slippery slope of fighting secret wars in the Middle East, CIA Director William Casey himself was implicated in a terrorist bombing in Lebanon, aimed at another suspected terrorist. [For details, see Bob Woodward's Veil.]

Those moral ambiguities reached into the second Bush administration, when thousands of Iraqi men, women and children were killed when Bush ordered the invasion of their country under false pretenses and without UN sanction. To many people, especially in the Middle East, George W. Bush is a terrorist with the blood of more than 10,000 people on his hands..

Historically, it also deserves note that 20 years ago, Saddam Hussein was such a close U.S. ally in holding back Iranian Islamic fundamentalism that he got personal visits from U.S. Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld and received military advice from then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. Back then, Libya's Moammar Khadafy was terrorist evil-doer No. 1, blamed for blowing up a civilian airliner over Scotland. Today, the younger George Bush invites Khadafy back into the club of civilized world leaders because he took responsibility for the airline bombing, while Hussein is locked up in a jail cell.

Losing the War

The final, bitter irony of Bush's strategy for the “war on terror,” however, is that his approach is almost certain to fail. His swaggering style, along with his simplistic tactics, have alienated people across the globe and most deeply in the Middle East. Rather than working toward stability in that explosive region, Bush has chosen to do the opposite while invoking as his justification some quasi-religious Christian “calling” or “crusade.”

Taken in its totality, Bush’s vision carries logical consequences of the gravest order: Military strategy will overwhelm diplomacy; root causes of Middle Eastern terrorism, such as the plight of the Palestinians, will go unattended so as not to “appease” the terrorists; civil liberties at home and abroad will be set aside in the name of security; Bush’s allies, no matter how brutal and autocratic, will be hailed for their moral virtues; critics of Bush, including longtime Western allies such as France, Germany and now Spain, will be derided as “soft on terror”; lying, spin and intimidation will be the currency of the U.S. public debate.

And the adverse consequences are only just beginning. The world’s cultural divisions are deepening, world commerce is being disrupted, and economic conditions for billions of people are growing more desperate. The grinding poverty and the perceived injustices are creating the perfect conditions for breeding more senseless violence, not less.

If the American people follow Bush as an avenging angel descending into this worldly hell, terrorism eventually could become a universal voice of international despair, violence begetting only more violence and more despair. It is a future that does not need to happen, but it is one that is looming if the United States can’t figure out how to have a realistic and honest debate about terrorism.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:57 am

Protecting Bush-Cheney
by Sam Parry
October 16, 2000

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

The national news media have altered the course of Campaign 2000 – perhaps decisively – by applying two starkly different standards for judging how Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney, handle the truth versus how Vice President Al Gore does.

Bush and Cheney have gotten almost a free pass. They have been allowed to utter misleading statements and even outright falsehoods with little or no notice. By contrast, Gore’s comments have been fly-specked and every inconsistency trumpeted to support the media’s “theme” – reinforced by the Republicans – that Gore is an inveterate liar.

What the press rarely if ever admits is that many of Gore’s “lies” actually were cases of media mis-reporting.

This litany of bungled stories includes many of the media’s favorites: the “I was the one that started” Love Canal case, “inventing” the Internet, inspiring the male lead in Love Story (which author Eric Segal says was true), Gore’s work as a boy on the family farm (Gore's version again was true), the degree of danger he faced in Vietnam, his alleged misrepresentation of his father’s civil rights record, and his alleged exaggeration that his sister worked as a Peace Corps “volunteer.”

The national news media mangled all these stories, a failure compounded by the pundit shows that routinely reference these mythical stories as fact.

On the Love Canal case, for instance, Gore actually referred to a Tennessee toxic waste dump and said “that was the one that started it all.” The Washington Post and The New York Times transformed the quote to “I was the one that started it all.” The Republicans refined it to say, “I was the one who started it all.” [For details, see our examination of the Love Canal case.]

The other stories have been variations on the same sort of bogus reporting, with the Republicans spinning the news media in a calculated attempt to redefine Al Gore – by all accounts, a hard-working, thoughtful public servant – into a caricature and a laughingstock.

Yet rather than proof of an unethical press corps (and another example of Republican dirty politics), these canards have become the historical backdrop – a kind of accepted reference point – that has sustained the depiction of Gore as a dishonest man.

So, when Gore makes an innocuous mistake, such as remembering inaccurately being at a Texas disaster scene in 1998 with the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency – when he actually was with the director’s deputy – the news media go into a sort of press riot over its Gore-as-serial-exaggerator theme.

Yet, saying you were on a trip with the FEMA director isn’t exactly like claiming you were hanging out with Nelson Mandela.

Indeed, it made no sense to think that the vice president of the United States would believe he was polishing his record by mentioning the FEMA director. Yet that was exactly the ugly conclusion that the Republicans and the press corps reached.

[For the best overall coverage of the media’s pattern of mis-reporting Gore, see Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler ]

By contrast to the front-page treatment given Gore’s FEMA mistake or the dispute over Gore’s description of an overcrowded Florida high school, the press shrugs its shoulders at false statements by Bush and Cheney.

In the second presidential debate, for instance, Bush argued that a stronger hate-crimes law was not needed in Texas because three men were facing the death penalty for the racially motivated murder of James Byrd, a black man dragged to his death behind a pickup truck.

“It’s going to be hard to punish them any worse after they’re put to death,” Bush said, with an out-of-place smile across his face.

But Bush wasn’t telling the truth. One of the three killers actually had received life imprisonment, not the death penalty. Bush had misstated or exaggerated the facts of a major criminal case that had occurred during his tenure as Texas governor.

One could only imagine how the press would have played up a similar mistake by Gore. It would have been all the voters would have heard about for a week.

With its penchant for cookie-cutter “themes” used to define candidates, the press also might have seized on Bush’s smirking comment about the condemned men and used it to remind the public about Bush’s earlier insensitivity when he mimicked condemned murderess Carla Faye Tucker as she was pleading for her life.

“With pursed lips in mock desperation, [Bush said] ‘Please don’t kill me’,” wrote Talk magazine’s conservative columnist Tucker Carlson.

Given the media’s endless search for a personality flaw behind Gore’s supposed exaggerations, a similar standard applied to Bush might have led to a conclusion that he suffers from a personality defect that leads him to mock people he is about to put to death. But the major news media didn’t see Bush’s misstatement or his smirk as much of a story.

The next day, The Washington Post stuck the governor’s exaggeration about the three condemned killers in a story on A6, where the newspaper also mentioned Bush’s accusation that former Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin stole money from the International Monetary Fund.

Bush’s accusation against Chernomyrdin, aimed at undercutting Gore’s work on economic and political reform in Russia, was imprecise and not supported by the known factual record.

There have been suspicions of misconduct against Chernomyrdin, but they have not involved the IMF. After the debate, Chernomyrdin angrily denied Bush’s IMF accusations, which the campaign did not buttress with specific evidence.

The media’s rationale apparently was that Bush’s errors were the kinds of mistakes a candidate can make in the course of a 90-minute debate and the press shouldn’t be too picky. Yet, a very different standard has been applied to Gore.

Covering for Cheney

The imbalance in the press coverage was apparent, too, with Bush’s vice presidential running mate, Dick Cheney, a longtime favorite of official Washington.

At the vice presidential debate, Cheney depicted himself as a self-made multi-millionaire from his years as chairman of Halliburton Co. As for his success in the private sector, Cheney told Democratic nominee Joe Lieberman that “the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.”

After years of hyper-critical coverage of Al Gore for supposedly puffing up his resumé, one might have expected the major media to jump all over this patently false statement. But the big newspapers and the major television networks offered no challenge to Cheney’s comment.

Bloomberg News, a business wire, was one of the few outlets that took note of the variance between Cheney’s assessment and the facts. “Cheney’s reply left out how closely Dallas-based Halliburton’s fortunes are linked to the U.S. government,” Bloomberg News said.

The article noted that Halliburton was a leading defense contractor (with $1.8 billion in contracts from 1996-99) and a major beneficiary of federal loan guarantees (another $1.8 billion in loans and loan guarantees from the U.S.-funded Export-Import Bank during Cheney’s years).

The article also cited internal Ex-Im Bank e-mails showing that Cheney personally lobbied bank chairman James Harmon for a $500 million loan guarantee for Russia’s OAO Tyumen Oil Co. The Ex-Im loan guarantee, approved in March, helped finance Halliburton’s contract with Tyumen.

In further contradiction of Cheney’s self-made-man claim, the article quoted from a speech that Cheney gave to the Ex-Im Bank in 1997. “I see that we have in recent years been involved in projects in the following (countries) supported, in part, through Ex-Im activities: Algeria, Angola, Colombia, the Philippines, Russia, the Czech Republic, Thailand, China, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kuwait, India, Kenya, the Congo, Brazil, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico,” Cheney said.

“Export financing agencies are a key element in making this possible, helping U.S. businesses blend private sector resources with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government,” Cheney added. [Bloomberg News, Oct. 6, 2000]

Fresh from his debate pronouncement about his self-reliance, Cheney took the offensive denouncing Gore for alleged exaggerations. “He [Gore] seems to have a compulsion to embellish his arguments or … his resumé,” Cheney said on Oct. 6. “He seems to have this uncontrollable desire periodically to add to his reputation, to his record, things that aren’t true. That’s worrisome and I think it’s appropriate for us to point that out.”

Normally, hypocrisy is considered a big story, especially when the accuser’s behavior is more egregious than the actions of his target. Yet, Cheney’s own resumé polishing was barely mentioned in the major media. When it was, it was excused as harmless banter.

The media maintained this position even as Cheney went out of his way to defend his self-made man statement in comments on National Public Radio. There, he compounded his deception by insisting that the government contracts with Halliburton had predated his arrival at the company in 1995.

“We did do some” work for the government, Cheney told NPR interviewer Bob Edwards on Oct. 11. “The fact is the company I worked for won a competitive bid before I ever got there. So it’s not as though this were some kind of gift.” [NPR’s Morning Edition]

Contrary to Cheney’s suggestion that he was not responsible for bringing in any of Halliburton’s government business, Halliburton actually moved up the list of Pentagon contractors during Cheney’s tenure, reaching 17 in 1999, the latest available rankings.

The documents, cited in the Bloomberg News article, also made clear that Cheney personally lobbied for loan guarantees from the Ex-Im Bank. The bank uses U.S. taxpayer money to finance the overseas business of U.S. companies, what some critics call “corporate welfare.”

The major media’s one-way microscope on Gore’s credibility missed Cheney’s exaggeration about his career while letting Cheney continue attacking Gore over alleged exaggerations about his career.

Bush & the Environment

Similarly, the press let Gov. Bush escape any serious attention over false and misleading statements about the environment and global warming, issues that will affect the future of the planet. In the Oct. 11 debate, Bush offered conflicting statements within the space of a few minutes, but the big-time press took no notice of the problems.

Bush’s first swing at the issue of pollution-causing industrial plants went this way: “We need to make sure that if we decontrol our plants that there's mandatory -- that the plants must conform to clean air standards, the grand-fathered plants. That's what we did in Texas. No excuses. I mean, you must conform.”

Just minutes later, he had shifted toward what sounded like a voluntary program. “Well, I -- I -- I don't believe in command-and-control out of Washington, D.C. I believe Washington ought to set standards, but I don't -- again, I think we ought to be collaborative at the local levels. And I think we ought to work with people at the local levels.”

Beyond the question of coherence, Bush’s statements seemed contradictory. Either the national government sets standards with compliance required or local governments can be allowed to set their own environmental rules, possibly in cooperation with business. Bush seemed to be having it both ways.

In Texas, Bush’s record suggests that he opposes mandatory standards even at the local and state levels. Bush cites as his most significant environmental accomplishment the setting of new rules for grand-fathered industrial plants, previously exempt from Texas clean air laws – what he apparently was referring to in his debate remarks.

But those plants were asked only to voluntarily comply with the clean air rules. The 1997 law carried no penalties for industries that didn’t seek a permit under the law. It is the kind of standard that polluting industries would salivate over at the national level.

As it turned out, Bush’s administration had drafted the new rules in close collaboration with representatives of the industries being regulated. The role of industry representatives was discovered in confidential memos obtained by the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. [Sierra Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 1999]

Without mandatory requirements, environmentalists argue that as few as 10 out of more than 800 grand-fathered facilities are likely to reduce emissions. [San Antonio Express News, June 4, 1999]

Other Bush comments have raised questions about his commitment to solving pollution problems in Texas and nationally. “I do not believe you can sue your way or regulate your way to clean air and clean water,” Bush told the Dallas Morning News [Dec. 1, 1999]

On global warming, Bush’s debate comments were perhaps even more misleading. “I just – I think there’s been some – some of the scientists. I believe, Mr. Vice President, haven’t they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming?” Bush said.

In reality, the only change within the scientific community has been to revise global warming projections upward, recognizing that the rising temperatures are a greater threat than had been thought. No credible scientist now denies that global warming is a real environmental development that has begun or is about to begin.

Even industry front groups, such as the Greening Earth Society, which supplied Bush some of his data for his Sept. 29 energy address, no longer deny the trends, though they argue that global warming might be beneficial. The Greening Earth Society, which was created by the Western Fuels Association, argues that higher levels of carbon dioxide will spur plant growth.

[For more on Bush’s reliance on Greening Earth data, see our story about Bush’s energy estimates.]

In his debate comment, Bush might have been referring to the recommendation from scientist, Dr. Jim Hansen, that the world first should address less common greenhouse gases, rather than confronting carbon dioxide, a gas emanating from fossil fuels and representing a much more difficult political battle.

Hansen’s suggestion, however, does not mean that scientists are less concerned about the world’s dependence on fossil fuels or the onset of global warming.

In the debate, Bush also protested the Kyoto Treaty aimed at curbing the pollution behind global warming. Bush said, “I’ll tell you one thing I’m not going to do is I’m not going to let the United States carry the burden for cleaning up the world’s air, like the Kyoto Treaty would have done. China and India were exempted from that treaty.”

In fact, China and India were not exempted from the treaty. They weren’t subjected to the same requirements as the developed world, but they committed themselves to reducing emissions and China appears to have stopped its emissions growth. Per person, China and India already have pollution rates that are fractions of the pollution caused by the United States.

At another point in the debate, Bush said the Clinton-Gore administration “took 40 million acres of land out of circulation without consulting local officials. … I just cited an example of the administration just unilaterally acting without any input.”

Bush was referring to a pending administration proposal to protect 40 million acres of roadless areas in national forests from more road building and logging. As the Sierra Club noted in a press release, Bush’s statement was false.

“In fact, the Forest Service conducted 600 public meetings about the proposal nationwide and more than one million Americans urged the administration to strengthen the proposal,” the Sierra Club said. “There was ample opportunity for local officials and others to comment on the proposal.”

Defending his own record in Texas, Bush also asserted that “our water is cleaner now.” False again, the Sierra Club said. “The discharge of industrial toxic pollution into surface waters in Texas increased from 23.2 million pounds in 1995 to 25.2 million pounds in 1998, the last year with data available,” a Sierra Club press release said.

If Gore had made similar misrepresentations, they would have filled the air waves. Bush’s falsehoods passed virtually unnoticed.

Friends in the Press

There is now a long record of the major news media excusing, ignoring or forgetting Bush’s growing list of false, misleading or hypocritical statements on issues from the serious to the trivial.

Though the press occasionally notes Bush’s mangled syntax, the Texas governor seems to have inherited the friendly press coverage that his well-connected father received during his 12 years as vice president and president.

The list of Bush’s deception and hypocrisy is a long one, reaching from his youth to today’s campaign. Here is a sample:

--As a young man, Bush supported the Vietnam War. “My first impulse and first inclination was to support the country,” Bush recalled in an interview. [NYT, July 11, 2000]. But Bush avoided service in the war by joining the Texas Air National Guard.

Bush has said no one to his knowledge helped him get into the National Guard. “I asked to become a pilot,” Bush said. “I met the qualifications, and ended up becoming an F-102 pilot,” The Associated Press reported. Bush insisted that he knew of no special treatment. [AP, July 5, 1999]

But the record indicates that, despite having the lowest acceptable score for entry, Bush jumped over other young men waiting to get into the National Guard.

Other accounts suggest that a “good friend” of Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, then a congressman from Houston who supported the war, weighed in with Ben Barnes, the Texas Speaker of the House, to arrange a slot for George W. Bush. [The Guardian (U.K.), July 29, 1999]

Sometime in late 1967 or early 1968, Barnes “personally asked the top official of the Texas Air National Guard to help George W. Bush obtain a pilot's slot in a Guard fighter squadron,” The Washington Post reported. [Sept. 21, 1999]. On Sept. 27, 1999, Barnes submitted a sworn statement that he helped Bush by contacting Brig. Gen. James M. Rose.

--Bush has a one-year gap in his National Guard duty from 1972-1973 when he was supposed to have transferred from the Texas Air National Guard to the Alabama Air National Guard.

According to the Boston Globe, “In his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly at all. And … for a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen.” [Boston Globe, May, 23, 2000]

Bush has said that he has “some recollection” of attending drills that year, but has not been more specific. Under Air National Guard rules at the time, anyone who did not report to required drills could be inducted in the draft to serve in Vietnam, according to the Globe. That never happened to Bush.

The press has reported these gaps in Bush’s record, but has not pressed the issue as a story worthy of determined pursuit or pundit show commentary. Similarly, Bush’s implausible answers have not led to questions from the media about Bush’s veracity.

By contrast, the press has dwelled on Gore’s supposed exaggerations about the dangers he faced as a U.S. Army reporter in Vietnam. Gore volunteered for the war, although he and his father, a senator from Tennessee, opposed it.

It is not clear how today’s reporters, who were not present with Gore in Vietnam, would have anyway of checking how much danger Gore might have encountered. But they have judged him a liar nonetheless.

--Early in the campaign, Bush faced short-lived press scrutiny of his possible drug use. To date, Bush has never answered the question of whether, when, how much or specifically what illicit drugs he used in his early adulthood.

The press accepted Bush’s carefully parsed statement in which Bush denied recent drug use while refusing to acknowledge earlier drug use.

While ducking questions about cocaine and other illegal drugs, Bush has confessed to drinking heavily well into his adult years. As part of his biography, he has described how he woke up after his 40th birthday party with a hangover and decided to stop drinking for good.

“It’s hard to usher in the responsibility era if you behave irresponsibly,” Bush has declared even while avoiding questions about his own youthful indiscretions. [U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 16, 1998]

By contrast, Gore has admitted smoking marijuana as a young man.

--As Texas governor, Bush boasts that he knows how to work in a bi-partisan manner. One of his examples is the expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program [CHIP]. “In 1999, Governor Bush and the Texas Legislature worked together to implement the CHIPs program for more than 423,000 children,” the Bush campaign has said.

Yet, according to the Houston Chronicle, Bush tried to block the Democratic initiative in the Texas Legislature to expand the CHIP program to children of parents earning up to twice the federal poverty level (about $33,600 for a family of four). Bush favored instead covering parents up to only 150 percent of poverty (about $25,200 for a family of four). [Houston Chronicle, Aug. 30, 2000].

After losing the legislative battle, Bush turned around and claimed credit for the CHIP expansion and his success in working with Democrats.

--Bush has made as a centerpiece of his campaign the theme that he would change the “tone” of Washington and restore “dignity” to the White House.

Yet, during the Republican primaries, the Bush campaign targeted Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for personal attacks. By fall 1999, McCain, who spent five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, had narrowed Bush’s lead and the Bush assault began.

In October 1999, McCain said, “'Apparently the memo has gone out from the Bush campaign to start attacking John McCain, something that I'd hoped wouldn't happen.”' [AP, Oct. 26, 1999]

Bush’s negative attacks intensified after McCain won the New Hampshire primary. Seeking to rebound in South Carolina, Bush visited Bob Jones University and refrained from criticizing the school’s ban on interracial dating and its anti-Catholic views. Bush also wouldn’t take a position on removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse.

After winning the South Carolina primary, Bush apologized for having spoken at Bob Jones without "disassociating myself from anti-Catholic sentiments and racial prejudice."

--As McCain remained a threat, Bush’s campaign ran a misleading ad attacking the senator for not supporting breast cancer research.

The ad cited an omnibus spending bill, which McCain voted against not because of the breast cancer research but because of the enormous spending included in the entire package. McCain complained, but the Bush attack strategy worked.

--After securing the Republican nomination, Bush renewed his pledge to run a positive general election campaign. But again, the promise lasted only until the governor found himself lagging in the polls.

Bush again broke his promise, unleashing his campaign to tear down Gore’s character, ironically, targeting Gore’s credibility.

The news media observed the changed tactics but took little notice of how Bush was violating his own pledge.

Instead, the press happily joined in repeating many of the canards about Gore’s honesty, these largely mythical and exaggerated press accounts that the media have repeated over and over for many months -- Love Story, Love Canal, “inventing” the Internet, etc., etc.

A Strategy of Destruction

The Republican strategy to destroy Al Gore’s reputation actually had been underway for many months.

The New York Times described what it called “a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy,” according to an article on Oct. 15.

In one example, the Times noted that the Republicans successfully portrayed Gore as a liar for having talked about his work on the family’s farm as a boy. Republican National Chairman Jim Nicholson mocked Gore as a pampered city boy misrepresenting his past.

“Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore’s father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm,” the Times noted in one neutrally phrased passage. While praising the effectiveness of the Republican strategy, the newspaper did not offer any self-criticisms about its role in spreading many of the Republican calumnies.

As part of the recent imbalanced coverage, journalists averted their eyes when Bush told whoppers in the presidential debates.

--In one case, Bush reprised his contention that he is not a man who needs a focus group or polls to tell him what to think.

Bush said, “I think you've got to look at how one has handled responsibility in office, whether or not … you've got the capacity to convince people to follow; whether or not one makes decisions based upon sound principles; or whether or not you rely upon polls and focus groups on how to decide what the course of action is. We've got too much polling and focus groups going on in Washington today. We need decisions made on sound principles.”

Left out was that Bush’s campaign has spent roughly $1 million on polls and focus groups during this campaign, about equal to the Gore campaign’s spending, according to a report by NBC News. [Oct. 6, 2000]. Indeed, Bush changed his campaign slogan from “Compassionate Conservative” to “Real Plans for Real People” because of poll analysis done by his campaign.

--In the first debate, Bush tried to make an issue out of President Clinton’s practice of allowing his friends and supporters to sleep over at the White House.

“I believe they've moved that sign, ‘The buck stops here,’ from the Oval Office desk to ‘The buck stops here’ on the Lincoln bedroom, and that's not good for the country. It's not right. We need to have a new look about how we conduct ourselves in office,” Bush said.

What Bush left out was that since he took office in 1995, he has had 203 guests stay over at the Governor’s Mansion in Austin, Texas. More than half of them have contributed to his campaign, amounting to $2.2 million. [The Public I]

The news media took little or no notice of Bush's hypocrisy.

--In the first presidential debate, Bush also claimed that he, as president, would not have the authority to override the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug RU-486. But he did not mention that his campaign supported the initiative in Congress to ban the drug, nor did he indicate that he supports sending the issue back to the FDA for more research.

He also ducked the issue of what personnel changes he would make at the FDA and whether those changes would have an impact on the approval of RU-486. Bush had previously stated that he would order his FDA appointees to review the decision.

--In perhaps Bush’s most obvious whopper in the first presidential debate, the Republican claimed that the Gore campaign had out-spent his. “This man has out-spent me,” Bush said.

In fact, Bush has raised and spent more than twice as much money in this election as Gore has raised and spent.

There has been no explanation from the Bush campaign about this remarkable claim and the national news media have not pressed for one, as the media certainly would have if Gore had made a similarly false statement.

Rather than deal with Bush’s numerous debate distortions, the press flew into a frenzy over Gore’s mistake about the FEMA director.

The press was whipped on by the Bush campaign. Its chief strategist Karl Rove compared Gore to “Zelig,” a Woody Allen character who put himself at the elbow of important people.

The press also zeroed in on Gore’s supposedly false statement about a 15-year-old girl in a Florida high school who had gone without a desk because of overcrowding. The major media accepted the denial of the school’s principal about the overcrowding problem and ignored the reporting from the local newspaper which backed Gore’s account.

The New York Times, for instance, reported that “the fact is, the girl has a desk, and went without one only a day.” The article contained no attribution for this conclusion. [NYT, Oct. 6, 2000]

A day earlier, however, the local newspaper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, had a different version. “Kailey [Ellis, the 15-year-old girl] said she moved from a biology classroom where students had to sit on the floor to another that was short on desks on Aug. 31 – the ninth day of school. She stood for one 50-minute period, and the following day a classmate gave up his desk for her” and the classmate then went without a desk for the next week.
“I’m not still standing,” Ellis told the newspaper, “but there’s still kids that have to sit on the side of desks and there’s still not enough room in the classes.” [Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Oct. 5, 2000]

There was no indication that The New York Times, the self-proclaimed “newspaper of record,” had made any attempt to ascertain the truth behind the school-overcrowding story. The Times apparently just accepted the account of the principal whose reputation had been put in question by the national attention on his school.

Cause and Effect

While this botched and biased campaign coverage might seem trivial to some, its cumulative effect has been to transform the presidential election campaign from one that had been dominated by issues to one controlled by the Republican/media’s harsh assessment of Gore’s character and credibility.

What has made this development a direct threat to the democratic process is that the media’s treatment has been extraordinarily one-sided and often erroneous.

The national press corps has acted as a political collaborator with the Republicans in a scheme to defame Al Gore and effectively hand the election to George W. Bush.

If George W. Bush is elected president on Nov. 7, he will owe a huge debt to a national press corps that has become a national disgrace.

Sam Parry, managing editor of Consortiumnews.com, works for Sierra Club's Human Rights & the Environment Campaign.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:58 am

Protecting Bush-Cheney Redux
by Robert Parry
March 7, 2004

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

The New York Times and other major media outlets are at it again: parroting Bush-Cheney campaign themes against a Democrat while turning a blind eye to equal or worse offenses by Republicans. This new case of protecting Bush-Cheney is built around the theme that Sen. John Kerry is a flip-flopper, while ignoring examples of George W. Bush’s own flip-flops.

The media’s eagerness to adopt this “conventional wisdom” on Kerry follows the pattern of Campaign 2000 when the Times joined the media pack in portraying Al Gore as a liar while buying into the image that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were straight-shooters, despite an abundance of evidence that they weren’t. Even four years later – after the deceptions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and disclosures about the abuse of scientific research to make it fit Bush’s agenda – the national news media clings to this precious notion that Bush is no liar.

Now, the pattern repeats itself. On March 6, in a lengthy front-page Times article entitled “Kerry’s Shifts: Nuanced Ideas Or Flip-Flops,” reporter David M. Halbfinger dissects Kerry’s statements on issues such as gay marriage and “defines” Kerry just the way the Republican National Committee drew it up: a waffler who takes both sides of issues. No where in the piece is there any reference to Bush’s history of flip-flopping on issues of grave consequence to the world, such as his promises to curb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; his pledges to maintain a balanced federal budget and keep his hands off the Social Security trust fund; and his assurances that he would run a “humble” foreign policy that wouldn’t stretch U.S. forces with “nation-building” tasks.

No Context

Bush’s inconsistencies are ignored even in a context, such as Bush’s direct personal attacks on Kerry’s credibility, when Bush’s own record and hypocrisy would seem especially relevant.

As in Campaign 2000, the Times and other publications seem determined to apply double standards that effectively give Bush and Cheney a walk. The logic behind this pattern is that it buys journalists protection from right-wing press attack groups, which have long proven that they can damage or destroy the careers of journalists who get tagged with the “liberal” label.

It is far safer and more lucrative for journalists to protect their right flanks by putting on blinders on their right side, so they don’t see certain facts that might require courage to report. That way, they can tout their tough anti-Democratic writing as proof they’re “not liberal,” knowing there is no serious threat to their careers from the left.

The careers of virtually all the journalists who made a mockery of Campaign 2000 continue to thrive, while there are many examples of journalists whose reporting angered the conservatives – the likes of former San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb – who paid a steep price. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Next Chapter

And, as surely as night follows day, the next page in the “Kerry-as-flip-flopper” script will be that Kerry “failed” to prevent the Bush-Cheney team from defining him as a flip-flopper. That will give the talking-head pundits another opportunity to reprise Kerry’s alleged offenses while leaving out Bush’s and, of course, never mentioning the news media’s role in creating this unbalanced impression. Soon, it will seem like bias for anyone even to suggest that Bush’s flip-flops, too.

So, as aspiring star reporters head off into another career-making presidential campaign, it is worth reflecting on three previous stories published by Consortiumnews.com: One is “Protecting Bush-Cheney,” an account of the double standards in Campaign 2000; the second is this year’s "Kerry & the 'Special Interest' Hit Piece," an account of the Washington Post’s deceptive reporting on “special interest” donations; and the third is “Bush’s Great Debate – With Himself,” which details some of the momentous flip-flips of Bush’s first term.

You’re unlikely to see these realities acknowledged in the mainstream media, which seems eager to protect Bush-Cheney once again.

Robert Parry is a former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who in the 1980s broke many of the stories that are now known as the Iran-Contra Affair. He is author of the book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 2:59 am

Al Gore v. the Media
by Robert Parry
February 1, 2000

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

To read the major newspapers and to watch the TV pundit shows, one can't avoid the impression that many in the national press corps have decided that Vice President Al Gore is unfit to be elected the next president of the United States.

Across the board -- from The Washington Post to The Washington Times, from The New York Times to the New York Post, from NBC's cable networks to the traveling campaign press corps -- journalists don't even bother to disguise their contempt for Gore anymore.

At one early Democratic debate, a gathering of about 300 reporters in a nearby press room hissed and hooted at Gore's answers. Meanwhile, every perceived Gore misstep, including his choice of clothing, is treated as a new excuse to put him on a psychiatrist's couch and find him wanting.

Journalists freely call him "delusional," "a liar" and "Zelig." Yet, to back up these sweeping denunciations, the media has relied on a series of distorted quotes and tendentious interpretations of his words, at times following scripts written by the national Republican leadership.

In December, for instance, the news media generated dozens of stories about Gore's supposed claim that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump. "I was the one that started it all," he was quoted as saying. This "gaffe" then was used to recycle other situations in which Gore allegedly exaggerated his role or, as some writers put it, told "bold-faced lies."

But behind these examples of Gore's "lies" was some very sloppy journalism. The Love Canal flap started when The Washington Post and The New York Times misquoted Gore on a key point and cropped out the context of another sentence to give readers a false impression of what he meant.

The error was then exploited by national Republicans and amplified endlessly by the rest of the news media, even after the Post and Times grudgingly filed corrections.

Almost as remarkable, though, is how the two newspapers finally agreed to run corrections. They were effectively shamed into doing so by high school students in New Hampshire and by an Internet site called The Daily Howler, edited by a stand-up comic named Bob Somerby. [http://www.dailyhowler.com/]

Though the major media often portrays the Internet as a bastion for crazed conspiracy theories, the nation's prestige newspapers appeared to have sunk into their own pattern of reckless journalism.

The Love Canal quote controversy began on Nov. 30 when Gore was speaking to a group of high school students in Concord, N.H. He was exhorting the students to reject cynicism and to recognize that individual citizens can effect important changes.

As an example, he cited a high school girl from Toone, Tenn., a town that had experienced problems with toxic waste. She brought the issue to the attention of Gore's congressional office in the late 1970s.

"I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing," Gore told the students. "I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue, and Toone, Tennessee -- that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After the hearings, Gore said, "we passed a major national law to clean up hazardous dump sites. And we had new efforts to stop the practices that ended up poisoning water around the country. We've still got work to do. But we made a huge difference. And it all happened because one high school student got involved."

The context of Gore's comment was clear. What sparked his interest in the toxic-waste issue was the situation in Toone -- "that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

After learning about the Toone situation, Gore looked for other examples and "found" a similar case at Love Canal. He was not claiming to have been the first one to discover Love Canal, which already had been evacuated. He simply needed other case studies for the hearings.

The next day, The Washington Post stripped Gore's comments of their context and gave them a negative twist. "Gore boasted about his efforts in Congress 20 years ago to publicize the dangers of toxic waste," the Post reported. "'I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal,' he said, referring to the Niagara homes evacuated in August 1978 because of chemical contamination. 'I had the first hearing on this issue.' … Gore said his efforts made a lasting impact. 'I was the one that started it all,' he said." [WP, Dec. 1, 1999]

The New York Times ran a slightly less contentious story with the same false quote: "I was the one that started it all."

The Republican National Committee spotted Gore's alleged boast and was quick to fax around its own take. "Al Gore is simply unbelievable -- in the most literal sense of that term," declared Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson. "It's a pattern of phoniness -- and it would be funny if it weren't also a little scary."

The GOP release then doctored Gore's quote a bit more. After all, it would be grammatically incorrect to have said, "I was the one that started it all." So, the Republican handout fixed Gore's grammar to say, "I was the one who started it all."

In just one day, the key quote had transformed from "that was the one that started it all" to "I was the one that started it all" to "I was the one who started it all."

Instead of taking the offensive against these misquotes, Gore tried to head off the controversy by clarifying his meaning and apologizing if anyone got the wrong impression. But the fun was just beginning.

The national pundit shows quickly picked up the story of Gore's new exaggeration.

"Let's talk about the 'love' factor here," chortled Chris Matthews of CNBC's Hardball. "Here's the guy who said he was the character Ryan O'Neal was based on in ‘Love Story.’ … It seems to me … he's now the guy who created the Love Canal [case]. I mean, isn't this getting ridiculous? … Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"

Matthews turned to his baffled guest, Lois Gibbs, the Love Canal resident who is widely credited with bringing the issue to public attention. She sounded confused about why Gore would claim credit for discovering Love Canal, but defended Gore's hard work on the issue.

"I actually think he's done a great job," Gibbs said. "I mean, he really did work, when nobody else was working, on trying to define what the hazards were in this country and how to clean it up and helping with the Superfund and other legislation." [CNBC's Hardball, Dec. 1, 1999]

The next morning, Post political writer Ceci Connolly highlighted Gore's boast and placed it in his alleged pattern of falsehoods. "Add Love Canal to the list of verbal missteps by Vice President Gore," she wrote. "The man who mistakenly claimed to have inspired the movie 'Love Story' and to have invented the Internet says he didn't quite mean to say he discovered a toxic waste site." [WP, Dec. 2, 1999]

That night, CNBC's Hardball returned to Gore's Love Canal quote by playing the actual clip but altering the context by starting Gore's comments with the words, "I found a little town…"

"It reminds me of Snoopy thinking he's the Red Baron," laughed Chris Matthews. "I mean how did he get this idea? Now you've seen Al Gore in action. I know you didn't know that he was the prototype for Ryan O'Neal's character in ‘Love Story’ or that he invented the Internet. He now is the guy who discovered Love Canal."

Matthews compared the vice president to "Zelig," the Woody Allen character whose face appeared at an unlikely procession of historic events. "What is it, the Zelig guy who keeps saying, 'I was the main character in ‘Love Story.’ I invented the Internet. I invented Love Canal."

Former secretary of labor Robert Reich, who favors Gore's rival, former Sen. Bill Bradley, added, "I don't know why he feels that he has to exaggerate and make some of this stuff up."

The following day, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post elaborated on Gore's pathology of deception. "Again, Al Gore has told a whopper," the Post wrote. "Again, he's been caught red-handed and again, he has been left sputtering and apologizing. This time, he falsely took credit for breaking the Love Canal story. … Yep, another Al Gore bold-faced lie."

The editorial continued: "Al Gore appears to have as much difficulty telling the truth as his boss, Bill Clinton. But Gore's lies are not just false, they're outrageously, stupidly false. It's so easy to determine that he's lying, you have to wonder if he wants to be found out.

"Does he enjoy the embarrassment? Is he hell-bent on destroying his own campaign? … Of course, if Al Gore is determined to turn himself into a national laughingstock, who are we to stand in his way?"

On ABC's "This Week" pundit show, there was head-shaking amazement about Gore's supposed Love Canal lie.

"Gore, again, revealed his Pinocchio problem," declared former Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. "Says he was the model for 'Love Story,' created the Internet. And this time, he sort of discovered Love Canal."

A bemused Cokie Roberts chimed in, "Isn't he saying that he really discovered Love Canal when he had hearings on it after people had been evacuated?"

"Yeah," added Bill Kristol, editor of Murdoch's Weekly Standard. Kristol then read Gore's supposed quote: "I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I was the one that started it all." [ABC’s This Week, Dec. 5, 1999]

The Love Canal controversy soon moved beyond the Washington-New York power axis.

On Dec. 6, The Buffalo News ran an editorial entitled, "Al Gore in Fantasyland," that echoed the words of RNC chief Nicholson. It stated, "Never mind that he didn't invent the Internet, serve as the model for 'Love Story' or blow the whistle on Love Canal. All of this would be funny if it weren't so disturbing."

The next day, the right-wing Washington Times judged Gore crazy. "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings," the Times wrote. "Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusional' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is actually not present … a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'"

The editorial denounced Gore as "a politician who not only manufactures gross, obvious lies about himself and his achievements but appears to actually believe these confabulations."

But The Washington Times' own credibility was shaky. For its editorial attack on Gore, the newspaper not only printed the bogus quote, "I was the one that started it all," but attributed the quote to The Associated Press, which had actually quoted Gore correctly, ("That was the one...").

The Washington Times' challenge to Gore's sanity also was reminiscent of its 1988 publication of false rumors that Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment. [As for the Times' insinuations about Gore's "delusional" behavior, it might be noted that the newspaper's founder and financial backer, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon, considers himself the Messiah.]

Yet, while the national media was excoriating Gore, the Concord students were learning more than they had expected about how media and politics work in modern America.

For days, the students pressed for a correction from The Washington Post and The New York Times. But the prestige papers balked, insisting that the error was insignificant.

"The part that bugs me is the way they nit pick," said Tara Baker, a Concord High junior. "[But] they should at least get it right." [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

When the David Letterman show made Love Canal the jumping off point for a joke list: "Top 10 Achievements Claimed by Al Gore," the students responded with a press release entitled "Top 10 Reasons Why Many Concord High Students Feel Betrayed by Some of the Media Coverage of Al Gore's Visit to Their School." [Boston Globe, Dec. 26, 1999]

The Web site, The Daily Howler, also was hectoring what it termed a "grumbling editor" at the Post to correct the error.

Finally, on Dec. 7, a week after Gore's comment, the Post published a partial correction, tucked away as the last item in a corrections box. But the Post still misled readers about what Gore actually said.

The Post correction read: "In fact, Gore said, 'That was the one that started it all,' referring to the congressional hearings on the subject that he called."

The revision fit with the Post's insistence that the two quotes meant pretty much the same thing, but again, the newspaper was distorting Gore's clear intent by attaching "that" to the wrong antecedent. From the full quote, it's obvious the "that" refers to the Toone toxic waste case, not to Gore's hearings.

Three days later, The New York Times followed suit with a correction of its own, but again without fully explaining Gore's position. "They fixed how they misquoted him, but they didn't tell the whole story," commented Lindsey Roy, another Concord High junior.

While the students voiced disillusionment, the two reporters involved showed no remorse for their mistake. "I really do think that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion," said Katharine Seelye of the Times. "It was one word."

The Post's Ceci Connolly even defended her inaccurate rendition of Gore's quote as something of a journalistic duty. "We have an obligation to our readers to alert them [that] this [Gore's false boasting] continues to be something of a habit," she said. [AP, Dec. 14, 1999]

The half-hearted corrections also did not stop newspapers around the country from continuing to use the bogus quote.

A Dec. 9 editorial in the Lancaster [Pa.] New Era even published the polished misquote that the Republican National Committee had stuck in a press release: "I was the one who started it all."

The New Era then went on to psychoanalyze Gore. "Maybe the lying is a symptom of a more deeply-rooted problem: Al Gore doesn't know who he is," the editorial stated. "The vice president is a serial prevaricator."

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writer Michael Ruby concluded that "the Gore of '99" was full of lies. He "suddenly discovers elastic properties in the truth," Ruby declared. "He invents the Internet, inspires the fictional hero of 'Love Story,' blows the whistle on Love Canal. Except he didn't really do any of those things." [Dec. 12, 1999]

The National Journal's Stuart Taylor Jr. cited the Love Canal case as proof that President Clinton was a kind of political toxic waste contaminant. The problem was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain. Gore -- self-described inspiration for the novel Love Story, discoverer of Love Canal, co-creator of the Internet," Taylor wrote. [National Journal, Dec. 18, 1999]

On Dec. 19, GOP chairman Nicholson was back on the offensive. Far from apologizing for the RNC's misquotes, Nicholson was reprising the allegations of Gore's falsehoods that had been repeated so often that they had taken on the color of truth: "Remember, too, that this is the same guy who says he invented the Internet, inspired Love Story and discovered Love Canal."

More than two weeks after the Post correction, the bogus quote was still spreading. The Providence Journal lashed out at Gore in an editorial that reminded readers that Gore had said about Love Canal, "I was the one that started it all." The editorial then turned to the bigger picture:

"This is the third time in the last few months that Mr. Gore has made a categorical assertion that is -- well, untrue. … There is an audacity about Mr. Gore's howlers that is stunning. … Perhaps it is time to wonder what it is that impels Vice President Gore to make such preposterous claims, time and again." [Providence Journal, Dec. 23, 1999]

On New Year's Eve, a column in The Washington Times returned again to the theme of Gore's pathological lies.

Entitled "Liar, Liar; Gore's Pants on Fire," the column by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder concluded that "when Al Gore lies, it's without any apparent reason. Mr. Gore had already established his credits on environmental issues, for better or worse, and had even been anointed 'Mr. Ozone.' So why did he have to tell students in Concord, New Hampshire, ‘I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on the issue. I was the one that started it all.'" [WT, Dec. 31, 1999]

The characterization of Gore as a clumsy liar continued into the new year. Again in The Washington Times, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. put Gore's falsehoods in the context of a sinister strategy:

"Deposit so many deceits and falsehoods on the public record that the public and the press simply lose interest in the truth. This, the Democrats thought, was the method behind Mr. Gore's many brilliantly conceived little lies. Except that Mr. Gore's lies are not brilliantly conceived. In fact, they are stupid. He gets caught every time … Just last month, Mr. Gore got caught claiming … to have been the whistle-blower for 'discovering Love Canal.'" [WT, Jan. 7, 2000]

It was unclear where Tyrrell got the quote, "discovering Love Canal," since not even the false quotes had put those words in Gore's mouth. But Tyrrell's description of what he perceived as Gore's strategy of flooding the public debate with "deceits and falsehoods" might fit better with what the news media and the Republicans had been doing to Gore.

Beyond Love Canal, the other prime examples of Gore's "lies" -- inspiring the male lead in Love Story and working to create the Internet -- also stemmed from a quarrelsome reading of his words, followed by exaggeration and ridicule rather than a fair assessment of how his comments and the truth matched up.

The earliest of these Gore "lies," dating back to 1997, was Gore's expressed belief that he and his wife Tipper had served as models for the lead characters in the sentimental bestseller and movie, Love Story.

When the author, Erich Segal, was asked about Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones. But Segal said the female lead, Jenny, was not modeled after Tipper Gore. [NYT, Dec. 14, 1997]

Rather than treating this distinction as a minor point of legitimate confusion, the news media concluded that Gore had willfully lied. The media made the case an indictment against Gore’s honesty.

In doing so, however, the media repeatedly misstated the facts, insisting that Segal had denied that Gore was the model for the lead male character. In reality, Segal had confirmed that Gore was, at least partly, the inspiration for the character, Barrett, played by Ryan O'Neal.

Some journalists seemed to understand the nuance but still could not resist denigrating Gore's honesty.

For instance, in its attack on Gore over the Love Canal quote, the Boston Herald conceded that Gore "did provide material" for Segal's book, but the newspaper added that it was "for a minor character." [Boston Herald, Dec. 5, 1999] That, of course, was untrue, since the Barrett character was one of Love Story's two principal characters

The media's treatment of the Internet comment followed a similar course. Gore's statement may have been poorly phrased, but its intent was clear: he was trying to say that he worked in Congress to help develop the Internet. Gore wasn’t claiming to have "invented" the Internet or to have been the "father of the Internet," as many journalists have asserted.

Gore's actual comment, in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that aired on March 9, 1999, was as follows: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Republicans quickly went to work on Gore's statement. In press releases, they noted that the precursor of the Internet, called ARPANET, existed in 1971, a half dozen years before Gore entered Congress. But ARPANET was a tiny networking of about 30 universities, a far cry from today's "information superhighway," ironically a phrase widely credited to Gore.

As the media clamor arose about Gore's supposed claim that he had invented the Internet, Gore's spokesman Chris Lehane tried to explain. He noted that Gore "was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." [AP, March 11, 1999]

There was no disputing Lehane's description of Gore's lead congressional role in developing today's Internet. But the media was off and running.

Routinely, the reporters lopped off the introductory clause "during my service in the United States Congress" or simply jumped to word substitutions, asserting that Gore claimed that he "invented" the Internet which carried the notion of a hands-on computer engineer.

Whatever imprecision may have existed in Gore's original comment, it paled beside the distortions of what Gore clearly meant. While excoriating Gore's phrasing as an exaggeration, the media engaged in its own exaggeration.

Yet, faced with the national media putting a hostile cast on his Internet statement -- that he was willfully lying -- Gore chose again to express his regret at his choice of words.

Now, with the Love Canal controversy, this media pattern of distortion has returned with a vengeance. The national news media has put a false quote into Gore's mouth and then extrapolated from it to the point of questioning his sanity. Even after the quote was acknowledged to be wrong, the words continued to be repeated, again becoming part of Gore's record.

From the media’s hostile tone, one might conclude that reporters have reached a collective decision that Gore should be disqualified from the campaign.

At times, the media has jettisoned any pretext of objectivity. According to various accounts of the first Democratic debate in Hanover, N.H., reporters openly mocked Gore as they sat in a nearby press room and watched the debate on television.

Several journalists later described the incident, but without overt criticism of their colleagues. As The Daily Howler observed, Time's Eric Pooley cited the reporters' reaction only to underscore how Gore was failing in his "frenzied attempt to connect."

"The ache was unmistakable -- and even touching -- but the 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out by it," Pooley wrote. "Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

Hotline's Howard Mortman described the same behavior as the reporters "groaned, laughed and howled" at Gore's comments.

Later, during an appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Salon's Jake Tapper cited the Hanover incident, too. "I can tell you that the only media bias I have detected in terms of a group media bias was, at the first debate between Bill Bradley and Al Gore, there was hissing for Gore in the media room up at Dartmouth College. The reporters were hissing Gore, and that's the only time I've ever heard the press room boo or hiss any candidate of any party at any event." [See The Daily Howler, http://www.dailyhowler.com/, Dec. 14, 1999]

Traditionally, journalists pride themselves in maintaining deadpan expressions in such public settings, at most chuckling at a comment or raising an eyebrow, but never demonstrating derision for a public figure.

Reasons for this widespread media contempt for Gore vary. Conservative outlets, such as Rev. Moon's Washington Times and Murdoch's media empire, clearly want to ensure the election of a Republican conservative to the White House. They are always eager to advance that cause.

In the mainstream press, many reporters may feel that savaging Gore protects them from the "liberal" label that can so damage a reporter's career. Others simply might be venting residual anger over President Clinton's survival of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. They might believe that Gore's political destruction would be a fitting end to the Clinton administration.

Reporters apparently sense, too, that there is no career danger in showing open hostility toward Clinton's vice president.

Yet, the national media's prejudice against Gore -- now including fabrication of damaging quotes and misrepresentation of his meaning -- raises a troubling question about this year's election and the future health of American democracy:

How can voters have any hope of expressing an informed judgment when the media intervenes to transform one of the principal candidates -- an individual who, by all accounts, is a well-qualified public official and a decent family man -- into a national laughingstock?

What hope does American democracy have when the media can misrepresent a candidate’s words so thoroughly that they become an argument for his mental instability -- and all the candidate feels he can do about the misquotes is to apologize?

As The Daily Howler's Somerby observes, the concern about deception and its corrosive effect on democracy dates back to the ancient Greeks.

"Democracy won't work, the great Socrates cried, because sophists will create mass confusion," Somerby recalled at his Web site. "Here in our exciting, much-hyped new millennium, the Great Greek's vision remains crystal clear." [The Daily Howler, Jan. 13, 2000]

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 3:01 am

Moon's Billions & Washington's Blind Eye
by Robert Parry
(c) Copyright 1997

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Somewhere, some political Einstein must have figured out a mathematical equation for computing how much money it takes to gain "respectability" in Washington. It would read something like "perceived respectability equals genuine decency or depravity (expressed in plus or minus numbers), plus money spent on favorable image-building minus money spent by detractors to boost the negatives, times some factor for the quality of the pro and con spinmasters."

Over the past quarter century, Rev. Sun Myung Moon is someone who has practiced the limits of this "theory of perceived respectability." He has spent billions of dollars in the United States to gain a political standing that would seem unthinkable without counting the money.

In Korea during his early years as a "messiah," Moon lustily took on the job of "blessing the wombs" of Korean women supposedly corrupted by Satan's seduction of Eve eons ago. Because of these "purification" rituals, he spent some time in jail on morals charges.

Since then, Moon has declared his goal of ruling the world through a Korea-based theocracy that would "digest" those foolish enough to try to retain their individuality. During Moon's first forays into the United States, hundreds of anguished parents charged that he was "brainwashing" their children into becoming robotic followers who hawked flowers and cheap toys.

Next, a congressional investigation in the late 1970s exposed Moon as an intelligence agent for the South Korean government which was engaged in a clandestine operation to penetrate the U.S. Congress, Executive Branch, news media and academia. U.S. intelligence files of the time showed that Moon had close connections, too, with leading Asian organized crime figures.

Expanding his unsavory connections in 1980, Moon's operatives rushed to congratulate right-wing military thugs who seized power along with drug lords in Bolivia, an event that became known as the Cocaine Coup and gave rise to the modern cocaine cartels.

But Moon must have understood the "respectability" equation well. With the election of Ronald Reagan, Moon began pouring hundreds of millions of dollars a year into conservative causes. He launched The Washington Times daily newspaper in 1982. He funded dozens of front groups. He bought political allies by the score with fat speaking fees and side business deals. His costly operations blasted anyone who crossed the Reagan-Bush administrations.

Justice Protection

Despite a brief stint in federal prison for tax fraud -- a prosecution which Reagan's Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to halt -- Moon saw his "respectability" climb through the 1980s. According to Justice Department documents recently released under the Freedom of Information Act, Moon also won protection from the Reagan-Bush administrations from any new criminal investigation.

Federal authorities rebuffed hundreds of requests -- many from common citizens -- for examination of Moon's foreign ties and money sources. Typical of the responses was a May 18, 1989, letter from assistant attorney general Carol T. Crawford rejecting the possibility that Moon's organization be required to divulge its foreign-funded propaganda under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

"With respect to FARA, the Department is faced with First Amendment considerations involving the free exercise of religion," Crawford stated. "As you know, the First Amendment's protection of religious freedom is not limited to the traditional, well-established religions."

A 1992 PBS documentary about Moon's political empire and its free-spending habits started another flurry of citizen demands for an investigation, according to the Justice Department files.

One letter stated, "I write in consternation and disgust at the apparent support, or at least the sheltering, of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a foreign agent ... who has subverted the American political system for the past 20 years. ... Did Reagan and/or Bush receive financial support from Moon or his agents during any of their election campaigns in violation of federal law?" The names of letter writers were withheld for privacy reasons.

Another letter complained that "apparently Moon gave the Bush and Reagan campaigns millions of dollars in support and helped fund the [Nicaraguan] contras as well as sponsoring rallys [sic] in 50 states to support the Persian Gulf war. No wonder the Justice Department turns a blind eye?"

"I feel it is necessary to find out who is financing the operation and why other countries are trying to direct the policies of the United States," wrote another citizen. "If even one-half of the allegations are true, Moon and his assistants belong in jail rather than being welcomed and supported at the highest level of Washington."

The 'Green Card' Defense

As demands mounted for Moon and his front groups to register as foreign agents, the Justice Department added a new argument to its reasons to say no. In an Aug. 19, 1992, letter, assistant attorney general Robert S. Mueller dismissed a suggestion that the Moon-backed American Freedom Council should register under FARA because Moon, a South Korean citizen, had obtained U.S. resident-alien status -- or a "green card."

"In the absence of a foreign principal, there is no requirement for registration," Mueller wrote. "The Reverend Sun Myung Moon enjoys the status of permanent resident alien in the United States and therefore does not fall within FARA's definition of foreign principal. It follows that the Act is not applicable to the [American Freedom] Council because of its association with Reverend Moon."

The rote denials continued with little change into the Clinton years. But the legal situation with Moon may be in flux. As immigration laws were being toughened in 1996 to permit easier deportation of aliens convicted of past crimes, Moon -- a felon from his tax-evasion conviction -- relocated his base of operation from New York to Uruguay.

Citing privacy laws, U.S. officials declined to tell me if Moon has renounced his "green card." Moon's spokesmen also have not responded to questions about Moon's immigration status. A consular official at Uruguay's embassy in Washington told me that Moon does not now have residency status in Uruguay and still travels to Uruguay with a multiple-entry visa on his South Korean passport. But if Moon does shift his permanent residency to Uruguay, that could eliminate some obstacles to investigation of his political operations here.

Still, the Reagan-Bush administrations went beyond just blocking criminal investigations of Moon. Despite evidence of Moon's collaboration with South Korean intelligence in the 1970s and his high-profile support of the Bolivian Cocaine Coup regime in 1980, the Republicans seem to have shut down any significant intelligence collection about Moon's activities after taking power in 1981.

Responses to recent FOIA requests indicate that only scattered newspaper clips about Moon found their way into U.S. intelligence files during the Reagan-Bush years. In a recent interview, a senior U.S. official confirmed that there is little fresh intelligence about the secret sources of Moon's money or his possible collaboration in the foreign penetration of U.S. institutions.

Spying on Americans

Perhaps even more remarkable, the Reagan administration showed greater respect for Moon's constitutional rights than those of some U.S. citizens. Starting in 1981, the FBI cooperated with one of Moon's front groups during a five-year nationwide investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a domestic organization critical of Reagan's policies in Central America, according to FBI documents cited by The Boston Globe. [April 20, 1988]

In 1981, the FBI began collecting reports from Moon's Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP) which was spying on CISPES supporters. Those reports came from CARP members at 10 university campuses around the United States and included the purported political beliefs of Reagan's critics. One CARP report called a CISPES supporter "well-educated in Marxism" while other CARP reports attached "clippings culled from communist-inspired front groups."

The Globe reported that Frank Varelli, who worked for the FBI from 1981-84 coordinating the CISPES probe, said an FBI agent paid members of the Moon organization at Southern Methodist University while the Moon activists were raiding and disrupting CISPES rallies. "Every week, an agent I worked with used to go to SMU to pay the Moonies," Varelli said in an interview. Because of the CARP harassment, CISPES closed its SMU chapter.

Moon did not lose his inside track at the White House until Bill Clinton's election in 1992. But Moon continues to ride high in Washington. Moon sustains The Washington Times despite a never-ending hemorrhage of red ink and he keeps up close political ties with prominent Republicans. Moon's Washington Times Foundation flashed the cash again recently, with a $1 million-plus donation to George Bush's presidential library in Texas. [WP, Nov. 24, 1997]

'Cemetery-Gate'

Moon's news outlets also continue to pay dividends by keeping the Democrats on the defensive. In late November, Insight magazine and The Washington Times trumpeted charges that the Clinton administration had traded plots at Arlington National Cemetery for campaign donations. Though citing no named sources, the explosive charge reverberated through the conservative talk-radio echo chamber and bounced into the mainstream press.
The Clinton administration was forced to disclose the names of 69 people who had been granted burial in Arlington but who didn't meet the strict criteria. Some turned out to be Republicans (such as the wife of Chief Justice Warren Burger). Others were national luminaries (such as Justice Thurgood Marshall). Another was an ex-Marine-turned-policeman who died in a shootout.

Still, Republicans in Congress kept digging until they found one major Democratic contributor -- Larry Lawrence -- who was buried at Arlington after dying in office as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland. GOP congressmen found records suggesting that Lawrence had fabricated a claim that he suffered a wound aboard a World War II cargo ship.

Insight's managing editor Paul Rodriguez acknowledged that the cemetery-plots-for-cash story was only "allegations and suggestions." But the story was justified, he said, by "this horrible perception, rightly or wrongly, that this guy [Clinton] will sell anything." [WP, Nov. 25, 1997]

Inside Moon's church, however, other troubles have mounted. Hyo Jin, Moon's eldest son from his current marriage, was treated for a cocaine addiction, saw his wife flee claiming physical abuse and filed for bankruptcy to avoid court-ordered support payments. The Hyo Jin situation and other family crises strained the faith of longtime followers who were taught that Moon and his family were examples of human perfection. By most accounts, the number of U.S. church members has dropped to around 3,000.

The dwindling church membership could raise another legal question, if it becomes apparent that Moon's business-media-political empire is a giant tail wagging a smaller-smaller-and-smaller dog. In a two-part investigative series on Nov. 23-24, The Washington Post reported that even Moon acknowledges this disappearing church.

"Moon has declared that 'the period of religion is passing away' and his Unification Church must be dissolved," one article stated. It quoted Moon as telling his followers to "cut down" their church and work through the Moon-sponsored Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, a non-profit corporation. But non-profits do not carry the First Amendment protections that churches do.

'Dung-Eating Dogs'

The Post also quoted some new anti-American declarations by Moon. "Satan created this kind of Hell on Earth," Moon said about the United States. Moon also lambasted American women. They "have inherited the line of prostitutes," he declared. "American women are even worse because they practice free sex just because they enjoy it."

Lashing out again last May, Moon denounced America for tolerating homosexuals, whom he likened to "dirty dung-eating dogs." For Americans who "truly love such dogs," Moon said, "they also become like dung-eating dogs and produce that quality of life."

The Post series clearly touched a raw nerve. Dong Moon Joo, president of Moon's Washington Times, took out a full-page ad in the Post on Nov. 28 complaining that the criticism was inappropriate during "the Thanksgiving season." In a press release, the Unification Church said it was "exploring the possibility of legal action against The Washington Post and its writers for malicious persecution of a minority religion with intent to incite bodily injury."

But on Nov. 29, Moon's church weaknesses were on display again, with "Blessing '97" which Moon had touted as a mass wedding where he would pair up 3.6 million followers worldwide. Yet, at the main event at RFK Stadium in Washington only 1,300 brides and grooms could be rounded up for the ceremony. Moon's organizers padded the numbers with already married couples and non-church members who were lured to a music concert with free or discounted tickets.

The next day, The Washington Times led the paper with a glowing front-page story about the ceremony. The article accepted the 3.6-million-couple figure as fact. The story also quoted one participant declaring that the RFK event was "bigger than I thought it would be." Clearly, Moon still has the bucks to make his employees spin the stories the way he likes.

Over the past quarter century, Moon has been the master at spending billions of dollars to make the "respectability" equation work for him.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 3:04 am

One Mother's Tale: Moon & An Nyu Freshman
by Robert Parry
(c) Copyright 1997

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Like many parents, Debbie Diglio was nervous when her only son, John Stacey, went off to college. But John was a stable, high-achieving, all-American young man who seemed the sort who might succeed in staying out of trouble.

So when John left their home in central New Jersey and registered at New York University in 1992, Debbie Diglio, a nurse by profession, hoped for the best. But, then, shortly into his first semester, she said, "he went away one weekend and vanished."

She first got a sense of trouble when she called his NYU room with happy family news. "My sister had a baby and I called to tell John," she recalled, still with a quaver in her voice. "His roommate said he had gone away with a few new friends he had met."

The roommate remembered that the "new friends" were from a group, known by the acronym, CARP, standing for the innocuous title, Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles. After learning that CARP was "a front group" for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, Diglio and her husband, John's step-father, began a frantic search.

"I tried to call the church and they said they had no idea who he was."

The Diglios feared the worst, that John would be drawn into the controversial religious sect that has been accused by critics of "brainwashing" impressionable young people into becoming robotic followers of Moon as a new messiah. "When John did call," Debbie Diglio said, "I knew immediately that he was in trouble."

So began a four-year nightmare for Debbie Diglio. Like thousands of other parents in the past quarter century, she lost a child to the charismatic South Korean who teaches that his movement is building a theocracy that will rule the world. During those four years, Stacey almost completely severed ties to his family and nearly drove his mother to a nervous breakdown.

Though the number of young Americans drawn to Moon appears to be in sharp decline -- his total U.S. church membership is estimated at less than 3,000 although church officials insist the figure is around 50,000 -- the story of John Stacey is a reminder that Moon's controversial recruiting techniques continue.

When I interviewed John Stacey recently at a pizza restaurant near his hometown of Piscataway, N.J., the thin, blonde, young man had an edgy way about him, a look that was both vulnerable and cagey. He'd hold my gaze for a minute and then quickly glance away.

But amid the clatter of plates and piped-in rock music, Stacey seemed relaxed talking about his growing-up years as a prototypical Middle American who came from a Baptist background and was close to his family. He was a high school honor student, and when he left for NYU, he said, "my mother was still making me peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches."

Stacey's life detoured when he encountered CARP members on the street near NYU, at the edge of Manhattan's Greenwich Village. "They gave me a survey and it turned out everything that I was interested in they were interested in," he chuckled. The recruiters invited him to a lecture which stressed positive themes: God, peace, patriotism.

Upset over a fight with his roommate, Stacey agreed to attend a week-long CARP seminar supposedly on "youth decision-making" at a compound located in Queens, N.Y. "They said it was not a religion," he recalled. "They invited me under false pretenses, away from my reference points to another world, it seemed. ... I went there with the impression that all the people there were students like me."

The "students" who surrounded him reinforced the messages from the speakers, while leaders of the group flattered Stacey and attended to his every need. "The seminar is completely rigged," Stacey told me. The other "students" turned out to be Unification Church members who Stacey later learned were "very well trained" in these recruitment methods.

"They gained my trust before I realized they were not worthy of it," Stacey complained. "They used the same tactics that the Chinese communists used. People don't recognize how dangerous it is because they're using mind-control techniques without prior consent. I didn't suspect that they had designs on me. ... It's like a Moonie factory. They sort of clone people there."

Stacey was not held at the Queens compound by force. Rather, he explained, the recruiters employed more subtle techniques of peer-group pressure and isolation. "When I was at that seven-day seminar, I had no idea my parents were trying to find me," he said. "For three months, I never left that property. ... I had five people patrolling me."

A Very Delicate Time

When Stacey did contact his mother, she had received some counseling herself in the methods of cults and knew that it was "a very delicate time in the first few days of recruitment." Her choices were to "scare him or go along with it. So I tried to scare him with [a story that] my husband had a heart attack."

But Diglio said the Unification Church was savvy to the reactions of desperate parents, too. "They called every hospital," she remembered, and found out that Stacey's step-father had not been admitted for treatment. Diglio saw her son slip farther from her reach.

"It was horrifying," Diglio told me. "I didn't sleep. We didn't eat. I had people come out and speak to our extended family [who wanted to know], how can John be so stupid?"

A year after John joined the church, Diglio said she was allowed to visit him "in a Moonie house. It was horrible. I never had a moment to speak to John alone. It was very creepy, very sad, because there are so many young people there, all under Moon's influence."

She was shocked by the changes in her son. "John was very different, very glazed over, trance-like. Did you ever see 'The Stepford Wives'? It was so emotional to watch your only son to be taken and transformed. I kept praying that he would come to his senses."

Inside the church, after his recruitment, Stacey took part in the exhausting and humiliating routine of the "mobile fund-raising teams" that travel by van from town to town selling flowers and other cheap items. Under pressure to meet quotas and fearing harsh criticism if they come up short, members would work feverishly for long hours, seven days a week. They would live on McDonald hamburgers and other fast food. Tired van drivers rushing the fundraising teams to new locations experienced far more accidents than normal.

Some church members went to extremes, even going out in snow storms, in sub-zero temperatures. "I know people who lived in a van for 15 years," Stacey said. "They're very burnt out, these people. ... Fear and guilt are the driving force."

Hiding the Moon Connection

Stacey asserted that the key to the church's fund-raising -- like its recruitment -- is deception. But church members justify the lies because they are serving a larger good, the ascendance of Moon to a position of world dominance. Stacey said, "there's no such thing as truth," outside of Moon's religious teachings, known as The Divine Principle.

"The Divine Principle justifies murder," Stacey stated matter-of-factly. "If you do it for Reverend Moon, it's good. Good and evil are decided by motivation."

When out selling, the fund-raisers hid their links to Moon and presented themselves as students raising money for some worthy cause. Stacey said he broke that rule only once, when going door to door selling wind chimes on an island off the coast of Alaska.

"I told everyone that I was doing this for Reverend Sun Myung Moon," Stacey said. "I didn't make a penny. It was the only time in four years that I was honest."

But with his intelligence, hard work and clean looks, Stacey rose quickly through the church's ranks. He opened a CARP office in Portland, Ore., and became a Pacific Northwest CARP leader based in Seattle. In his capacity as a leader, it was his turn to become the recruiter, targeting vulnerable young people and applying the same deceptive techniques that had been employed on him.

"I convinced people to quit school and leave their families," he acknowledged. "Look, I was a con artist."

The fund-raising schemes also grew more sophisticated as the church phased out the "mobile fund-raising teams" because of bad publicity. Instead of roaming from city to city, local chapters sold gift items at mall kiosks before Christmas. But always, Stacey said, there was the deception and the certainty that the end -- advancing the cause of Moon's church -- justified the means. Stacey's chapter made $80,000 last holiday season, he said, by working a bait-and-switch tactic: the kiosk would display a decorative light which looked stunning with a powerful halogen bulb. But after the purchase, the customer was given a boxed lamp which contained a "much cheaper" and dimmer bulb.

Growing Disenchantment

Eventually, according to Stacey, the deception and the deification of Moon ate away at his commitment to the church. He also grew disturbed watching the painful lives of longtime church members who joined in the 1970s. Then there were gaudy promises of the church's worldwide ascendance and the evolution of church members into perfect beings. Instead, the church has shrunk and none of the members has attained the promised perfection.

"Twenty years later the church is getting smaller, it seems," Stacey told me. "I see the church as very miserable people. ... There's a lot of suffering among the older members."

The rewards, both spiritual and worldly, have gone disproportionately to Moon and his family, Stacey observed. "Reverend Moon is perfect and his wife is perfect, his family is supposed to be perfect. But according to church records, no one [else] had reached perfection."

Through the four years, Stacey had periodic contact with his family. But he hid signs of his doubts. In September 1996, he flew to New Jersey for his mother's birthday and stayed the weekend. Some family members went out to lunch together. Stacey found himself defending Moon.

"When he got back [to the Pacific Northwest]," Debbie Diglio recalled, "he wrote a nasty letter. He was visibly upset that we were laughing at Moon."

Yet privately, Stacey's faith in Moon was breaking down. "When I looked at the leaders, they were all con artists," Stacey concluded. "Reverend Moon is training a race of very charming manipulators. ... He's creating almost an elite force of people who are very charming but very dangerous."

Stacey also was offended by Moon's pretensions that he was superior to Jesus and by Moon's attacks on Americans as "Satanic" because of their belief in individualism. "I left because it was wrong," Stacey told me. "I was causing my family way too much pain. ... My mother was about institutionalized. They'd cry and cry and cry and beg me to come home."

Then, last January, Stacey called his mother and announced that he was flying to New York. They met in Newark where she works. Only then did he tell her that he was quitting the Unification Church.

"I almost died," Diglio said, "I could not believe it. I thanked God. I was so happy and so frightened at the same time. We just huddled as a family and cried our eyes out. It was so emotional. For four years, it was an all-time low. The distress was so much. I wasn't dealing at all with life. I thought I was losing my mind. I'd wake up at night and cry hysterically."

When I spoke with Diglio several months after Stacey's return home, his mother spoke with none of that passion. Her voice sounded drained, the tone of a parent who is relieved that an ordeal with a child is over but is sorry that the ordeal ever happened. Though glad that her son had returned, Diglio no longer sees Stacey as the same bright-eyed young man who left for college.

The four-year stint with the Unification Church had changed his mannerisms. Though she was hopeful that he would get his life back together -- he has decided to attend Rutgers -- she was often reminded of the four lost years. His behavior is still a "little Moonie," Diglio said. "He can't directly look you in the eye."

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 3:06 am

Rev. Moon, The Bushes & Donald Rumsfeld
by Robert Parry
January 3, 2001

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

George W. Bush’s choice of Donald Rumsfeld to be U.S. defense secretary could put an unintended spotlight on the role of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon – a Bush family benefactor – in funneling millions of dollars to communist North Korea in the 1990s as it was developing a missile and nuclear weapons program.

In 1998, Rumsfeld headed a special commission, appointed by the Republican-controlled Congress, that warned that North Korea had made substantial progress during the decade in building missiles that could pose a potential nuclear threat to Japan and parts of the United States.

"The extraordinary level of resources North Korea and Iran are now devoting to developing their own ballistic missile capabilities poses a substantial and immediate danger to the U.S., its vital interests and its allies," said the report by Rumsfeld's Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.

"North Korea maintains an active WMD [weapons of mass destruction] program, including a nuclear weapon program. It is known that North Korea diverted material in the late 1980s for at least one or possibly two weapons," the report said.

Rumsfeld’s alarming assessment of North Korea’s war-making capabilities now is being cited by Republicans as a justification for investing billions of taxpayer dollars in an anti-missile defense system favored by Bush and Rumsfeld.

Yet, during the early-to-mid 1990s, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was monitoring a series of clandestine payments from Sun Myung Moon's organization to the North Korean communist leaders who were overseeing the country's military strategies.

According to DIA documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Moon’s payments to North Korean leaders included a $3 million “birthday present” to current communist leader Kim Jong Il and offshore payments amounting to “several tens of million dollars” to the previous communist dictator, Kim Il Sung.

The alleged payments – and broader Moon-North Korean business deals reported by the DIA – came at a time of a strict U.S. government ban on financial transactions between North Korea and any U.S. person or entity, to keep hard currency out of North Korea's hands.

Legal experts say that ban would have applied to Moon given his status as a permanent U.S. resident, even though he maintains South Korean citizenship.

Bush Speeches

While negotiating those business deals with North Korea in the 1990s, Moon’s organization also hired former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush to give speeches at Moon-sponsored events.

During one speech inaugurating a new Moon-sponsored newspaper in Argentina in November 1996, former President Bush declared, “I want to salute Reverend Moon,” whom Bush praised as “the man with the vision.”

The father of the incoming U.S. president has refused to divulge how much Moon’s organization paid for these speeches which were delivered in the United States, Asia and South America.

Some press estimates have put the fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though one former leader of Moon’s Unification Church told me that the organization had earmarked $10 million for the former president. [For more on the Bush-Moon relationship, see the story in our Archives, "Hooking George Bush."]

Ex-President Bush’s pro-Moon speeches came at a time, too, when Moon – now 80 – was expressing intensely anti-American views. In the mid-1990s, Moon denounced the United States as “Satan’s harvest” and condemned American women as having descended from a “line of prostitutes.”

In a speech to his followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed to liquidate American individuality, declaring that his movement would “swallow entire America.” Moon said Americans who insisted on “their privacy and extreme individualism … will be digested.”

Beyond these anti-Americanism diatribes, other questions have arisen about how Moon finances his religious-business-political empire. Evidence has existed back to the 1970s indicating that Moon’s organization has engaged in money-laundering operations and has associated with right-wing organized-crime figures in Asia and Latin America.

One of Moon's key early backers was Ryoichi Sasakawa, a leader of Japan's Yakuza organized crime family, according to the authoritative book, Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan & Alec Dubro.

In 1998, Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law, Nansook Hong, added first-hand testimony about one of Moon's money-laundering methods when she described how cash was smuggled illegally through U.S. Customs. Moon “demonstrated contempt for U.S. law every time he accepted a paper bag full of untraceable, undeclared cash” carried into the United States from overseas, she wrote in her book, In the Shadows of the Moons.

Checkered Past

To many Americans, Moon is perhaps best known as a 1970s cult leader who allegedly brainwashed young recruits into joining his Unification Church and then paired up his followers in mass marriages where Moon would preside wearing lavish costumes and crowns.

But Moon also understood the importance of political clout. In 1978, a congressional investigation identified Moon as a part of a covert influence-buying scheme aimed at American institutions and run by the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency, a charge that Moon denied.

In 1982, Moon was convicted of tax fraud and served an 18-month sentence in federal prison. Nevertheless, his political influence grew when he launched The Washington Times, also in 1982.

In the years that followed, Moon developed a reputation for financing all-expense-paid international conferences for conservative politicians, prominent journalists and influential academics.

Moon’s conservative newspaper grew in importance in Washington through the 1980s and early 1990s, as it staunchly supported Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

In 1991, President Bush expressed his gratitude to Moon’s newspaper by inviting its editor, Wesley Pruden, to a private White House lunch “just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.” [Washington Times, May 17, 1992]

Moving North

At about the same time as that lunch, Moon was beginning another initiative – establishing a business foothold in North Korea. The DIA, the Pentagon agency responsible for monitoring possible military threats to the United States, started keeping tabs on these developments.

Though historically an ardent anticommunist, Moon negotiated a sweeping business deal with Kim Il Sung, the longtime communist leader, the DIA documents said. The two men met face-to-face in North Korea from Nov. 30 to Dec. 8, 1991.

“These talks took place secretly, without the knowledge of the South Korean government,” the DIA wrote on Feb. 2, 1994. “In the original deal with Kim [Il Sung], Moon paid several tens of million dollars as a down-payment into an overseas account,” the DIA said in another cable dated Aug. 14, 1994.

The DIA said Moon's organization also delivered money to Kim Il Sung's son and successor, Kim Jong Il.

“In 1993, the Unification Church sold a piece of property located in Pennsylvania,” the DIA reported on Sept. 9, 1994. “The profit on the sale, approximately $3 million was sent through a bank in China to the Hong Kong branch of the KS [South Korean] company ‘Samsung Group.’ The money was later presented to Kim Jung Il [Kim Jong Il] as a birthday present.”

After Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 and his succession by his son, Kim Jong Il, Moon dispatched his longtime aide, Bo Hi Pak, to ensure that the business deals were still on track with Kim Jong Il “and his coterie,” the DIA reported.

“If necessary, Moon authorized Pak to deposit a second payment for Kim Jong Il,” the DIA wrote.

As described by the DIA, Moon's deal with North Korea called for construction of a hotel complex in Pyongyang as well as a new Holy Land at the site of Moon’s birth in North Korea.

“There was an agreement regarding economic cooperation for the reconstruction of KN's [North Korea's] economy which included establishment of a joint venture to develop tourism at Kimkangsan, KN [North Korea]; investment in the Tumangang River Development; and investment to construct the light industry base at Wonsan, KN. It is believed that during their meeting Mun [Moon] donated 450 billion yen to KN,” one DIA report said.

In late 1991, the Japanese yen traded at about 130 yen to the U.S. dollar, meaning Moon's investment would have been about $3.5 billion, if the DIA information is correct.

Pak's Response

Contacted in Seoul, South Korea, Bo Hi Pak, a former publisher of The Washington Times, acknowledged that Moon met with North Korean officials and negotiated business deals with them in the early 1990s.

But Bo Hi Pak denied that payments were made to individual North Korean leaders and called “absolutely untrue” the DIA's description of the $3 million land sale benefiting Kim Jong Il. Bo Hi Pak also said the North Korean business investments were structured through South Korean entities.

“Rev. Moon is not doing this in his own name,” said Pak.

Pak said he did go to North Korea in 1994, after Kim Il Sung’s death, but only to express “condolences” to Kim Jong Il on behalf of Moon and his wife. Pak denied that another purpose of the trip was to pass money to Kim Jong Il or to his associates.

In the phone interview, Bo Hi Pak also denied that Moon’s investments ever approached $3.5 billion. Pak did not give a total figure for the investments, but said the initial phase of an automobile factory was in the range of $3 million to $6 million.

The DIA depicted Moon's business plans in North Korea as much grander, however. The DIA valued the agreement for hotels in Pyongyang and the resort in Kumgang-san, alone, at $500 million. The plans also called for creation of a kind of Vatican City covering Moon's birthplace.

“In consideration of Mun's [Moon's] economic cooperation, Kim [Il Sung] granted Mun a 99-year lease on a 9 square kilometer parcel of land located in Chongchu, Pyonganpukto, KN. Chongchu is Mun's birthplace and the property will be used as a center for the Unification Church. It is being referred to as the Holy Land by Unification Church believers and Mun [h]as been granted extraterritoriality during the life of the lease.”

North Korean officials clearly valued their relationship with Moon, granting him small but symbolic favors. Four months after Moon's 1991 meeting with Kim Il Sung, the communist dictator granted a rare interview to editors from Moon's Washington Times.

In February 2000, on Moon's 80th birthday, Kim Jong Il sent Moon a gift of rare wild ginseng, an aromatic root used medicinally, Reuters reported.

Legal Issues

Because of the long-term U.S. embargo against North Korea – eased only last year – Moon’s alleged payments to the communist leaders raise potential legal issues for Moon, a South Korean citizen who is a U.S. permanent resident alien.

“Nobody in the United States was supposed to be providing funding to anybody in North Korea, period, under the Treasury (Department's) sanction regime,” said Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state handling international crime.

The U.S. embargo of North Korea dates back to the Korean War. With a few exceptions for humanitarian goods, the embargo barred trade and financial dealings between North Korea and “all U.S. citizens and permanent residents wherever they are located, … and all branches, subsidiaries and controlled affiliates of U.S. organizations throughout the world.”

Moon became a permanent resident of the United States in 1973, according to Justice Department records. Bo Hi Pak said Moon has kept his “green card” status. Moon maintains a residence near Tarrytown, north of New York City, and controls dozens of affiliated U.S. companies.

Direct payments to foreign leaders in connection with business deals also could prompt questions about possible violations of the U.S. Corrupt Practices Act, a prohibition against overseas bribery.

Political Fallout

Today, however, the potential political fallout might be a greater concern than any legal action, especially once George W. Bush assumes the presidency.

For the past two years, Republicans have used Rumsfeld's report to club President Clinton and Vice President Gore for alleged softness toward a recalcitrant communist enemy.

In 1999, a House Republican task force followed up the work of Rumsfeld's commission and declared that North Korea and its missile program had emerged as a nuclear threat to Japan and possibly the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

"This threat has advanced considerably over the past five years, particularly with the enhancement of North Korea's missile capabilities," said the Republican task force. "Unlike five years ago, North Korea can now strike the United States with a missile that could deliver high explosive, chemical, biological, or possibly nuclear weapons."

Ironically, Moon's newspaper joined in laying the blame for North Korea's progress at the feet of the Clinton-Gore administration.

"To its list of missed opportunities, the Clinton-Gore administration can now add the abdication of responsibility for national security," a Washington Times editorial stated on Sept. 5, 2000.

Not surprisingly the Times did not mention that its founder and financial backer, Sun Myung Moon, had lent a hand to North Korea by agreeing to multi-million-dollar business deals and allegedly putting millions of dollars in the personal accounts of the leaders masterminding the strategic weapons development.

Equally unsurprising, former President George H.W. Bush and his about-to-be-president son have never explained the family's financial involvement with Rev. Moon, a messianic leader who has vowed to build a movement powerful enough to eliminate all individuality and freedom in the United States.

Those questions also aren't likely to come up at the confirmation hearings for Donald Rumsfeld, who believes that the United States must now pursue an expensive missile shield to counter the threat posed by North Korea.

Robert Parry is a veteran investigative reporter, who broke many of the Iran-contra stories in the 1980s for The Associated Press and Newsweek.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 23, 2018 3:08 am

Kerry Attacker Protected Rev. Moon
by Robert Parry
October 15, 2004

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Carlton Sherwood, who has produced an anti-John Kerry video that will be aired across the United States before the Nov. 2 elections, wrote a book in the 1980s denouncing federal investigators who tried to crack down on Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s illicit financial operations.

In retrospect, Sherwood’s book, Inquisition: The Prosecution and Persecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, appears to have been part of a right-wing counter-offensive aimed at discouraging scrutiny of Moon and his mysterious money flows. The strategy largely succeeded, enabling Moon to continue funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. political process, most notably to publish the ultra-conservative Washington Times but also to make payments to prominent politicians, including former President George H.W. Bush.

New evidence also makes clear that Moon resumed his practice of laundering money into the United States after serving a 13-month prison sentence for a 1982 conviction for tax law violations. Former Moon associates, including his ex-daughter-in-law, have disclosed that Moon’s organization smuggled cash across U.S. borders, but those admissions have not led to renewed federal investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

Indeed, the pummeling of federal investigators who examined Moon’s financial schemes in the 1970s and early 1980s – and Moon’s enormous clout among conservatives in Washington – have made the South Korean theocrat something of a political untouchable. The congressional investigators, who first uncovered Moon’s financial irregularities, and the federal prosecutor, who narrowed that evidence into a successful prosecution for tax evasion, were made into cautionary tales for others thinking about challenging Moon.

Accused Investigators

Government investigators, including former Rep. Donald Fraser and ex-federal prosecutor Martin Flumenbaum, were accused by Moon defenders of offenses ranging from a lack of patriotism to racial and religious bigotry. Sherwood, a former Washington Times reporter, was among the Moon defenders who lashed out at Fraser and Flumenbaum, portraying them as unscrupulous witch hunters who abused their investigative authority.

In Inquisition, Sherwood claimed he had examined the financial records of Moon’s organization and found nothing improper, concluding that Moon and his associates “were and continued to be the victims of the worst kind of religious prejudice and racial bigotry this country has witnessed in over a century.” Sherwood portrayed Moon as a religious martyr.

But there was a back story to Sherwood’s book. Inquisition was originally put out by a little-known publisher called Andromeda, which apparently operated out of the house of Roger Fontaine, a former member of Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff who later worked as a reporter for Moon’s Washington Times. In 1991, the book was republished by Regnery-Gateway, which was run by conservative operative Alfred Regnery, who worked in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department.

Beyond the conservative allegiances of Sherwood’s backers, there also was evidence that Moon himself subsidized the book. A PBS Frontline documentary in 1992 reported that former Washington Times editor James Whelan said Sherwood told Regnery that Moon’s organization would buy 100,000 copies of Inquisition, which would assure Regnery a handsome profit. Frontline reported that Regnery denied Whelan’s statement, as has Sherwood.

However, a week after interviewing Regnery, Frontline said it obtained a copy of a letter that corroborated claims of a secret Moon role in the production of Sherwood’s book. The letter, addressed to Moon from his aide James Gavin, stated that Gavin had reviewed the “overall tone and factual contents” of Inquisition before publication and had suggested revisions.

“Mr. Sherwood has assured me that all this will be done when the manuscript is sent to the publisher,” Gavin wrote. “When all of our suggestions have been incorporated, the book will be complete and in my opinion will make a significant impact. … In addition to silencing our critics now, the book should be invaluable in persuading others of our legitimacy for many years to come.” Frontline said Gavin refused to be interviewed about the letter.

Sherwood’s book did contribute to a successful campaign that silenced many of Moon’s critics. The self-proclaimed Messiah helped his cause, too, by becoming a major benefactor to the U.S. conservative movement, sponsoring lavish conferences as well as financing right-wing media outlets.

Koreagate

The Right’s "defend Moon campaign" dated back to the late 1970s when an investigation by a House subcommittee headed by Rep. Fraser, a Minnesota Democrat, discovered that Moon had participated in the “Koreagate” influence-buying scheme. In that operation, the South Korean intelligence agency was caught secretly trying to manipulate U.S. policy and politics by spreading money around Washington. One of South Korea’s conduits was Moon, then best known as a religious cult leader who presided over mass weddings of his followers and was accused of “brainwashing” young recruits.

Fraser’s investigators found that Moon’s organization was funneling large sums of money into the United States from Japan, but the investigators couldn’t trace the money all the way back to its source.

Moon, who was already investing in Washington’s conservative political infrastructure, turned to American right-wing operatives for help. In pro-Moon publications, Fraser and his staff were pilloried as leftists. Anti-Moon witnesses were assailed as unstable liars. Minor bookkeeping problems inside Fraser’s investigation, such as Fraser's salary advances to some staff members, prompted letters demanding an ethics probe of the congressman.

One of those letters, dated June 30, 1978, was written by John T. "Terry" Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). At the time, Dolan's group was pioneering the strategy of "independent" TV attack ads. In turn, Moon's CAUSA International helped Dolan by contributing $500,000 to another Dolan group, known as the Conservative Alliance or CALL. [Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1984]

With support from Dolan and other conservatives, Moon weathered the Koreagate political storm. Facing questions about his patriotism, Fraser lost a Senate bid in 1978 and left Congress.

Another early Moon defender was Grover Norquist, who interrupted a 1983 press conference by the moderate Republican Ripon Society as it was warning that the New Right had entered into “an alliance of expediency” with Moon’s organization. Ripon’s chairman, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, had released a study which alleged that the College Republican National Committee “solicited and received” money from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media of benefiting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.

Leach said the Unification Church has “infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well.” Then-college GOP leader Norquist disrupted Ripon’s news conference with accusations that Leach was lying. (Norquist is now a prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration.)

Over the next two decades, despite Moon’s controversial goals that include replacing democracy and individuality with his own personal theocratic rule, Moon lured into his circle prominent political figures. One of those leaders was George H.W. Bush, who accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from Moon’s organization for giving speeches.

Crime Connections

Another concern about Moon was his longstanding ties to organized crime figures in Asia and South America, including Japanese rightists Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, reputed leaders of the yakuza organized-crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea.

Though briefly jailed as war criminals after World War II, Sasakawa and Kodama rebounded to become power-brokers in Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party. They also collaborated with Moon in organizing far-right anti-communist organizations, such as the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). According to David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro in their book, Yakuza, "Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and helped recruit many of its original members.

Moon also associated with right-wing South American leaders implicated in cocaine trafficking. In 1980, Moon’s organization made friends with Bolivia’s “Cocaine Coup” conspirators who had overthrown a left-of-center government and seized dictatorial power. The violent coup installed drug-tainted military officers at the head of Bolivia’s government, giving the putsch the nickname the “Cocaine Coup.”

One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, Gen. Garcia Meza. After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city.”

According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, another of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.

By late 1981, however, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point. “The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived,” reported German journalist Kai Hermann. [An English translation of Hermann’s report on the Moon organization’s role in the Cocaine Coup was published in Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986]

The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too. Interior Minister Luis Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez, who was Arce-Gomez’s cousin and had helped finance the coup, got a 15-year prison term. Gen. Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.

But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from its coziness with the Cocaine Coup plotters. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington. There, Moon made his organization useful to President Reagan, Vice President Bush and other leading Republicans. [For more on Moon and the Cocaine Coup, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Contra Cocaine

Moon cemented his relationship with the U.S. conservative movement by creating the Washington Times in 1982 and making it a reliable propaganda organ for the Republican Party. Moon’s newspaper also promoted conservative causes dear to Ronald Reagan’s heart, such as the contra rebels who were fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. In the 1980s, Moon’s organization and the Reagan-Bush administration found common cause, too, in covering up evidence of contra-connected drug smuggling.

Ironically, in 1986, the leading U.S. senator who challenged the contra cocaine cover-up was John Kerry. Soon, the freshman senator from Massachusetts found himself under attack from Moon’s Washington Times. The newspaper published articles depicting Kerry’s contra drug probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. “Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain,” announced the headline of one Times article. [Washington Times, Aug. 13, 1986]

But when the evidence continued to build, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their investigation supposedly interfered with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth. “Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said,” according to one of the articles. [Washington Times, Jan. 21, 1987]

Despite the newspaper’s attacks and pressure from the Reagan-Bush administration, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that contra units – both in Costa Rica and Honduras – were implicated in the cocaine trade. “It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation said in a report issued April 13, 1989. “In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”

Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” the report said. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”

In the late 1980s, Kerry’s dramatic findings weren’t taken seriously by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major news media. The Reagan-Bush attacks on Kerry as an irresponsible investigator had stuck. In a Conventional Wisdom Watch item, Newsweek summed up this dominant view, calling Kerry a “randy conspiracy buff.”

It took another decade for the inspectors general of the CIA and the Justice Department to conduct their own investigations that corroborated Kerry’s findings of both contra trafficking and Reagan-Bush neglect of the evidence. In a two-volume report issued in 1998, CIA inspector general Frederick Hitz disclosed that more than 50 contras and contra-related entities had become involved in the cocaine trade during the 1980s and that incriminating information – which was known to the Reagan-Bush administration – was withheld from Congress.

Hitz said the chief reason for the CIA’s protective handling of the contra drug information was Langley’s “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.” [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

Moon’s Washington Times also had played an important role in the cover-up of the contra cocaine trafficking, although the motives of Moon’s organization – including its longstanding relationship with drug-tainted leaders in South America – may have added extra incentives to frustrate Kerry’s investigation.

More Kerry Bashing

Now, nearly two decades after Kerry’s contra cocaine investigation, Moon’s organization is trying to keep its old adversary out of the White House and away from control of the Justice Department.

On a number of topics, the Washington Times has led the way in battering Kerry. For instance, as Kerry emerged as the Democratic frontrunner this year, the newspaper promoted an investigative report questioning whether Kerry was lying when he said some foreign leaders favored him over George W. Bush. [Washington Times, March 12, 2004] Though clearly many foreign leaders did favor a change in the White House, the Times opened up a line of attack against Kerry’s honesty and internationalism that has continued to this day. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush and the L-Word.”]

Also popping up again is Carlton Sherwood, who has produced a video that virtually calls Kerry a traitor for his anti-Vietnam War activities. The video, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal,” will be broadcast before the Nov. 2 election on Sinclair Broadcast Group’s 62 stations, the largest chain of television stations in the United States.

The Sinclair chain is headed by David Smith and his three brothers whose collection of TV stations have promoted right-wing causes before, even barring its ABC affiliates from airing Nightline on April 30 when Ted Koppel paid tribute to U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq by reading their names and showing their photographs. Sinclair's thinking apparently was that listing the names of the dead would undermine the war effort.

“The Smith brothers and their executives have made 97 percent of their political donations during the 2004 election cycle to Bush and the Republicans,” according to Washington Post reporters Howard Kurtz and Frank Ahrens. [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2004]

Democratic leaders have cited these Republican political ties in complaining that the Sinclair chain is simply broadcasting “Stolen Honor” as anti-Kerry propaganda to benefit the Bush campaign.

But Sherwood’s longstanding ties to Moon’s organization raise other troubling questions: Do inside-the-Beltway conservatives have a financial incentive to make sure a Moon-friendly politician like Bush stays in charge of the Executive Branch? Would a Kerry victory potentially mean more trouble for Moon getting his mysterious money into the United States?

Altruistic World Online Library

Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parry

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Re: Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right, by Robert Parr

Who is online