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Seymour Hersh Revelations Ignored by US Media Comment by Larry Ross, March 15, 2007
This paper by Tom Engelhardt shows that dramatic and questionable developments under the Bush Administration have not been reported, commented upon, or questioned by the US mass media. For example Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that: What this means is that just about anything and anyone in Iran may be considered a target. Engelhardt comments: "Were there nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of this would still have been significant news - if we didn't happen to live on a one-way imperial plant in which Iranian "interference" in (American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret US operations in, and military plans to devastate Iran are your basic ho-hum issue. Our mainstream news purveyors don't generally consider the issue of our "interference" in Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do our pundits consider it a topic worthy of speculation or; nor in a Congress where leading Democrats have regularly outflanked the Bush Administration in hawkish positions on Iran, is this likely to be much of an issue." In my own writings on the mass media both in the US and allied countries, my observations and conclusions have been the same as Tom Engelhardt's below.
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The Seymour Hersh Mystery: A Journalist Writing Bloody Murder … by Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, March 13, 2007 ... and no one notices. Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal - holding positions in the Bush administration - was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams . Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others - and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw Reagan administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras. In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success - and would have worked far better if the CIA and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the Vice President's office. Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began. Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. All of this was being done as part of a "sea change" in the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government - and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back, or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror), despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officials may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shiite rift in the region. |
