By RAY McGOVERN Former CIA Analyst June 24 , 2005 The Downing Street papers are proving a formidable challenge to the White House PR machine as it desperately tries - in often-ludicrous ways - to slow down a train that has already left the station. And interest continues to build. The leaked British documents are now on the top-ten list of Google queries.
One huge fly in the ointment for the administration was British Prime Minister Tony Blair's early decision that it would be a fool's errand to challenge the authenticity of the papers. Why? Because there is still a relatively free Fourth Estate in the U.K. together with patriotic whistleblowers willing to risk jail for exposing the government dishonesty.
This has prevented the White House from labeling the documents spurious. And Michael Smith, the British journalist who was given them has now acknowledged that more than one such patriot has been involved.)
Smoke Rather Than Denial
With Blair forced to acknowledge that the documents are authentic, the White House could hardly label them spurious. Smoke, rather than outright denial, is had to be the chosen course.
Thus, many too-clever-by-half interpretations are now being offered for the eleven words with which the head of British intelligence, fresh back from Washington in July 2002, unwittingly gave the game away:
"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the "Downing Street memos," thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.
At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He'd given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.
The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.
They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.
Why aren't the media screaming about the latest proofs of Bush's war scams? Don't you know?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Wednesday, June 22, 2005
This is the white-hot question right now gushing forth from many on the Left, from progressive blogs and liberal patriots and blue staters and angry anti-Bushers alike, and it is like a plea, a rallying call, an indignant stomp of deep frustration. It is this:
Why are major American media not swarming all over the Downing Street Memos thing? Why is the entire nation not just appalled and disgusted and aghast at finding seemingly irrefutable proofs about what we all already knew, which is that BushCo planned to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and needed to find a way to justify it?
And, we now know, he was even willing to go so far as to rig the intelligence and "fix the facts" and screw the U.S. economy and screw any sort of exit strategy and screw the potential for lost lives and let's just blindly stomp on in there and bomb the living crap outta Saddam despite the undeniable pre-Iraq evidence that Saddam had zero WMDs and that his nuclear program was "effectively frozen," and despite how BushCo and the CIA and FBI and DOD and the Clinton administration and your grandma all knew it?
This is what the infamous Downing Street Memos allegedly contain, more undeniable proofs in the form of meeting notes with higher-ups in Britain and the U.S., talking about the supposedly "dire" threat of WMDs and nailing Iraq well before Bush was handed the tragic and morose political gift of 9/11 to leverage and whore and turn into his own personal Jesus.
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington The Independent 18 June 2005
A US Army sergeant has been charged with murdering two officers in the first alleged case of 'fragging' since the start of the Iraq war.
Alberto Martinez, 37, is being held in a military jail in Kuwait after being charged with the premeditated killing of Cpt Phillip Esposito and Lt Louis Allen. The three men served with the 42nd Infantry Division, a reserve unit drawn from the New York National Guard.
A statement issued by the Pentagon said the officers were killed by a blast in Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, on 7 June. Initial inquiries suggested an enemy mortar blast was responsible, but further investigations found circumstances "inconsistent with a mortar attack". The Pentagon has declined to provide further details.
The case is the first of its kind involving US troops in Iraq, although in April another army sergeant was convicted of fragging (military slang for killing a senior officer). Hasan Akbar killed two officers in March 2003 by rolling grenades into their tent on the Kuwait border as they prepared for the invasion. He has been sentenced to death, the first US soldier convicted of murdering a colleague in war since Vietnam.
A neighbour of Sgt Martinez in Troy, New York, said he had just lost his home to a fire and moved to his childhood home. His mother had died in recent years, the neighbour said.
The bodies of the two dead men have been returned to their families. Lt Allen was buried in Milford, Pennsylvania, where he lived. Denis Petrilak, head teacher at the George Baker High School, where the officer had taught science for the past five years, said: "Today we're just focused on Lieutenant Allen."
Cpt Esposito's mother said her son's wife, Siobhan, and 18-month-old daughter, Madeline, deserved to know the details of his death. He had wanted to be a soldier since he was a boy, she said.
A family friend, Barry Lennihan, said he was a "very, very solid individual". He said Cpt Esposito had attended space camp as a boy and might have been an astronaut if not for imperfect eyesight.
By STAN GOFF Counterpunch.org 06/15/05 I was a soldier for most of the time between 1970 and 1996. I signed out on my retirement from 3rd Special Forces in Ft. Bragg. I had also served in 7th Special Forces, on three Ranger assignments, with Delta for almost four years, as a Cavalry Scout for a while, and in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman. I started my career in Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
I thugged around in eight different places in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, where I pointed guns at people. Like you, I was an instrument of American foreign policies policies controlled, then as now, by the rich.
In the course of that career, I heard everything you have heard and felt everything you have felt about "loyalty."
Tricky thing, loyalty.
Nowadays, when I talk with some of you, or when I hear conversations recorded with you, I hear many who have very serious reservations about these wars of occupation. I had more than reservations from the get-go about Iraq and Afghanistan, and I opposed them as hard as I could, and so did millions of other people around the world. [...]
And in these conversations that many of you have with me and thousands of other people, we hear you say more and more often now that you know this war is wrong, but that you have to "do your job," because you are loyal to your buddies; because you feel that you have to back them up; and because if you don't go, someone else will have to. And I respect that sentiment.
But I have to challenge this loyalty thing, and I do it out of respect for you, and because I care about you, and because my own son is back there for his second go-around.
A young friend of mine, Patrick Resta, who recently returned from Iraq, and who is now a member of an organization called Iraq Veterans Against the War, recently told me, "My platoon sergeant tried to get us to violate the Geneva Convention, and when we resisted, he threatened us with punishment. He told us that 'the Geneva Convention doesn't exist in Iraq, and that is in writing at the Brigade level.'" [...]
One of the ways they will get you to do things that you will not want to live with for the rest of your lives is to impose that group-think on you. If one of us is guilty, we are all guilty. And "what happens in Iraq stays in Iraq." This is one of the many ways they take that buddy-to-buddy loyalty and twist it into a way to control you, even when they are trying to get you to violate the law and not only the formal law, but to violate what you know is right, to violate your own conscience and jeopardize your own peace of mind for the rest of your life.
And I'm telling you that you do not owe them or anyone else that kind of loyalty.
They know that many of you know that you were sent to do this thing for a pack of lies about weapons of mass destruction and mushroom clouds over New York City and phony al Qaeda connections (and then when that fell apart, you were there to deliver democracy at gunpoint). So they know that many of you can't stay committed to this violent occupation out of loyalty to that gang of thugs in Washington DC, who are busy every day at home undermi ning the same Constitution you swore to protect (from all enemies foreign and DOMESTIC).
They know that you know that plenty of the officers are out there trying to get new fruit salad medals on their Class-A uniforms, and bucking for promotion, by risking your asses on pointless glory patrols. So they know t hat they can't rely on the loyalty of many of you to the chain of command any more either.
Where do they have to go with this, then, after all? What do they tell you?
"You get out there on that Humvee, and face those IEDs together, as loyal buddies."
"You get out there and ransack people's houses in the middle of the night, and make their babies cry together, as buddies."
"You get out there and set up a road block without Arabic signs or interpreters and get put into that situation where you are tense and don't know, and you shoot up that car and kill parents in front of their children, an d you have to live with that for the rest of your lives together, because you are loyal buddies."
"You get out there and lose life, limb, or eyesight face mental and physical ailments for the rest of your lives together, as an act of loyalty to your buddies."
That's the pressure you have on you today. Cover your buddies, and for some of you, go to Iraq so someone else doesn't take your place.
But let's look at the bigger picture here, and for that I'll take you back to Vietnam, before many of you were born. We heard this same bullsh*t then. Almost verbatim. And do you know what one of the main contributing fac tors was for getting us out of that war?
We quit being good soldiers.
The United States military got to the point where it was no longer an effective fighting force, because US soldiers quit taking orders. It got to the point where an officer who was using his men's bodies to chase medals might find himself on the wrong end of a Claymore mine. Now I'm not advocating that again, and I hope we can stop this before it goes that far. [...]
MERhas never before published this story, this 'conspiracy theory' if you will. Though under much pressure over the years to do so we always held back and never published anything about this 'possibility'...until today that is. But now the fact that a ranking former Bush Administration official, in fact the man who was the top government economist in the Labor Department on 11 September 2001, has now gone public saying 9/11 may have been a historic hoax and the World Trade Towers were 'most likely' destroyed by a 'controlled demolition', causes us to reconsider. This is far too important to simply dismiss at this point. At the least we conclude this story now deserves far more attention that it has gotten in recent days with nearly the entire corporate media focused on Michael Jackson and various frivolities while this paragraph -- published this week on the UPI wire from Washington in fact -- has hardly had any attention:
A former Bush team member during his first administration is now voicing serious doubts about the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9-11. Former chief economist for the Department of Labor during President George W. Bush's first term Morgan Reynolds comments that the official story about the collapse of the WTC is "bogus" and that it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. Reynolds, who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas and is now professor emeritus at Texas A&M University said, "If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling." Reynolds commented from his Texas A&M office, "It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7. If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings."
MER CALLS FOR UNPRECEDENTED INTERNATIONAL MEDIA INVESTIGATION
We think an unprecedented international press investigation is now called for to match this unprecedented historical situation -- one totally independent of all governments, intelligence agencies, and pressure groups; and one bringing together a coalition of major international media from various political and national dispositions. What happened is a totally modern-day sui generis event with the greatest of history-changing consequences. Taking place so soon after Ariel Sharon came to power in Israel, and the Bush/Cheney Administration put so many former Israeli-Jewish lobby 'Neocons' in key power positions throughout Washington was suspicious from the start. But in the past we thought these suspicions had more to do with what the U.S. and Israeli governments really knew in advance, and what steps they were fast preparing to take whenever they had the excuse to do so regardless of the actual facts.
But now we have to add to the larger picture that there is quite a long history of major political/military deceptions and hoaxes originating both with the Israelis and from Washington. To mention just a few that history has so far unraveled includes the sinkings of the Maine and the Lusitania, the Lavon Affair, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the deceptions behind the 1967, 1982 and Gulf Wars, the Iraq-Kuwait-US invasion, the 'Oslo Peace Process', and most recently the 'Stealth Assassination' of Yasser Arafat after the assassinations of the senior Hamas leadership. Add to this historical brew quite a few other very suspicious developments that have come to light including the jubilant Israelis caught after photographing the WTC's collapse, all the unexplained developments in Lebanon, the blatant lies and cons surrounding the Iraq invasion including Colin Powel's testimony before the Security Council, and looking ahead at the moment the considerable preparations to take down Iran one way or another. And so we conclude that such an unprecedented situation on top of such already proven lies and deceptions dateline Washington, London, and Israel, all call for an unprecedented coalition of credible major media from many countries to come together for a White Paper investigation of 9/11 focusing on the following specific issues:
1) What really happened on 9/11 and who knew what in advance?
2) Had the U.S. government prepared in advance to exploit such an event as 9/11, whether the full story is now known or not, in order to pursue geostrategic goals decided upon in advance regardless of the actual facts of the situation?
3) What is known about the behind-the-scenes contacts and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli governments, and the crucial role played by the leading American Jewish Neocons who held key power and intelligence positions in Washington at the time of 9/11?
Highly recognized former chief economist in Labor Department now doubts official 9/11 story, claiming suspicious facts and evidence cover-up indicate government foul play and possible criminal implications.
June 12, 2005 By Greg Szymanski
A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.
"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.
Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.
"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.
"More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right."
However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.
From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.
Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11.
Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government jet fuel theory include:
AP 6/11/2005 4:28 AM RENO - Security contractors were heckled, humiliated and physically abused by U.S. Marines in Iraq while jailed for 72 hours with insurgents, one of the detainees said Friday.
"We were being held with terrorists," says Mat Raiche, an ex-Marine detained by current Marines in Iraq as a contractor.
"It was disbelief the whole time. I couldn't believe what was happening," said Matt Raiche, 34, an ex-Marine who was one of 16 American and three Iraqi contractors detained at Camp Fallujah last month.
"I just found it crazy that we were being held with terrorists, that we were put in the same facility with them," he told The Associated Press in an interview at his lawyer's office. "They were calling us a rogue mercenary team."
Defense officials disclosed on Thursday that the security guards for Charlotte, N.C.-based Zapata Engineering were detained for three days after they fired from trucks and SUVs on Iraqi civilian cars and U.S. forces in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.
The military has denied the contractors were abused. No charges have been filed against any of the contractors, who the military said were separated from suspected insurgents.
Company president Manuel Zapata said the only shot fired by his workers was a warning blast after they noticed a vehicle following them.
Raiche, of Dayton, Nev., said the contractors were stopped and taken into custody on May 28. He said a Marine told him that shots had been fired, and Raiche told him, "It wasn't us."
Raiche said several of the contractors were interrogated before they were released June 1 with no official explanation for their detention.
by Bruce David and Carolyn Sinclair Hustler magazine
August 2005
We all know what happened on September 11, 2001 - Osama bin Laden inspired 19 Muslim extremists to hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But what if it didn't happen that way at all?
David Ray Griffin is a professor of theology, a well-respected scholar and author of more than 20 books, including The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions and The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. Griffin maintains that the evidence contradicts the government's official story and that, so far, nobody's come up with a theory that can account for all of the facts.
At HUSTLER we believe the murder of 2,986 innocent people demands hard questions and digging deeper. We're especially troubled by the collapse of Building 7, but we're determined to keep an open mind. As such, we sit down with Griffin to discuss what appear to be disturbing inconsistencies with the government's story.
HUSTLER: You've compiled a record of the facts-but are they beyond dispute?
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN: I simply gather research that has been done by others, a lot of it based on mainline stories from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Guardian and so on. These reports tend to, more or less, contradict the official theory.
You say there's reason to question the government's official position on Osama bin Laden.
One problem with the official theory of the attacks being pulled off entirely by the 19 men named as al Qaeda terrorists is that six of them have, subsequently, shown up very much alive. This has been reported in the BBC, but not in the American mainstream press. One guy even walked into the U.S. Embassy and asked what was this nonsense about his having died on 9/11?
What are some other problems with the official story?
The government had every reason to know this was going to happen. There were some 52 warnings of the attack, many of which the Bush Administration didn't see fit to have released until after the inauguration. A little bit came out during the 9/1 1 hearings. For example, Condoleezza Rice-who had been describing the famous August 6, 2001, memo from British intelligence as merely historical in nature-was forced to admit that the title of it was "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within the United States." Many people have thought that was the strongest evidence of foreknowledge-but not at all.
JERUSALEM, June 3 (Reuters) - Israeli commandos killed eight Palestinian policemen in "eye for an eye" shootings three years ago that were ordered to avenge comrades slain in an ambush on an army checkpoint in the West Bank, a newspaper said on Friday.
The report in the Maariv daily, confirmed by senior Israeli security sources, was the latest public challenge to the Jewish state's official insistence that its forces have abided by a strict code of ethics in battling a Palestinian uprising.
After gunmen from the Palestinian faction Fatah killed six soldiers at a checkpoint outside the West Bank city of Ramallah on Feb. 19, 2002, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon approved stepping up the scale and variety of retaliations.
"The feeling was that this would be 'an eye for an eye'," an ex-soldier who took part in the shooting spree three years ago told Maariv.
Eighteen Palestinians were killed in various retaliatory attacks, including eight policemen shot while manning their checkpoints near Ramallah and Nablus, another West Bank city.
"'We are going to liquidate Palestinian policemen at a checkpoint in revenge for our six soldiers that they killed'," the ex-commando quoted his commander as ordering the troops.
At one of three checkpoints raided the Palestinians managed to return fire, but caused no Israeli casualties, Maariv said.
"The moment we knew we were going to eliminate them, we no longer saw them as human," another former commando said.
Last month, we reported here about Jeb Bush's courtroom efforts to crush the life of an abused, poverty-stricken 6-year-old girl in his gubernatorial satrapy of Florida. Later, against all odds, a jury of ordinary citizens thwarted the dynast's brutal will. But as befits a scion of the ruling family, Bush is now brushing aside this interference from the rabble and pressing ahead with his plans to strip the little girl of all public assistance.
Bush's minions went to court earlier this year in a bid to cut off medical aid to Marissa Amora, who, at the age of 2, had been abandoned by Jeb's "Department of Children and Families" despite overwhelming evidence of horrific past abuse -- and the imminent danger of more to come. More came. Within weeks, she was beaten almost to death; then Jeb's agents tried to stop her medical treatment and let her die. She survived their malign intervention and is now thriving with a new family -- but still suffers from permanent, catastrophic damage caused by the entirely predictable beating she received after the DCF cast her aside.
But late last month, the jury in the case issued a stern rebuke to these perverted Bush Family values: They awarded Marissa $35 million in damages for institutional neglect and for her future medical care, with the DCF ordered to pay the bulk of the costs. So, a happy ending, right?
Profit is the mantra of the CEO. It is the goal that embodies the motives, agendas, and actions of the modern corporation. And it is this very goal that will lead all "profit at any cost" corporations to their own self destruction. How is this so?
Well behavior eminates from motivation and from that agendas are set and parameters of operational strategies to enable these profits are put into place. It can be seen today that an almost psychopathic set of events have transpired and with it the rise of power and domination over world events by multinational corporations.
To enable the maximum profit the agenda of the present day corporation is to find the most exploitable, undereducated, politically powerless, and "most terrorizied" people they can find to manufacture goods, provide services, and ENABLE the PROFITS for those that INVEST in this form of modern psychological slavery, physical abuse, economic domination, and "fear mongering" that is possible under a set of legal and military strategies that enables the corporations to strip the people of human rights, politital power, and the abilities to act in civil disobedience to such immoral and unjustified authority.
Multinational Corporations are legal money making influence oriented investment vehicles that allow the use of money to enable the all important and worshiped profit to be had. That profit then has lead the ideology of the corporation to use any and all means neccessary to gain the maximum amount of control and domination in any profitable situation and has led them to form a global investment coalition of elite rich self decieving individuals that ascribe to a set of psychopathic beliefs that rest on the ideals of profit through "terror" and "terror" for profit, which as we shall see is the reason that conventional ideology wars to be abandoned and a new PsyOps oriented war against the worker to be waged. A war where the leaders do not promise a set of ideals like freedom, but sell fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the "terror" campaign. This PsyOps campaign has at its core several values that are common for this type of Psychologcial Warfare that is being practiced by multinationals against the common working people of the world.
TOKYO - The head of Amnesty International hit back at US outrage over the group labelling Guantanamo Bay a "gulag" and challenged Washington to open the military-run detention center to outside inspections.
US leaders, including President George W. Bush, have said they were shocked that the human rights group accused the United States of running "a new gulag of prisons around the world beyond the reach of the law and decency".
The secretary general of London-based Amnesty International, Irene Khan, said the US response has lacked substance.
"Their response has been defensive and dismissive," she said during a visit to Japan. "We have not seen from them a more detailed response to the concerns we have expressed in our report.
"Our answer is simple. If that is so (that the allegations are unfounded), open up these detention centers. Allow us and others to visit them," she told a news conference on a visit to Tokyo.
Is it time to 'dispose' of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? Has he 'outlived' his usefulness? by William Bowles
Wednesday, 1 June 2005
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – a man notorious for his alleged ruthlessness – is suspected of direct involvement in the kidnap and beheading of several foreigners in Iraq – even of wielding the knife himself.
A headline to conjure with no doubt, though clearly whoever writes this drivel needs to go back to journalism school and get a lesson in sentence construction. "Alleged" and "suspected", but nevertheless there's no doubt that he's "notorious", what for, his allegedness?
Fascinating the way the media operates. Note here that the words that will stick won't be his allegedness but his ruthlessness and his notoriety, that is, after all, entirely the objective of this piece of disinformation.
Now whether the BBC is leading or being led makes little difference. I'm not sure if people even care about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. What does count however, is the overall impression that's created, that is after all the objective, to deflect attention from the real issues through the creation of a mythological figure, the archetypal 'bogey-man', who comes and goes at will, seemingly impervious to capture. Able to slip across borders that are we are told, under surveillance 24/7, first he's here then he's there, he moves at the speed of light, the master of disguise, blah-blah-blah…
I caught a snatch of a news report on the BBC in the am (31/5/05) that talked of "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the insurgency in Iraq", so the elusive little bugger has been promoted overnight just as it seemed he was about to be 'downsized'. The BBC of course, is not exactly au fait with the man, just with the bits and pieces of disinformation it gets fed by the army of 'experts in terror' who feed parasitically on the myth and for all I know, are instrumental in its creation, or least 'conduits' through which disinformation can be fed.
Just a 'throwaway' line but one that instils an entire set of assumptions about what's going on in Iraq. Now is this all self-delusion? After all, how do the news mavens think? What exactly goes on between thought and pen? The traditional argument is somewhat self-referential as it relies on the idea that somehow, 'news' gets onto the front page and hence becomes 'news' all on its little own-some, without any help from its friends, but of course 'news' has to be primed. Cues are handed out from the 'powers that be' that inform the corporate/state media what's what when it comes to what needs to be the focus of the 'news' at any given time.
Much depends on the fact that most of us are not informed about events, hence discontinuities in the storyline escape unnoticed and unchallenged, although this is changing rapidly, even if its only an escalating state of utter disbelief at what we are being told – or not told (eg see the latest MediaLens piece) due in no small part to the Internet and the collapsing credibility of the corporate/state media's lock on events.
As regular readers will know, I've been on Abu's case since he surfaced mysteriously in Colin Powell's Powerpoint presentation to the UN way back in February 2003.
Zarqawi's pedigree is fascinating and an object lesson in story continuity for any would-be scriptwriter looking for a job with the imperium, for any analysis of Abu Zarqawi's evolution as a character reveals serious discontinuities. Not that these bother the news organisations, as they regularly discard anything that doesn't 'fit' the current scenario but you know how the 'soapies' work, with characters often killed off for a variety of reasons, only to re-emerge at a later date without any apparent objections from the viewer as to how, exactly, they arose from the dead.
