Chimps
In A Zoo Cage
By Sheila Samples
14 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all
for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life,
a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector,
but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate
like a chimp in a zoo-cage."~~
Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
If the Bush administration and
the US mainstream media are united on any one issue, it's an absolute
refusal to rock the political boat as they sail mercilessly through
the seas of corporate profit on the good ship Terrorbush. For the most
part, each group is an incurious lot -- undead creatures who neither
care, nor dare, to glance over the side of the ship at the bloated,
swirling bodies in the blood-red water below. From the beginning, their
mission has been to perform so fantastically against a backdrop of such
violent, explosive madness on so many fronts that we watch hypnotically
but do not see -- listen intently but do not hear.
They are very good at what
they do.
In the last 10 days, as 36
Americans were killed in Iraq, we were inundated with a variety of devastating
news -- all of which literally beg for broad, investigative reporting
from those whom the late, great Molly Ivins laughingly referred to as
"alert guardian watchdogs of democracy." For example...
~~A bleak National Intelligence
Estimate was
released, which stated flatly that what is going on in
Iraq is much worse than a civil war and there is little chance that
Bush's escalation of 20,000-50,000 troops will do anything but fuel
the fire. The media's initial interest quickly faded when Vice President
Dick Cheney called the report "hogwash," and announced that
he and Bush had the power to do whatever they wanted, and neither the
Congress nor the people could stop them.
~~Bush appointed Adm. William
Fallon to head Central Command (CENTCOM) -- a Navy man to run the ground
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Formerly with NATO as Assistant Chief
of Staff, Plans and Policy for Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, Fallon
has a history
of high-tech war game tomfoolery that provokes the enemy to attack.
With US carrier attack groups bumping into each other in the Persian
Gulf off the coast of Iran, who you gonna call?
~~Nat Hentoff writes in the
Village
Voice that the giant aerospace Boeing is "supplying
the CIA with the planes to transport the shackled, blindfolded, drugged
passengers for interrogation in foreign torture chambers." Hentoff
credits The New Yorker's Jane Meyer with breaking
the Boeing story in October, wherein she quoted a former
Jeppesen (Boeing subsidary) employee who was told by a top official,
"We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights --you know, the
torture flights...It certainly pays well. They” -- the C.I.A --
“spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about costs.
What they have to get done, they get done.”
~~The Pentagon's Inspector
General (IG) Report confirms what we have known for nearly five years
-- we were catapaulted into war with Iraq on a pack of malicious, treasonous
lies dreamed up by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith
and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who were obviously following
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's order on 9-11 to "sweep
it all up -- things related or not" to justify an attack on Iraq.
. . .In testimony
last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Acting IG Thomas
Gimble acknowledged, albeit in bewildering doublespeak, that Feith's
office had indeed "developed, produced and then disseminated alternative
intelligence assessments on the Iraq and Al-Qaeda relationship, which
included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus
of the intelligence community, to senior decision-makers." Gimble
plowed on with an admission that Feith "was inappropriately performing
intelligence activities of developing, producing and disseminating that
should be performed by the intelligence community."
. . .Given that more than
600,000 Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered, more than 2 million families
are broken and displaced, and 3,379
coalition troops (3,123 of them Americans) have been blown
to bits, Gimble's limp concession that what these creatures did in manipulating
intelligence to go to war was neither "illegal or unauthorized"
is almost as bizarre as the media refusing to investigate such criminal
activity. Almost as bizarre as Wolfowitz' grinning admission in Vanity
Fair two months after the attack, "We settled on one issue, weapons
of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree
on." Almost as bizarre as the American Enterprise Institute's Michael
Ledeen, who boasted in 2002, "We do not want stability in Iran,
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia. . . The real issue is not
whether, but how to destabilize."
~~Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales suddenly fired seven US attorneys and replaced them with Republican
insiders. One of them, Tomothy Griffin, who previously worked for Karl
Rove and for the Republican National Committee, will head to Arkansas
-- just as the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign heats up. San Diego
prosecuror Carol Lam was bounced for bringing California Republican
Randy "Duke" Cunningham to justice for taking $2.4 million
in bribes. According to Salon's Joe Conason, Lam "is
still pursuing important leads in that historic case. Cunningham
is supposed to be cooperating," Conason says, "but if Bush
replaces her (Lam) with a partisan stooge, he may be able to keep his
secrets." In his usual Cheshire manner, Gonzales admitted the resignations
were forced, but "declined to comment on details of the cases."
~~The old news surfaced briefly
of the Pentagon loading 363 tons of $100 bills onto pallets and flying
them aboard military planes to Iraq where they were handed over to the
Iraqi government with no accountability. That's $4 billion, or 726,000
pounds of stash -- with an additional $8.8 billion that also disappeared
about the time US "Viceroy" Paul Bremer mounted up and headed
for the border.
~~Then, there's the Scooter
Libby Blame Plame Game trial wherein Libby and a gaggle of journalists
are wildly pointing fingers at each other in a hiliarious effort to
cover their treasonous asses about who told whom what and when -- while
the noose tightens slowly around Dick Cheney's neck. Great entertainment,
but of course no in-depth research and investigation into matters of
consequence, such as what "dark side" activity was going on
at the highest levels in order to take us to war. Personally, I never
believe anything anybody called "Scooter" tells me -- unless
his last name is Rizzuto.
You'd think that the mainstream
media would bump into each other in their haste to cover one or all
of the above. But no. While C-Span alone carried the interminably long
Senate debate-about-the-debate on at least three toothless, nonbinding
resolutions addressing Bush's ongoing ejaculation in Iraq -- while six
US helicopters were brought down by enemy fire -- while the Bush neocons
were back at their old game of manipulating intelligence to justify
a war on Iran -- the silly, somnolent scriveners chose instead to overdose
on the "Air Pelosi" scandal.
Reporters clambered aboard
the Swift Boat with their Republican "unnamed sources," and
went full throttle at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for daring to request
a plane large enough to fly from Washington to California without refueling.
The story quickly went from "Air Pelosi" to "Pelosi One."
It went from, "The new Speaker of the House is apparently asking
for a big travel upgrade" to "the San Francisco Democrat is
abusing the perks of power by attempting to commandeer a fancy jumbo-size
military jet with a 'distinguished visitor compartment with sleep accommodations.'"
The reporters-cum-repeaters
rounded out the jam-packed 10-day news period either shouting that all
destructive weapons in Iraq come from Iran -- or curled up on the nation's
sidewalks shrieking in ecstasy about Anna Nicole Smith.
The U.S. media is beneath
contempt, and can never redeem itself for the damage it has wrought
on this republic by its fawning allegience to a band of crooked, war-mongering
fools. By sinking to reading scrubbed-clean White House press releases,
by relinquishing all pretences of honesty, values and integrity in order
to ingratiate itself to the ravenous corporate beast, its members are
little more than "enablers" who cannot remember why they became
journalists in the first place.
W.C. Fields once said, "There
comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the
tail and face the situation." That time is now. Molly Ivins was
right -- it's time we hit the streets, beating on pots and pans and
take our country back. Our first stop should be at the source of our
country's problems -- the shallow and destructive corporate media.
Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian
US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for
a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at [email protected]
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