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Banned
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Originally Posted by powerclown
I think very highly of 3 NYT war reporters: John Burns, Dexter Filkins, and Michael Gordon. They very much put into perspective the likes of Arkin et al. These 3 have consistently been compelling, informative, enlightening, comprehensive and above all as neutral as possible, to my mind. I very much look forward to reading their articles. I also like Thomas Friedman, although he's not a war reporter in this war.
Ask yourself this question: If the NYT are simply providing a neutral public service, to whom are they servicing? What demographic wants to see american soldiers KIA? Would you have reservations about foreign news agencies airing americans KIA?
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You don't want news reporting, powerclown, you want a conduit for the broadcasting of the message that you already agree with....
powerclown, here's a "crash course" on why you probably like Dexter Filkins' "work". He trades "access" to exclusive information from the US military and political authorities, by acting as Tim Russert on MTP does. They are both reliable, uninquistive, non-confrontational "shills", and hence, satisfy you that they offer "fair and balanced" reporting. But....they are not news reporters.
The truth is, that they offer whatever is in the interest of the agenda of the military and government officials "SAOs" to disseminate. As Cathie Martin described, Russert is not even a propagandist, just a "stage manager" for the newest episode of the "Dick Cheney show".....
It is telling that you think highly of Dexter Filkins, powerclown. He doesn't probe or investigate, he simply has the same job as president Bush....self admitted propaganda "catapult".
It's a small world.....that "news world" of yours, powerclown....the narrow little "corner" of the NY Times where an embedded "mouthpiece" like Filkins can sooth you with reporting that "fits" your views.
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012501951.html
In Ex-Aide's Testimony, A Spin Through VP's PR
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 26, 2007; A01
Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you.
This delicious morsel about the "Meet the Press" host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under "pro," she wrote: "control message."
<h3>"I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used," Martin testified. "It's our best format."</h3>
It is unclear whether the first week of the trial will help or hurt Libby or the administration. But the trial has already pulled back the curtain on the White House's PR techniques and confirmed some of the darkest suspicions of the reporters upon whom they are used. Relatively junior White House aides run roughshod over members of the president's Cabinet. Bush aides charged with speaking to the public and the media are kept out of the loop on some of the most important issues. And bad news is dumped before the weekend for the sole purpose of burying it.
With a candor that is frowned upon at the White House, Martin explained the use of late-Friday statements. "Fewer people pay attention to it late on Friday," she said. "Fewer people pay attention when it's reported on Saturday."
Martin, perhaps unaware of the suspicion such machinations caused in the press corps, lamented that her statements at the time were not regarded as credible. She testified that, as the controversy swelled in 2004, reporters ignored her denials and continued to report that it was Cheney's office that sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate allegations of Iraq's nuclear acquisitions. "They're not taking my word for it," Martin recalled telling a colleague.
Martin, who now works on the president's communications staff, said she was frustrated that reporters wouldn't call for comment about the controversy. She said she had to ask the CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, which reporters were working on the story. "Often, reporters would stop calling us," she testified.
This prompted quiet chuckles among the two dozen reporters sitting in court to cover the trial. Whispered one: "When was the last time you called the vice president's office and got anything other than a 'no comment'?"
At length, Martin explained how she, Libby and deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley worked late into the night writing a statement to be issued by George Tenet in 2004 in which the CIA boss would take blame for the bogus claim in Bush's State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Africa.
After "delicate" talks, Tenet agreed to say the CIA "approved" the claim and "I am responsible" -- but even that disappointed Martin, who had wanted Tenet to say that "we did not express any doubt about Niger."
During her testimony, Martin, a Harvard Law School graduate married to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and a close pal of Bush counselor Dan Bartlett, seemed uncomfortable, shifting in her chair, squinting at her interrogators, stealing quick glances at the jury, and repeatedly touching her cheek, ear, nose, lips and scalp.
Martin shed light on the mystery of why White House press secretary Scott McClellan promised, falsely, that Libby was not involved in outing CIA operative Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife. After McClellan had vouched for Bush strategist Karl Rove's innocence, Libby asked Martin, "Why don't they say something about me?"
"You need to talk to Scott," Martin advised.
On jurors' monitors were images of Martin's talking points, some labeled "on the record" and others "deep background." She walked the jurors through how the White House coddles friendly writers and freezes out others. To deal with the Wilson controversy, she hastily arranged a Cheney lunch with conservative commentators. And when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof first wrote about the Niger affair, she explained, "we didn't see any urgency to get to Kristof" because "he frankly attacked the administration fairly regularly."
Questioned by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Martin described how Hadley tried to shield White House spokesmen from the Niger controversy. "Everybody was sort of in the dark," she explained. "There had been a decision not to have the communicators involved."
But Martin, encouraged by Libby, secretly advised Libby and Cheney on how to respond. She put "Meet the Press" at the top of her list of "Options" but noted that it might appear "too defensive." Next, she proposed "leak to Sanger-Pincus-newsmags. Sit down and give to him." This meant that the "no-leak" White House would give the story to the New York Times' David Sanger, The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, or Time or Newsweek. Option 3: "Press conference -- Condi/Rumsfeld." Option 4: "Op-ed."
Martin was embarrassed about the "leak" option; the case, after all, is about a leak. "It's a term of art," she said. "If you give it to one reporter, they're likelier to write the story."
For all the elaborate press management, things didn't always go according to plan. Martin described how Time wound up with an exclusive one weekend because she didn't have a phone number for anybody at Newsweek.
"You didn't have a lot of hands-on experience dealing with the press?" defense attorney Theodore Wells asked.
"Correct," Martin replied. After further questions, she added: "Few of us in the White House had had hands-on experience with any crisis like this."
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040900890.html
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A01
....The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.
That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. <b>One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.....</b>
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Quote:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1002314713
A U.S. 'Propaganda' Program, al-Zarqawi, and 'The New York Times'
By Greg Mitchell
Published: April 10, 2006 3:00 PM ET
NEW YORK Midway through Thomas Ricks’ Washington Post scoop on Monday detailing a U.S. military “propaganda program” aimed at convincing Iraqis that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has a very prominent role in directing violence in that country, there is one specific tip on how the plan may have also targeted American reporters and audiences.
<b>Ricks found that one “selective leak”--about a recently discovered letter written by Zarqawi--was handed by the military to Dexter Filkins, the longtime New York Times reporter in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about the Zarqawi letter boasting of foreigners' role in suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the front page of the Times on Feb. 9, 2004.</b>
“Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare,” Ricks observed. <h3>He quoted Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman when the propaganda campaign began in 2004: "We trusted Dexter to write an accurate story, and we gave him a good scoop."</h3>
<b>Filkins, in an e-mail to Ricks, said he assumed the military was releasing the Zarqawi letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." He told Ricks he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now.</b>
But Ricks' article, if anything, underplays the impact of the letter in February 2004--<b>and if Filkins had qualms about its authenticity, it hardly deterred him and his paper from giving it serious, and largely uncritical, attention. </b>
In his February 9, 2004 front-pager, <b>Filkins</b> detailed the contents of the letter, and its significance, matter-of-factly for eight paragraphs. Only then did he introduce any doubt, suggesting that possibly it could have been “written by some other insurgent…who exaggerated his involvement.”
After that one-sentence brief mention, <b>Filkins</b> went directly to: “Still, a senior United States intelligence official in Washington said, 'I know of no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way.''’ The story continued for another 1000 words without expressing any other doubts about the letter—which was found on a CD and was unsigned.
In his Post story today, Ricks also does not mention what happened next.
<b>William Safire, in his Feb. 11, 2004, column for the Times titled “Found: A Smoking Gun,” declared that the letter “demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a '’clear link’ between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.”</b> Safire mocked the Washington Post for burying the story on page 17, while hailing a Reuters account quoting an “amazed” U.S. officials saying, “We couldn’t make this up if we tried.”
Three days later, another Times columnist, David Brooks, covered the letter as fact under the heading “The Zarqawi Rules.” The letter was covered in this manner by other media for weeks. So clearly, the leak to Filkins worked.
A Web search of New York Times articles in the two months after the scoop failed to turn up any articles casting serious doubts on the letter. Two leading writers for Newsweek on its Web site quickly had a different view, however.
<b>Christopher Dickey, the Middle East regional editor, on February 13, 2004, asked: “Given the Bush administration’s record peddling bad intelligence and worse innuendo, you’ve got to wonder if this letter is a total fake. How do we know the text is genuine? How was it obtained? By whom? And when? And how do we know it’s from Zarqawi? We don’t. We’re expected to take the administration’s word for it.”
Rod Nordland, the magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief, on March 6 wrote: “The letter so neatly and comprehensively lays out a blueprint for fomenting strife with the Shia, and later the Kurds, that it's a little hard to believe in it unreservedly.</b> It came originally from Kurdish sources who have a long history of disinformation and dissimulation. It was an electronic document on a CD-ROM, so there's no way to authenticate signature or handwriting, aside from the testimony of those captured with it, about which the authorities have not released much information.”........
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/in...rssnyt&emc=rss
December 12, 2005
Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 9 - The priests have long since departed, but the elite Jesuit high school called Baghdad College still looms over the swirling world of Iraqi politics.
<b>The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week - Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi</b> and Adel Abdul Mahdi - were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away......
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Between May 3, 2003 and July 9, 2006, Dexter Filkins filed 45 reports that mentioned Ahmed Chalabi. To Iraqis, Chalabi had the voter appeal equivalent to that of a Dennis Kucinich in the US. He is described in Filkin's 14 page article, published just three months ago, as a "close friend" to Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. How would an article of this length, with such gushing praise towards Chalabi, be received in the US, more than a year after a "no voter appeal candidate", like Chalabi...... was a losing candidate who received less than one precent of the popular vote in a US presidential race?
Filkins never bothered, in his years filing reports from Iraq, to do anything more than convey the reporting about Chalabi that satisfied the US administration. Three months ago, Filkins reported at length about a neo-con sponsored shill who held no influence in Iraq. Why? Who does Filkins and his editors think are interested in reading his long tribute to Chalabi?
Quote:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/...bi.php?page=13
Where Plan A left Ahmad Chalabi
By Dexter Filkins / The New York Times
Published: November 3, 2006
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/...abi.php?page=6
(Page 6 of 14)
.....And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, <b>seemed already to know:</b> that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) <b>Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq - even less trusted than Saddam Hussein.</b>
<b>["host" asks the obvious question....why then, Mr. Filkins, three years later, are you giving us 14 pages about an Iraqi "leader" who no one aside from US neo-cons, and certainly almost no Iraqis, supported?]</b>
The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq's oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It's an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein's fall.
<b>For all the hard work,</b> his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites - his only natural constituency - especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. "I don't think Chalabi has any credibility left," Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. "He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don't like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada - it's ridiculous.".....
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/...bi.php?page=12
(Page 12 of 14)
.....6. Baghdad, December 2005
A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He's talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes.
As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask.
"Chalabi good good," the Iraqi man says in halting English.
Whom are you going to vote for?
"The Shiite alliance, of course," the Iraqi answers. "It is the duty of all Shiite people."
When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast - not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. <b>One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: "We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots,</b> and when they were counted, we didn't even get that many." He shrugged......
(Page 13 of 14)
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/...bi.php?page=13
.....But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people <h3>he had worked so hard to set free.........</h3>
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Last edited by host; 02-02-2007 at 12:58 AM..
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