Antony Loewenstein

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the establishment media’s constant and obsessive campaign to discredit Julian Assange. Shooting the messenger is an old tactic but now corporate journalists are joining in:

It’s not hard to see why The New York Times, CNN and so many other establishment media outlets are eager to do that.  Serving the Government’s interests, siding with government and military officials, and attacking government critics is what they do.  That’s their role.  That’s what makes them the “establishment media.”  Beyond that, the last thing they want is renewed recognition of what an evil travesty the attack on Iraq was, given the vital role they know they played in helping to bring it about and sustain it for all those years (that’s the same reason establishment journalists, almost by consensus, opposed any investigations into the Bush crimes they ignored, when they weren’t cheering them on).  And by serving as the 2010 version of the White House Plumbers — acting as attack dogs against the Pentagon’s enemies — they undoubtedly buy themselves large amounts of good will with those in power, always their overarching goal.  It is indeed quite significant and revealing that the John Ehrlichmans and Henry Kissingers of today are found at America’s largest media outlets.  Thanks to them, the White House doesn’t even need to employ its own smear artists.

The mainstream media, as deep as ever.

Bob Geldof writes a love letter to George W. Bush.

(Yes, it’s as undignified and delusional as you’d expect):

On Air Force One, Jendayi Frazer, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Bobby Pittman, the National Security Council adviser for Africa, and I stayed awake as the pitch night engulfed us, only punctuated by the giant orange gas flares on the Gulf of Guinea. We ate our popcorn, drank our Cokes and watched Batman Begins as the airspace was cleared for miles around us. America was flying through the warm African night and I was hitching a ride on her.

Fox News is a channel truly sponsored by the White House (its latest show is below, need one say more?):

Welcome to the modern Republican Party.

Freaks (and creationists) only need apply.

Republican svengali Karl Rove and George W. Bush confidante is soon to release a book, with bidding already said to be in the millions. An advance copy of the table of contents is below:

Greg Palast, November 12:

Just months before he left office President Clinton paid a sudden visit to Musharraf. Congressional Democrats were stunned. Musharraf had quickly shown himself to be a Taliban-loving, unbalanced dictator who violated US treaty terms by exploding a nuke and threatening to incinerate our ally India. Notably, the Ambassador with Clinton made payments to the electric companies a top item on his agenda.

Favors done; favors repaid. Nothing new under the sun, but it’s a dangerous game, Senator Clinton.

All right, maybe you can say that President Clinton’s blessing of the radioactive dictator can’t be blamed on Hillary despite the smelly money chain going from Arkansas to Karachi. But, be honest, the lady sure as heck ain’t running on her record as a Senator; her whole pitch is, “Re-elect Clinton.” And I’d rather tell you this story before you hear it from President Giuliani.

Nevertheless, let’s not lose sight of the current danger. While the Clinton’s may have handed us the Lunatic of Lahore, it’s George Bush who leaves mints on his pillow. I have no information that Clinton knew of the sales to North Korea. The Bush Administration did and, we discovered at BBC, blocked the CIA investigation that could have exposed it in 2001. And that, Mr. Bush, is a very, very dangerous game. The problem of creating Frankensteins, whether an Osama or a Saddam or a Musharraf, is that these creatures are often known to rise and turn on their creators.

But I’m sure we’ll correct the error. Four years ago, as Bush was proclaiming victory over the Butcher of Baghdad, I wrote, “Given our experiences with Saddam and Osama, our monsters tend to get out of control after about 11 years. Therefore, we can expect, in the year 2013, that President Jeb Bush will have to order the 82d Airborne into Pakistan to remove Musharraf, the Killer of Karachi.”

Unfortunately, we may not have that long.

UPDATE: Tony Karon explains the faux democratic battle currently taking place in Pakistan.

Sidney Blumenthal, Salon, November 8:

Every aspect of Bush’s foreign policy has now collapsed. Every dream of neoconservatism has become a nightmare. Every doctrine has turned to dust. The influence of the United States has reached a nadir, its lowest point since before World War II, when the country was encased in isolationism.

Keith Olbermann unloads on the Bush administration’s use of torture (his directness is almost shocking in its honesty):

My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey:

The Iraq war has barely registered in this election campaign (except Murdoch cheerleader Andrew Bolt declaring last week that the battle has been “won”). Clearly Bolt must have missed the millions of displaced refugees both inside and outside the ravaged country during his visit to the Green Zone. Most Iraqi bloggers remain pessimistic.

John Howard’s stated reason for Australian troops to remain in Iraq is simply to support the Americans, while Kevin Rudd has pledged to remove our combat troops from the country. But in the real world, Iraq remains in turmoil and election campaigns are never the time for sensible policy discussion, let alone accountability for the over one million Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion.

Ali Allawi, Iraq’s former defence and trade minister, is in Australia this week talking about his country’s prospects and his acclaimed book, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Unlike fellow former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who is currently angling to run the nation again, Allawi remains disillusioned with the American mission and deeply resents their numerous crimes since 2003.

“It was doomed”, he told the New York Times in October.

“What was doomed was the attempt to refashion Iraq in a sort of civilisational makeover, using American power in an alliance with a supposedly grateful Iraqi public, led by a Westernised middle class.”

Allawi told a packed audience at Sydney’s Lowy Institute last night that the Iraqi state had “collapsed” on 9 April, 2003. A nation that has had its sovereignty violated four times in the last century is unlikely to regain its national character anytime soon, he lamented.

Iraq no longer has any kind of central authority and currently operates, with tacit American backing, as a dominant Shiite state that both oppresses the Sunni minority and empowers tribal groups to merely worsen the fragmentation. Allawi argued that even the possibility of a centralised government was highly unlikely and federalism was an equally unlikely solution. He said that many in the West didn’t accept that secular parties only gathered tiny support throughout the country and the majority had consistently voted for politicians with strong religious affiliations.

His solution – though he acknowledged this was unlikely to happen anytime soon – consisted of establishing a semi-centralised government with a large degree of decentralisation among the ethnic regions of the country, including the Kurdish minority in the north. Simply put, despite the suggestion of some politicians and analysts in America, Allawi believed that Iraq should not be divided along ethnic lines.

He said withdrawal of Australian troops would make no difference to the security situation (something he agreed had slightly improved over the last months.)

Allawi reminded the audience that America was responsible for Iraq’s current crisis and therefore should institute a regional conference with all the major players to discuss the country’s future.

Mark Danner, New York Review of Books, November 8:

Surely one of the agonizing attributes of our post-September 11 age is the unending need to reaffirm realities that have been proved, and proved again, but just as doggedly denied by those in power, forcing us to live trapped between two narratives of present history, the one gaining life and color and vigor as more facts become known, the other growing ever paler, brittler, more desiccated, barely sustained by the life support of official power.

At the center of our national life stands the master narrative of this bifurcated politics: the Iraq war, fought to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist, brought to a quick and glorious conclusion on a sunlit aircraft carrier deck whose victory celebration almost instantly became a national embarrassment. That was four and a half years ago; the war’s ending and indeed its beginning, so clearly defined for that single trembling instant, have long since vanished into contested history.

The latest entry in that history appeared on September 26, when the Spanish daily El Pa’s published a transcript of a discussion held on February 22, 2003 — nearly a month before the war began — between President Bush and Jose Maria Aznar, then prime minister of Spain. Though the leaders met at Mr. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, some quickly dubbed the transcript Downing Street Memo II, and indeed the document does share some themes with that critical British memorandum, mostly in its clear demonstration of the gap between what President Bush and members of his administration were saying publicly during the run-up to the war and what they were saying, and doing, in more private settings. Though Hans Blix, the UN chief inspector whose teams were then scouring Iraq for the elusive weapons, had yet to deliver his report — two weeks later he would tell the Security Council that it would take not “years, nor weeks, but months” to complete “the key remaining disarmament tasks” — the President is impatient, even anxious, for war. “This is like Chinese water torture,” he says of the inspections. “We have to put an end to it.”

“The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know.”

Believe it.