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July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
GA
Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
Racist Eyes:
Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
Between Spain and Morocco
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel
and Squawk:
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save the White House?
July 17, 2002
Philip Farruggio
The
New Role Model:
Remember Jesus, George?
Zara Gelsey
Who's
Reading Over
Your Shoulder?
Behzad Yaghmaian
9/11 and
Fotress Europe:
the Drama of the New
Moslem Diaspora
Mike Ferner
War, Incorporated
Gary Leupp
Bush, Burqas
and the Oppression of Afghan Women
July 16, 2002
Pierre Tristam
Faith--based
Capitalism in
the Ruins of the Market
Kurt Nimmo
How My
35mm Camera Almost Became a Tool of Treason
Robert Fisk
The Kashmir
Distraction
Salam al--Marayati
When
is Terrorism
Not Defined as Terrorism?
Kathleen Christison
The
Image Problem:
Anti--Palestinian Bias
from Wilson to Bush
July 15, 2002
Gavin Keeney
In One
of Safire's Ears,
Out the Other
CounterPunch Wire
Nader in
Cuba
Ralph Nader
The Secret
World of Banking
Dave Marsh
Vincible:
Michael Jackson, Racism and the Music Cartel
Rahul Mahajan
Justice
for Bhopal
Jeffrey St. Clair
Seduced
by a Legend
The Return of Jimmy T99 Nelson
July 14, 2002
Bill Christison
The
DOA (Poem)
David Vest
I'll Never
Get Out of This Band Alive
July 13, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
A Process
of Dehumanization
Gavin Keeney
Go Tell
Karl Rove!
Matt Vidal
Corporate
"Ethics" Red Herrings
Ed Whitfield
Lessons
from Independence Day
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Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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July
22, 2002
Forbidden Truth
The Sellouts in the Fourth
Estate
by Wayne Madsen
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, "Journalists
who would give up some credibility for a little government access
deserve neither." Too many members of the Washington press
corps have become nothing more than toadies for the current administration.
While every administration can be expected to have its fair share
of loyalists penning favorable pieces on the news, editorial,
and op-ed pages, what is amazing in the current environment is
the lemming-like rush by a number of heretofore liberal and progressive
reporters to support the Bush II administration's extreme right-wing
policies. These modern day quislings in the media even provide
the White House with helpful cover from investigations by more
independent-minded journalists.
Such has certainly been the case with
the recent publication in English of "Forbidden
Truth: U.S.-Taliban, Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia, and
the Failed Search for Bin Laden." Written by French
journalists Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, the book's
first French language publication in Europe caused a major furor.
But it was not with the French government or its friends in the
media. The angst was among  members
of the Bin Laden family -- the so-called "good bin Ladens"
and those who have done business in the past with George W. Bush
and his father. Yeslam bin Laden, one of the "good"
bin Ladens in Switzerland sued the authors for the information
they provided on the bin Laden family's past business dealings.
The suit went no where because the authors had absolute proof
that not everything the bin Ladens have done in finance and business
has been on the up and up.
But now, some self-appointed media spokespeople
in Washington have taken up the cause that the bin Ladens wisely
decided to drop. They have criticized Forbidden Truth without
having read it or only having read snippets from it. It would
appear that they have taken their cue from a White House family,
who, like the bin Ladens, seem to have an awful lot to hide.
The book has also been criticized for being unsourced when, in
fact, it has over 500 footnotes. Footnoting and providing references
is a practice that some of Washington penultimate journalistic
insiders, including Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, should
adopt in their own future docu-novels concerning administration
cover-ups and malfeasance.
That Washington's media elite appears
to be anesthetized to Bush's current drive to turning the United
States into some mirror image of East Germany, China, or Pinochet's
Chile cannot be overstated. The creation of the Freedom Corps,
with neighbors turning in neighbors under the Terrorism Information
and Prevention System (TIPS), the scrapping the Posse Comitatus
Act of 1878 to once again permit Federal troops to engage in
civil law enforcement (including the possibility of their providing
"security" at polling places this November and in November
2004), having booksellers, librarians, and video rental clerks
report on the reading and viewing habits if their customers,
and even the suggestion by a Bush appointee to the US Civil Rights
Commission that internment camps may be necessary for Arab-Americans
all point to an administration that is hell bent on destroying
this country in order to save it.
So the media elite, in some perverted
and confused quest to show its loyalty to the Bush family, has
decided that linking its policies in Afghanistan and the Middle
east to its past oil dealings, is somehow off the mark, "out
there," unworthy of consideration. Reconstructed liberal
and progressive journalists throw around the "C word"
(conspiracy) to detract from those who write about the massive
evidence that points to the Bushes having traded the nation's
economic well-being and national security for personal profit.
Grandfather Bush, Prescott, certainly did this during World War
II when his investments included companies that supported Nazi
Germany's war effort.
Now we have Neil Bush, from Silverado
Savings and Loan infamy, cutting deals all over the Middle East
using Daddy's and Dubya's business and political connections
in that part of the world. And why shouldn't he? Dubya did this
with a lucrative pipeline deal in Argentina for Enron in 1989
when he was pimping for Enron and Daddy was in the White House
gearing up for a war with Iraq, another act that would eventually
line the pockets of the Bushes.
Brisard and Dasquie provide concrete
evidence how this same self-serving approach to business permitted
the Taliban to negotiate with senior members of the Bush administration
on a lucrative pipeline deal just weeks prior to the al Qaeda
terrorists slamming commercial jetliners into the World Trade
Center towers and the Pentagon. It's the same mind set that in
1990 convinced U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie to tell
Sadaam Hussein that the Bush I administration had no interest
in his inter-Arab border dispute involving Kuwait. We now all
know why the Bush family had no great interest in that "minor"
dispute. They made a fortune from it, along with then Secretary
of Defense Dick Cheney, whose Halliburton company helped rebuild
the oil infrastructures of both Kuwait and Iraq.
And now we have some of the same players
standing to make a fortune from a trans-Asian CentGas pipeline
that will extend from Turkemenistan, through Afghanistan, to
Pakistan's Indian Ocean port of Gwadar. Dubya's, Cheney's, and
Condoleezza Rice's Big Oil friends at Unocal, Halliburton, Chevron,
and Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil all stand to make a handsome profit
from the CentGas deal. Enron, in concert with Bush's Special
Envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, actually developed the
feasibility study for the pipeline. And current Secretary of
the Army, Thomas White, who now influences U.S. military policy
in Afghanistan, was a Vice President of Enron in charge of such
"special deals." So its little wonder we are told in
Forbidden Truth that representatives of the Bush administration
told the representatives of the Taliban in Berlin in July 2001
that they would be faced with a "carpet of gold or a carpet
of bombs." Its so arch-typical Bush.
Meanwhile, First Brother Neil has found
lucrative comfort in Saudi Arabia, the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers
of 911. His company, Ignite!, Inc., an e-learning educational
software company, has been busy finding clients in the educational
community of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It's
always a great thing to find better ways to teach. But we also
know that schools in these countries are financed and influenced
by the Wahhabi clerical structure, the most radical form of Islam
that preaches violence against Christians, Jews, and even fellow
Shia and Sufi Muslims. It is, therefore, astounding that Brother
Neil would be trying to sell software to schools that can then
put vile and extremist religious rantings online and accessible
to more "students," madrassas , and future terrorists
throughout the Middle East. But then again, when have the Bushes
ever cared about the consequences of their business dealings?
In fact, so-called "homeland security"
also seems made to order for the Bushes. From 1994 to 1999, Neil
ran Interlink Management Corporation from 10000 Memorial Drive
in Houston in the same building where Daddy Bush has his office.
Interlink is a venture capital firm that funded start-up companies
in the biotech fields, including many that are currently engaged
in bio-war defenses involving people, animals, and crops. Once
again, how convenient for the Bushes. Has anyone at the FBI thought
about looking into these firms and how they may have profited
from the anthrax attacks against the Democratic leadership of
the Senate? Probably not, wait -- certainly not!
And who is one of Neil Bush's best friends
and advocates in the Middle East? A leader who said this following
911: "the United States must not to act in haste, it must
give diplomacy and legal means every opportunity before launching
a military strike on Afghanistan, it must not rush to accuse
people without hard evidence." His name is Shaikh Mohammed
bin Rashid al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai and Defense
Minister of the United Arab Emirates, a country that was one
of three to recognize the Taliban and a center for the financing
of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Last October, while visiting
Dubai, Brother Neil praised the good Shaikh as a man with "foresight
and vision." Bush's other escort was Shaikh Hamdan bin Rashid
al Maktoum, the Finance Minister of Dubai and someone who certainly
had his pulse on the millions of dollars sent through the emirate
on their way to the Taliban and Pakistani madrassas and Islamic
"charities."
So once again, the Bushes are up to their
asses with corruption and questionable business partners and
acquaintances. "Forbidden Truth" highlights some of
these. But it is only a start. But the Washington-based sell
outs in the Fourth Estate cannot be counted on to expose the
rest of the Bush dirty business deals. And they extend far and
wide: The Caryle Group and Barrick Gold, on whose boards Daddy
Bush serves -- the first company does business with the Bin Laden
Group while the second is involved with questi onable CIA-backed
regimes in Africa; Scowcroft Associates, headed by Daddy Bush's
National Security Adviser and Dubya's Chairman of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board -- it is involved with shady
deals from the privatization of South Africa's state-owned telecommunications
company to the CentGas deal; JNB International, an oil firm that
along with Enron used Bush influence to get oil and gas contracts
in Argentina; M&W Pump and its partner Bush-El, Florida firms
that used Jeb Bush to intercede with it in military-ruled Nigeria
in 1989; and the list goes on and on.
If only the media elite in Washington
would just stop shooting their own messengers and begin focusing
on the real issues in this town, we might all be able to breathe
a little easier.
Wayne Madsen
is a Washington-based investigative journalist. He wrote one
of the introductions to "Forbidden
Truth." He can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
Today's Features
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
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