Maureen Farrell at BuzzFlash.com

Support BuzzFlash Get a copy of click image MORE BuzzFlash INTERVIEWS WORLD MEDIA WATCH P.M. CARPENTER MAUREEN FARRELL BARBARA'S DAILY BUZZ SOUTHERN STYLE CARTOONS THE ANGRY LIBERAL EDITORIALS CONTRIBUTORS MAILBAG PERSPECTIVES ANALYSIS NEWS ALERTS LINK ARCHIVES SEARCH ABOUT FAQ

Bamboozling Revisited

by Maureen Farrell

In January, 2003, Mike Ward addressed the conspiracy theories that had sprung up since the 911 attacks. "Angry speculation - focused mainly on government dirty dealings, ulterior motives, and potential complicity in the attacks - has risen to a clamor that easily rivals what followed the Kennedy assassination," he wrote [LINK]. Not surprisingly, the more Team Bush shows contempt for truth and the public's right to know, the worse it gets. And if a miracle doesn't happen -- that is, if the Bush administration doesn't cooperate with the September 11 commission or satisfactorily address claims that they knowingly presented forged information to make their case for war [LINK] -- sentient citizens are going to want to know why.

"Was Press Asleep on Pre-War WMD Issue?" the June 12, 2003 edition of Editor and Publisher belatedly asked, with Dallas Morning News international editor Tim Connelly admitting, "Questions were being raised, not necessarily by the press, but by diplomats. The skepticism was there, but it may be the case that the press failed to ask this or that question. The British press has been more aggressive. . . ." [LINK]. No kidding. Bertrand Russell's 1964 essay, "16 Questions on the [JFK] Assassination," [LINK] contained eerily similar complaints about the US media, charging that it blindly propagated "blatant fabrications" and largely ignored "world-wide disbelief" in official US government claims.

Such negligence insures that questions persist -- which is why the Kennedy assassination continues to generate controversy. Headlines like "Study Backs Theory of the Grassy Knoll" [LINK] tantalize Washington Post readers; The Men Who Killed Kennedy [LINK] is a History Channel staple; and JFK's murder is debated on TV. When Bill Maher recently appeared on Hardball, for example, Maher uttered a confounded "wow" after Chris Matthews admitted, "I believe in the single bullet theory." [LINK] (Matthews also thinks George AWOL Chickenhawk looks more authentic in a flight suit than real war hero John Kerry ever could, so go figure).

Matthews' assertion that "you don't go by theories, you go by facts," is fair enough, but how can any of us "go by the facts" when we don't know what they are? While today's media critics bemoan "All the News That's Fudged to Print" [LINK], the Village Voice chronicled similar sins in 1992. In an article entitled "JFK: How the Media Assassinated the Real Story" [LINK], Robert Hennelly and Jerry Policoff cited a 1963 memo from Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and revealed that Katzenbach determined what the Warren Commission's findings should be "a year before the commission reached them." Mapping out a strategy to insure government credibility, Katzenbach wrote, "We need something to head off public speculation or Congressional hearings of the wrong sort."

Hennelly and Policoff chronicled ploys to achieve this end, and the tactics are startlingly familiar. Borrowing from the Voice's account, here then, is a sampling of attempts to manipulate, control and bamboozle the public -- then and now:

1) Then: "Within days of the [Kennedy] assassination, the Justice Department quashed an editorial in The Washington Post that called for an independent investigation . . . Katzenbach called Washington Post editor Russell Wiggins and told him that "the Department of Justice seriously hoped that the Washington Post would not encourage any specific means" by which the facts should be made available to the public."

Now: "President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11. . . Tuesday's discussion followed a rare call to Daschle from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request. 'The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism,' Daschle told reporters." [LINK]

2) Then: "Within two weeks the FBI was able to crow that NBC had pledged not to report anything beyond what the FBI itself was putting before the American people."

Now: "It started the day after the attacks on the twin towers, with the discovery of a flight manual in Arabic and a copy of the Koran in a car hired by Mohammed Atta and abandoned at Boston airport. In the immediate shocked aftermath of the attacks, these findings were somehow reassuring: American intelligence was on the case, the perpetrators were no longer faceless. In less than a week came another find, two blocks away from the twin towers, in the shape of Atta's passport. We had all seen the blizzard of paper rain down from the towers, but the idea that Atta's passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged would have tested the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI's crackdown on terrorism." [LINK]

3) Then: "In the aftermath of the assassination, the media completely relinquished its usual skepticism and opened the door for the government to do whatever it found most expedient."

Now: "In the American press, day after day, the White House controls the agenda. The supposedly liberal American press has become a dog that never bites, hardly barks but really loves rolling over and having its tummy tickled." [LINK]

4) Then: "[F]our hours after the murder, Life magazine grabbed up one of the main pieces of evidence--the Zapruder film-- misrepresenting the content to millions of readers in its very first post-assassination issue and then continuing the lie with ever-changing captions and Zapruder frames in its special issue supporting the Warren Commission report."

Now: (Newsweek, Sept. 11, 2001): "As a small army of fire fighters struggled to put out the flames at the World Trade Center in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington, federal law enforcement agencies had already begun marshaling agents, readying them for what promises to be the largest criminal investigation in the history of the nation." [LINK]; (Newsweek, May 7, 2003): "[T]he White House may seek to invoke executive privilege over key documents relating to the attacks in order to keep them out of the hands of investigators for the National Commission on Terror Attacks Upon the United States -- the independent panel created by Congress to probe all aspects of 9-11." [LINK]

5) Then: "[I]n 1967, a supposedly independent CBS documentary series on the assassination was in fact secretly reviewed and seemingly altered by former Warren Commission member John Jay McCloy. . . "

Now: [Lionel Chetwynd's] film . . . portrays Bush as decisive and in-charge on 9/11, commanding officials on Air Force One to take him to Washington. "If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!" Whoever was driving Air Force One apparently wasn't listening; as we know, the president was flown instead to Nebraska and only returned that evening to the White House, where Laura Bush was holding the fort. [LINK]

6) Then: "Many of the editors who were calling the shots on assassination coverage had come out of World War II. Their country took precedence over the truth; the CIA and FBI were entitled to the benefit of the doubt; the "free press" was sometimes confused with the Voice of America."

Now: "The growing scandal over the Bush Administration's manipulation of intelligence data on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction focuses on the role of the White House. But it doesn't devote proper attention to the role of the US media in the propaganda effort that misled the world." [LINK]

7) Then: "The paper of record, The New York Times, led the newsprint pack with the official story. Months before the Warren Commission report was released, Times writer Anthony Lewis got a special exclusive preview and his June 1, 1964, page-one article presented its findings in positively glowing terms; over the years he has continued to attack Warren Commission critics as well as Oliver Stone's film."

Now: "Take the case of [New York Times] staff reporter Judith Miller, who covers the atomic bomb/chemical-weapons-fear beat, and hasn't heard a scare story about Iraq that she didn't believe, especially if leaked by her White House friends. On Sept. 8, 2002, Ms. Miller and her colleague Michael Gordon helped co-launch the Bush II sales campaign for Saddam-change with a front page story about unsuccessful Iraqi efforts to purchase 81-mm aluminum tubes, allegedly destined for a revived nuclear weapons program. Pitched to a 9/11-spooked public and a gullible, cowardly U.S. congress, the aluminum tubes plant was a big component of the "weapons of mass destruction" canard, which resulted in hasty House and Senate war authorization on Oct. 11." [LINK]

8) Then: "In the early edition of the [New York Times] the headline read, "Who Killed John F. Kennedy?" and the review itself contained two long paragraphs challenging the Warren Commission, subtitled "Mysteries Persist".. . . Within hours these hard-hitting paragraphs disappeared from the review and the headline was altered to read, "The Shaw-Garrison Affair." Leonard told the Voice he was never able to track down the person responsible for the changes. "Not the bullpen, not the culture desk, not even Abe Rosenthal knew how it happened."

Now: "On 21 September 2002, The Memory Hole posted an extract from an essay by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, in which they explain why they didn't have the military push into Iraq and topple Saddam during Gulf War 1. Although there are differences between the Iraq situations in 1991 and 2002-3, Bush's key points apply to both. But a funny thing happened. Fairly recently, Time pulled the essay off of their site. . . If you go to the table of contents for the issue in which the essay appeared (2 March 1998), "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" is conspicuously absent. [LINK]

9) Then: "While the Times was busy selling the Warren Commission story, Life magazine went one step beyond that, actively intervening to spirit away crucial physical evidence in the case. Aside from swooping down on Oswald's wife and mother and sequestering them in a hotel room to protect Life's exclusive interviews, Life was in Dallas making arrangements to buy the original Zapruder film only four hours after the assassination."

Now: "With the help of the FBI, the Saudis and the bin Laden family chartered an aircraft to pick up family members in Los Angeles, Orlando, and Washington, D.C. The bin Laden plane then flew the relatives to Boston, where - one week after the attacks - the group left Logan Airport bound for Jeddah. . . . [H]ow much did the FBI know about the bin Laden family when it allowed them to leave the country? And could investigators have learned everything they needed to know on the basis of the day-of-departure airport interviews? . . . When [the National Review] called an official at Logan Airport, he said, "You have to talk to the State Department. They're the ones who set it up." But a State Department source said the department "played no role" in the matter. "This is not something we would have brokered," the source said. [LINK]

10) Then: "According to Richard Stolley, who is currently the editorial director of Time Inc. and who handled the Zapruder transaction for Life, the order to acquire the film and "withhold it from public viewing" came from Life's publisher, C.D. Jackson.. . [a] staunch anticommunist who played a crucial role in the direction of U.S. policy throughout the 1950s, both as "psychological war advisor" to Eisenhower and as a member of anticommunist front groups. Jackson's publication had long been known for "always pulling chestnuts out of the fire for the CIA. . . "

Now: "[I]t is Kristol's Weekly Standard, bankrolled by conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, that has popularized [neoconservative] viewpoints. The Standard may have a circulation of just 55,000, but it has aimed successfully at policy-makers rather than average readers, making it "one of the most influential publications in Washington". . . In 1997, the Standard's cover story announced that "Saddam Must Go." In 1998, the Standard published a letter to then-President Clinton, calling on him to remove Hussein from power. The letter was signed by 18 people, eight of whom would join the Bush administration in senior positions. . . ." [LINK]

11) Then: "[Life Magazine's] description of the Zapruder film went a long way toward allaying fears of conspiracy in those early days, for it explained away a troublesome inconsistency in the lone assassin scenario. There was only one problem: The description of the Zapruder film was a total fabrication."

Now: "The United States went to war with Iraq, spent billions of dollars, lost nearly 200 American lives so far and killed thousands of Iraqi citizens, all because the Bush administration had convinced the public that America -- indeed the world -- was under imminent threat of being attacked by weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaida. . . . When Colin Powell made the case for war before the United Nations, he may have unknowingly used some fabricated evidence provided by the Defense Department. Now Condoleeza Rice has admitted that President Bush cited a forged document in his State of the Union speech to show that Iraq was a nuclear threat." [LINK]

12) Then: "Meanwhile, Life's sister publication, Time, did its best to swat away any and all conspiracy talk. Time countered the ground swell of conspiracy rumors in Europe with an article in its June 12, 1964, issue. Entitled "J.F.K.: The Murder and the Myths," the article blamed the speculation on "leftist" writers and publications seeking a "rightist conspiracy."

Now: "But the neocon-conspiracy notion is especially conspicuous in writing by leftist authors in the pages of journals like The Washington Monthly . . . . Many of those who disseminate the new theory had strenuously opposed war with Iraq. . . The critics had warned of such things as massive resistance by the Iraqi military and people, a quagmire on the order of Vietnam, Saddam's use of weapons of mass destruction (though some of the same voices loudly questioned whether Iraq had such weapons at all). . . . " [LINK]

13) Then: "The best look inside the investigation came in a Rolling Stone interview with New York Times reporter and assassination investigation team member Martin Waldron. Waldron told Rolling Stone that the team found "a lot of unanswered questions" that the Times did not choose to pursue."

Now: "The costs of the media acquiescence to the atmosphere of superpatriotism are all around us. We're fighting one war in Afghanistan and may be about to enter another in Iraq. And yet because of the Bush Administration's penchant for obsessive secrecy coupled with the media's misplaced deference, we're not much more knowledgeable about our path than thirty-eight years ago, when Lyndon Johnson sent US troops into combat in Vietnam by retaliating for an imaginary attack." [LINK]

14) Then: "[T]he working press was a lobster in a trap," Bill Moyers told the Voice. "Back then, what government said was the news. . . . In the 1950s and early '60s, the official view of reality was the agenda for the Washington press corps."

Now: "Could the press have been more aggressive? Probably," said [San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil] Bronstein, who covered the first Persian Gulf War as a correspondent. "I saw a lot of stories that raised the issues. But at the end of the day, the government controls the information." [LINK]

15) Then: "I think it is quite revealing that it's Oliver Stone that's forcing Congress to open up the [JFK assassination ] files and not The Washington Post, The New York Times, or CBS." -- Bill Moyers

Now: [Michael] Moore said he plans to investigate the historical ties that the Bush family had with the bin Ladens for many years via the Carlyle Group and the little-publicized report that the Bush administration allowed 24 bin Laden family members to leave the U.S. on a private Saudi jet before the FBI could question them in the months after 9-11. . . . "Here's one question I want to pose," Moore told the Times. "What if on the day after Oklahoma City, Bill Clinton, suddenly worried about the safety of the McVeigh family up in Buffalo, allowed a jet to pick them all up and take them out of the country, not to return?" [LINK]

Since JFK's assassination, disinformation procedures to "employ propaganda assets" for "countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists" have been uncovered [LINK] and former intelligence agents have spilled the media manipulation beans [LINK]. Former CIA director William Colby's claim that, "the Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any major significance in the major media," was substantiated in Carl Bernstein's "The CIA & The Media," an article he penned for Rolling Stone. "By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials," he wrote in 1977, "have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc." [LINK]. Later that year, the New York Times revealed that "more than eight hundred news and public information organizations and individuals," were involved. Today, the CIA's Public Affairs Office boasts that it has relationships with "every major wire service, newspaper, news-weekly, and television network in the nation." [LINK]

Harold Pinter recently charged that 'millions of totally deluded American people' had fallen for media manipulation [LINK] -- and given that the majority of Americans thought Osama was in cahoots with Saddam and believed weapons of mass distortion, he has a point. Yet forty years ago, attempts to "head off public speculation" failed and today, 77% of Americans don't believe the Warren Commission report. Will speculation haunt us forty years down the road? Or will we search for truth, rediscover our backbone, and demand accountability from the president, the press and others charged with preserving the public trust?

I've reported. You decide.