Rumsfeld’s Al-Jazeera outburst

THE Middle Eastern news network Al-Jazeera was accused by Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, of broadcasting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” reports about the war in Iraq the day before President George W Bush met Tony Blair at the White House and apparently suggested bombing the station’s headquarters.
Rumsfeld denounced the satellite television station at a Pentagon briefing on April 15, 2004 after Al-Jazeera had reported that America’s assault on the insurgent stronghold of Falluja was terrorising civilians. “They are simply lying,” Rumsfeld said.

It was on April 16 that Bush reportedly said during talks with Blair that he wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera’s offices in Doha, Qatar, although it is not known whether he was joking. A report last week that was said to be based on a transcript of the conversation claimed that Blair had talked the president out of a raid, but Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, has banned newspapers from publishing details under the Official Secrets Act. The White House dismissed the report as “outlandish”. The Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad detailed 34 instances of alleged hype and distortion by the television station from April 8-13, ranging from reports of a helicopter and fighter plane being shot down to stories about American soldiers killing and mutilating Iraqi citizens.

In 2001, after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon awarded the Rendon Group, a public affairs firm, a $16.7m contract to monitor media in the Islamic world. It was assigned to track “the location and use of Al-Jazeera news bureaux, reporters and stringers”, and was asked to “identify the biases of specific journalists and potentially obtain an understanding of their allegiances”. The firm says that it did not go on to monitor Al-Jazeera. But the original contract suggests the Pentagon was interested in targeting the station and its journalists.

In 2002 Al-Jazeera’s bureau in Kabul was hit by a US missile and five months later a missile struck its Baghdad office and killed a reporter. Both were said to be accidents. Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank, last week described Al-Jazeera as “fair game” on the grounds that it promoted beheadings and suicide bombings. Wadah Khanfar, director- general of Al-Jazeera, delivered a letter to Downing Street yesterday urging Blair to clarify reports that Bush had suggested bombing the station.
“We have regularly been accused of showing beheadings of hostages, but Al-Jazeera has never shown any material of this nature,” Khanfar said.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1892464,00.html

To put this in perspective, if this were all ever taken up in a 'Grand Unified Rico Case' someday, Rendon Group would be an accomplice to murder in the 'hit' on unfriendly Al-Jazeera correspondents.

we might "all be taken up in a Grand Unified Rico Case" by the nations of the world for War Crimes.

Amy Goodman covers this PR firm in a recent show.

"Investigative journalist James Bamford examines how the Bush administration and Iraqi National Congress used the PR firm Rendon Group to feed journalists - including Judith Miller -- fabricated stories in an effort to sell the war. The firm has received millions in government contracts since 1991 when it was by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Iraq wasn't the first regime change case for Rendon. In 1989 the CIA turned to Rendon to use a variety of campaign and psychological techniques in Panama to put the CIA's choice, Guillermo Endara, into the presidential palace to replace Gen. Manuel Noriega."

more



http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/21/1516257

war, as any network worthy of the word 'news' should. They have so much to hide!! It must be exhausting for them all, trying to hide all their crimes.

This is what Rummy and Bush don't want the American people to see.

http://cryptome.org/kid-kill/kid-kill-01.htm (thanks to the DUers who provided the link. It should be shoved in Rummy's face, and Cheney's and Bush's, all of them should be in a cell with these pictures for the rest of their lives, imo)

So many dead and maimed little insurgents, those little babies ~ a real threat they were, to the great US and Britain!! What these pictures DO show, apart from the horror of Bush's criminal war, is how to create terrorists, and fully answers the question 'Why do they hate us'

These and all the other awful photos from their war, need to be distributed far and wide, because OUR 'free press' which should be showing the American people the truth, doesn't exist. War is not a video game, and it's time the American people who thought so, learned what it's all about.

I agree *'s base should see these pictures........of innocents being killed & maimed.

Parade in front of recruiting stations and in front of the homes of Republican donors with large posters of the dead.

Perhaps even make a giant bus plastered with pictures of the corpses and drive around with it.

of the war it has made possible and continued to support.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/fallujah/

The Horror of the war the America does not 'get' to see.

:cry:

:cry:

What have we become?

Collateral damage, I heard from 1 older man at a shopping mall.

Really? Bet he wouldn't think so if it were his grandchild.

No wonder 80% of Iraqi's want us to go the hell home. Who can blame them. Common reasoning tells ya they want this to stop. Now.

How does one equate OIL & War Profiteering for this?

I'm sickened.

http://cryptome.org/kid-kill/kid-kill-01.htm

I got in a conversation with someone about the war when it initially began and was expressing my anger about the daisy cutters that were being used, how they sliced people up, including children.

What does this guy say in response? Nothing. He shrugged and kind of smiled, as if to say, "Ain't no big thang."

Guess where he served his tour of duty during the Vietnam War years? He was in Hawaii, playing golf. The man has no sense of the horror of war, yet you should listen to him brag about his beautiful grandchildren. He makes me sick.

I think if you showed that older man some real pictures of actual children, dead or wounded by our bombs, he might at least stop calling them 'collateral damage'. Let him face the truth ~ call them what they are, human beings!! I am so sick of these orwellian words to try to mask what we are doing.

The next time anyone says 'collateral damage' to me, I will show them these pictures or others, (there are so many, sadly). I think we should print out such photos, and make them into a booklet to have ready for those who support this war.

The reason Bush, Rummy et al do not want Al Jazeera showing the real war is because they KNOW decent human beings could never condone what they are doing. They have control over our media, but not over us.

Brave reporters and war photographers took real risks to take these pictures ~ we should make sure that no Bush supporters gets to avoid seeing what they support.

One picture in that link, a beautiful little girl sitting on a table with two bullet holes in her arm, for some reason really affected me, even though she was luckier than many of the others. I think it's because seeing the bullet holes really brings home the monstrousness of those who are doing this to a little girl and who tell us this is for OUR safety?? How on earth can they sleep at night, and that goes for those who still support them and refuse to look at what they are supporting.

The truth that we are commiting heinous crimes against Iraqis who don't want us there.

Good job George!

is he an appropriate guest for "Hardball" with Chris Matthews?

and a signatory on their Statement of Principles

http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

Elliott Abrams    Gary Bauer    William J. Bennett    Jeb Bush

Dick Cheney    Eliot A. Cohen    Midge Decter    Paula Dobriansky    Steve Forbes

Aaron Friedberg    Francis Fukuyama    Frank Gaffney    Fred C. Ikle

Donald Kagan    Zalmay Khalilzad    I. Lewis Libby    Norman Podhoretz

Dan Quayle    Peter W. Rodman    Stephen P. Rosen    Henry S. Rowen

Donald Rumsfeld    Vin Weber    George Weigel    Paul Wolfowitz

and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) rents them space

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2003Q4/aei.html

AEI rents office space to the Project for the New American Century

PNAC = NAZI

All he cares about is money and power.. and Rudy Guiliani for Prez.

Yuck.

"We're winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis, and the insurgency is in it's last throes, and the mission is accomplished, and yadda, yadda, yadda."

The war pigs have to be put in their place, folks. Bush and his bosses, Cheney and Rumsfeld, MUST GO. VERY SOON.

...from the people of Iraq, just last week. Did you get yours, yet?

:sarcasm:

Frank Gaffney
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr., who is American, is the president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.

Frank Gaffney is a former Reagan administration Assistant Secretary of Defense. Gaffney is head of the right-wing advocacy organization, the Center for Security Policy.

He says that:

"the international situation bequeathed by Bill Clinton to George Bush was considerably more threatening than was widely perceived at the time."

He appeared on FahrenHYPE 9/11, the conservative documentary that acts as a rebuttal to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Gaffney"

Categories: American people stubs | American columnists | Project for the New American Century

Right?

There are many journalists and networks besides them who are broadcasting the truth.

The Bush administration thinks that because their dad's got away with murdering Kennedy, his brother, Martin King, and doing all kinds of horrible things, that they won't get caught now.

...expected from the Fourth Estate in the old days before U.S. news organizations became war profiteering corporate news monopolies. They are certainly not advocates for terrorism. They try to be objective and factual. They tell it like it is. (There is a good documentary on them called "Control Room." You can get it from Netflix.)

The only news service we have that does that--tries to be objective and informative about hot topics like Iraq, and also devotes investigative resources to it--is Knight-Ridder, which is currently under threat of a hostile takeover by rightwing investors.

There is Reuters (European) news service, which also tries to be objective and informative--and has suffered many casualties in Iraq. AFP (French) and BBC (English) operate along those lines as well--old fashioned, reality based news. But almost none of our news organizations do that any more. They are all rife with corporate agendas, and all promoted the war, and covered for Bushite crimes, except Knight-Ridder.

I think 21 journalists, all in all, have been targeted and killed by US forces in Iraq. It's clear that the US rightwing junta, having successfully turned the NYT and WaPo into complicit war criminals--with their pet reporters committing actual crimes on the Bush Cartel's behalf (and Novak of the Chic-Sun Times also)--are now out to terrorize or kill off whatever vestiges of real journalism we still have. And the L.A. Times just fired columnist Robert Scheer, one of the few corporate-paid writers in the country who told people the truth about Iraq.

But the worse crime that our corporate news monopolies committed was on election night, 2004, when they ALTERED their own exit polls (Kerry won) to FIT the results from Diebold's and ES&S's "trade secret," proprietary programming code (Bush won.) I'll never forgive them for that. They actively prevented change.