October 16, 2005
In America, we are served up news stories that really matter—for
instance, the capture of the "al-Qaeda" barber, Walid Muhammad Farhan
Juwar al-Zubaydi. "The Barber’s’ duties included altering senior al
Qaeda in Iraq members’ appearances by dying hair color, altering
hairstyles and changing facial hair in their efforts to evade capture,"
a U.S. military statement expects us to believe. I bet he dyed their hair platinum blonde, since this is a popular hair color in Iraq.
Nobody
in the corporate media challenges these absurd stories and they soon
become "factual" elements of the official "al-Qaeda" mythology.
Meanwhile,
Abdurrahman Wahid, the former Indonesian president, who fingers spooks
and cops for the Bali 2002 bombings, is characterized as "famously eccentric," and his allegations are generally ignored by the corporate media, and a report filed by the Quds Press
of two Americans disguised in Arab dress who tried to blow up a
booby-trapped car in Baghdad’s al-Ghazaliyah district last week, an
incident following on the heels of the apprehension of two Brits in
al-Basrah attempting to do the same, is totally ignored, in part
because al-Quds is owned by Palestinian expatriates and edited by Abd
al-Bari Atwan who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza Strip
in 1950.
Arabs, of course, believe anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,
while the corporate media in America is a paragon of unvarnished truth,
especially after Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program designed to
"influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda," including a
"large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services
and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book
publishers, and other foreign media outlets," according to the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
Although supposedly closed down in 1975, Operation Mockingbird is still
in operation, according to researchers Steve Kangas (who had himself a
"suicide"), Angus Mackenzie, and Alex Constantine.
As an
interesting aside, Kangas "was found dead in the bathroom of the
Pittsburgh offices of Richard Mellon Scaife," a "CIA asset," according
to Joseph J. Trento (The Secret History of the CIA).
As such, "Dickie" Scaife, according to Edward Spannaus,
"was allowed to take over ownership of Forum World Features, a joint
British intelligence-CIA news media operation based in London. This is
probably the most important career advancement for Dickie, for it
defines the track he has pursued since: the use and the manipulation of
the news media to promote favored causes, and to attack and defame
adversaries." As a primary example of the "attack and defame" model,
consider David Horowitz’ Scaife-funded FrontPage website, Moonbat blog,
and Discover the Network database
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