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CounterPunch
March 3,
2003
Bill O'Reilly's Enemies
of the State
Journalism
as McCarthy Hearing
By KURT NIMMO
It's bad enough the Bushites sincerely believe
your principled opposition to Iraq attack II is "irrelevant,"
and New York's finest think it's acceptable to push a barricade
up in your face while you're attempting to exercise your constitutional
right to free speech and assembly. It's bad enough that your
Congress person responds to your letters and phone calls with
a form letter, or not at all, and the local newspaper will not
publish your letters to the editor. Considering the way things
are in America these days, you may have concluded all of this
is inevitable, sadly predictable.
But it's about to get worse, much worse.
Soon, thanks to the corporate media,
you may not only be denied the right to express your opposition
to Bush's attack, you may very well be considered an enemy of
the state -- and most of us know what that means.
Enter loud mouth and hyper-reactionary
Bill O'Reilly. On February 26, during O'Reilly's Fox News Channel
show, he said the following,
"Once the war against Saddam Hussein
begins, we expect every American to support our military, and
if you can't do that, just shut up. Americans, and indeed our
foreign allies who actively work against our military once the
war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me.
Just fair warning to you, Barbara Streisand and others who see
the world as you do. I don't want to demonize anyone, but anyone
who hurts this country in a time like this, well. Let's just
say you will be spotlighted."
Now, of course, it's prudent to consider
the source -- a TV personality interested primarily in ratings
-- but it is also advisable to consider O'Reilly's pull. Thanks
to his rabid "journalism," Bill O'Reilly essentially
had Dr. Sami al-Arian, an associate professor of computer engineering
at the University of South Florida, not only bounced from his
job but also arrested and indicted by the Justice Department
on racketeering and terrorist charges due to his alleged association
with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Ashcroft went as far as to characterize
al-Arian as "the North American leader of the Palestinian
Islamic Jihad." Sami and his co-defendants face possible
life sentences if convicted.
I'm sure Bill O'Reilly is tickled.
Recall O'Reilly saying during the September
26, 2001, al-Arian interview, "if I was the CIA, I'd follow
you wherever you went. I'd follow you 24 hours."
Obviously, this is what happened. O'Reilly
had used his show as a sort of media glamorized McCarthy hearing,
accusing al-Arian of complicity in terrorism.. As it now appears,
the FBI and Justice Department were watching Sami and his co-defendants
prior to Sami's appearance on the O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly's
and the Justice Department's efforts dovetailed nicely -- some
will likely say too nicely. It's no secret the corporate media
is essentially the official propaganda office of the Bush White
House. It's the promotional department for the Pentagon.
Sami al-Arian's arrest after his much
ballyhooed appearance on national television is nothing short
of a PR coup d'etat for the Ashcroft Justice Department as it
endeavors to convince the American public that sinister threats
from al-Qaeda and Islamic militant are pervasive from the shores
of New York to San Francisco and beyond. Bushites Tom Ridge of
the Ministry of Homeland Security and John Ashcroft of the Justice
Department are entrusted with the requisite task of creating
a climate of color-coded hysteria and ubiquitous fear in America
as the Bushites prepare us for continual war against the "terrorist
states" of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea.
Sami al-Arian is but the first of many
fishes to be snagged from the mostly illusory (and meticulously
engineered) river of terrorism the Bushites have fabricated --
with more than a little help from the CIA -- in an effort to
scare Americans into the required psychological state needed
for perpetual war. In fact, the "international terror network"
Bush and Crew often mention runs back through the days of Iran-Contra
to Zbigniew Brzezinski and the creation of ferocious and murderous
Islamic radicalism during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
It worked for Carter and Reagan. It will work for Bush.
As O'Reilly points out, in the not too
distant future you will be expected to either give your full
support to Bush, or shut up. If you can't shut up, if you insist
on taking to the streets in protest, if you insist the First
Amendment (which O'Reilly exploits) means what it says it does,
you will be "spotlighted." You will be declared an
"enemy of the state."
Of course, not every American opposed
to Bush and his vision of recurrent war will be "spotlighted"
by the Fox News reactionary, but the real or perceived leaders
of the emerging antiwar movement certainly will be. O'Reilly
-- as the consummate media snake with the dark personality of
a relentless bully -- will happily finger these perceived leaders
on his show and the FBI, CIA (with full presence now in FBI offices),
agents from the Ministry of Homeland Security, and those from
the Justice Department will descend on prominent and not so prominent
dissenters like Attorney General Palmer's hired thugs did on
labor leaders and socialists after World War One.
Naturally, O'Reilly is not so much interested
in the antiwar musings of Barbara Streisand or Sean Penn (who
can be silenced relatively easily through intimidation), but
rather those of us who organize peace vigils and marches, who
publish antiwar websites, those of us who write words like the
ones you are reading at this very moment. We are the sincere
threat to the Bush cabal and its demented vision of forever war,
even as Dubya's dismissive subalterns call us "irrelevant."
Millions of people around the world pouring into the streets
and pressuring their governments to end this war before it begins
cannot be easily dismissed as "irrelevant." It will
take accusations and frame-ups and TV spangled slander and innuendo
to put a dent in the antiwar movement. It take a lot of work
for the newly christened COINTELPRO to take down the antiwar
movement.
Like Nixon before him, Bush privately
roils over these massive rallies and marches and you can bet
he will pull out all the stops to circumvent them, especially
after he sends the troops into Iraq. Soon Bush will play on the
patriotic impulses of millions of Americans to follow lockstep
behind him as he murders untold thousands in the Middle East.
He will -- either implicitly or directly -- question the patriotism
of those arrayed against the madness of total and unremitting
war. It happened in the dark days after 911 and during the attack
on Afghanistan -- it will happen again, and with a vengeance,
when Bush gives the order for his military juggernaut to roll
over the helpless Iraqi people. You're either with Bush and the
Zionist chickenhawks, or you will suffer the fate of Sami al-Arian.
Bill O'Reilly will see to it.
Yesterday's
Features
Dr. Richard Lichtman
Psychologists
and War
John Stanton
Life
in a Barrel of Oil
Carol Norris
George Bush's War on Himself: the World is His Battlefield
Wayne Madsen
The
First Shots of the War
Pablo Mukherjee
Orwell's
Bastards: Lies and Shameless Pretence
Larry Mosqueda
A Duty to Obey All Unlawful Orders
Behzad Yaghmaian
Scarf and Make-Up: the Modern Face of Islam
Jason Leopold
Hell-Bent for War: the Six Year Campaign by Right Wing Think
Tanks to Promote Takeover of Iraq
Anthony Gancarski
Bush's Divine Inspiration:
What If Jesus Were a Gunslinger?
Ellen Cantarow
The
Day of the Barricades: New York City Against the People
Sam Bahour & Michael Dahan
Snow Covered Rubble
Website of the Day
Bush
and Blair: the Duet
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February 22
/ 23, 2003
Laura Flanders
Security Threat?
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey Barred Entry to US
Alexander Cockburn
The Trouble with E-Bombs
Kathy Kelly
Letter from Baghdad
Tight Squeeze
Subcomandate
Marcos
A Universal
No to the War of Fear
William Cook
Armageddon Anxiety
Jo Freeman
Conservative Women
Michael Colby
Howard Dean is No Green
Ben Tripp
Fact-Checking the Constitution
Joanne Mariner
Pets Unite!
Richard Falk and David Krieger
Iraq and the Failures of Democracy
Uri Avnery
War Crimes and Sharon
Ian Williams
John Bolton in Jerusalem
Michael Wolff
How Sanctions Destroyed Iraqi Education
William Hughes
The Zev and Ari Show
Susanna Sonnenberg
Boxing Missoula
Michael Ortiz Hill
Peace and Humility
Anis Shivani
When Kafka Aligns with Orwell
John Mihelich
The Hidden History of Butte's
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Rich Procter
Bush and His Fabled Gut
Adam Engel
Voice of the Nation
Becky Johnson
The Hopscotch Rebellion
Krieger, Tripp, Ashley
Poets' Basement
Website of
the Weekend
The
Pedro Martinez of Palestine
February 15
/ 16, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Colin
Powell and the Great "Intelligence Fraud"
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
The Whole World is Watching
Edward Said
A Monumental Hypocrisy
Wouter Hijink
Report from Amsterdam
"War: Do Not Feed!"
Linda Heard
At Last! Proud to be British
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Taking a Stand on Iraq
Robert Fisk
The Case Against War
Lev Grinberg
Lessons from Israel
A War Without Legitimacy
Chris Floyd
Cold Fronts:
Bush War Profits
Ahmad Faruqui
Stepping Back from the Brink of War
Norman Madarasz
French Kisses from the Citizens of France
Adam Lebowitz
Scott Ritter in Tokyo
Kurt Nimmo
Bring Us the Head of Osama bin Laden
Forrest Hylton
The Revolt in Bolivia
Col. Dan Smith
Irrelevance and Credibility:
Bush, NATO and the UN
Wayne Madsen
The Lies of Tom Lantos
Ranjit Hoskote
The Invisible Modernities of the Islamic World
Emily Zitter-Smith
Who's Safe Now?
An American in Cairo
Rich Procter
Anybody Remember the Powell Doctrine?
Poets Basement:
Eliot
Katz, Scott Handleman, and Bruce Tomczak
Website of the Weekend
Anti-War
Posters
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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