CIA

Out Of The Loop: Red Truth VS. Blue Truth

Chris Matthews, Chuck Hagel, CIA, Clarence Page, Cokie Roberts, Dan Rather, Fallujah, Howard Fineman, Iraq, Jay Garner, John Kerry, Karl Rove, Katty Kay, Robert Novak, Swift Boat Veterans, Windsurfing, Zell Miller

BY JOHN S.TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
August 2004

John Kerry is really making a mess of this war in Iraq.

He brought this on himself after all, by completely screwing up the entire month of August. The Senator accused his fellow soldiers in Vietnam of torture and heinous acts while he bragged and boasted about his own alleged service.

Then he went windsurfing!

Wasn’t he a snowboarder just this past winter?
Make up your mind Mr. Kerry.

The liberal elite media won’t inform the people, as the president gladly did this week, that the “right track/wrong track” polling numbers are actually better in Iraq than here in America. Those people are dealing with kidnappings, hostage-taking, beheadings and car-bombings yet they are optimistic for the future and answer pollster’s questions.

It’s going to take the long lens of time to understand what really happened on the ground during the liberation of Iraq. History will be the final judge, so it’s best to continue on this path of unexamined patriotism, at least until the war on terrorism is over. If you want to take umbrage with President Bush, wait for about thirty years. After all, these people started it.

As usual, the Democrats are best at criticizing themselves, so they’re keeping Kerry on his feet and scared. After Zell Miller (and Karl Rove) eviscerated the Senator for being a weakling on security and defense, the talking heads, pundits, and subpar speculators in the lazy press started writing his obituary.

Even Cokie Roberts and Howard Fineman were plain old baffled at how poor a candidate Kerry was, and they know things. It seems that the candidate just doesn’t “get” the voters. Deep thoughts from the ?Cool Kids Media Club: “Who is John Kerry?”.

An English person named Katty Kay from the BBC said on a television program called “The Chris Matthews Show” that the Kerry and Edwards speeches at the Democratic convention were the only ones of any note. Clarence Page looked stunned. The British are very smart you know.

During August, the bloodiest month yet for the soldiers and Marines in Iraq, with combat injuries reaching 1100, CNN spent about fifteen minutes an hour on the Swift Boat Veterans. This month it’s as bloody as ever and they’ve got fifteen minutes an hour on IBM Selectric typewriters.
Robert Novak, the syndicated columnist, wants Dan Rather and CBS to reveal their document sources. The Dems just can’t win for trying.

The intellectuals stammered something faint about ill-prepared troops, lack of exit strategy, and a 25,000 page Army War College /CIA/ State Department plan for the war. More left-wing nuanced goo-gah; freedom, liberty and democracy aren’t always a walk in the park folks, and this is a messy business.

Should we have guarded the ammunition dumps? Youbetcha!
Was there a complete lack of intelligence and a credible plan for war?Sure!Were we forced to funnel resources and troops out of Afghanistan to mount the war in Iraq thereby leaving Osama Bin Laden uncontested at Tora Bora?
Hey!….scram kid!

The oxygen-loving lefties claim the president has used 9/11 as a pretext to get his legislation through Congress and point to rollbacks of various EPA regulations, corporate tax breaks, and drug company profits during his term. Protest, dissent, and hand wringing don’t make us safer.

Tell that to the Cassandras at the CIA, whose National Intelligence Estimate about the long-term outlook for Iraq was leaked this week. The best-case scenario for the country was described as “tenuous stability”. These naysayers and naer-do-wells squawk about “civil war” yet they got the 9/11 attack and Iraq’s weapons capability completely wrong. Why should we believe them now? The President rightly called it just “a guess”.

Republican doomsday-er Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said this week that Iraq was “beyond pitiful, beyond embarrassing, now in the zone of dangerous”. What did he think would happen, that we’d be greeted as liberators, with flowers thrown at us?

Perhaps General Jay Garner was correct so very long ago when he advocated quick elections and a hasty withdrawal. But this is George Bush’s war and once you take your hands off the bible you’re the Commander-in-Chief, boss.

If we’ve squandered our credibility and destroyed relationships with other countries when we need their help with the global war on religious fundamentalism, too bad, so sad. France and Germany were making money over there the whole time and besides, aren’t we all safer with Saddam in a jailcell?

It’s Fallujah or Cleveland buddy, so fire up Ebay and pass the Freedom Fries. It’s a fabulous disaster and a catastrophic success.


©2004 THE LOS ANGELES SUN

American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.

CIA

American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.

The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a
crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of
operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep
inside the country, according to American government
officials.

Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the
detained American contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired
Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and other
reconnaissance missions for a Central Intelligence Agency
task force of case officers and technical surveillance
experts, the officials said.

Read More:

We are the most powerful nation in the world. There is no excuse, only corruption.

Alberto Gonzales, Albritton Communications, Ari Fleisher, Baker Botts, Barack Obama, Beck, Brewster Jennings, Brit Hume, Broadcatching, Broder, Carlyle Group, Childhood Literacy, CIA, D.C., David Frum, David Gregory, David Ignatius, Dick Cheney, Eisenhower, Executive Power, George Stephanapoulos, George W. Bush, Halliburton, Health Care, Housing, Hunger, Infant Mortality, Iran, Iraq, John Harris, Justice Department, K Street, Karl Rove, KBR, Kellogg Brown Root, Krauthammer, Kristol, Limbaugh, Lobbyists, Meet The Press, Michael Gerson, Michael Wolff, Military Industrial Complex, Neocons, New York Times, O'Reilly, Pentagon, Politico, Ronald Reagan, Scooter Libby, Think-Tanks, Tim Russert, Torture, Valerie Plame, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Will, Wiretapping

We are the most powerful nation in the world. There is no excuse, only corruption.

On a Plane Ride Home From Paris Sitting Next to a Douchebag With an Ed Hardy Shirt Reading Glenn Beck's Book

Alberto Gonzales, Albritton Communications, Ari Fleisher, Baker Botts, Barack Obama, Beck, Brewster Jennings, Brit Hume, Broadcatching, Broder, Carlyle Group, Childhood Literacy, CIA, D.C., David Brooks, David Frum, David Gregory, David Ignatius, Dick Cheney, Duct Tape, Eisenhower, Executive Power, George Stephanapoulos, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George Will, Haditha, Halliburton, Health Care, Housing, Hunger, Infant Mortality, Iran, Iraq

TEEVEE1

1441!

by John Tully
The New York Herald Sun
July 26, 2009


Whether it was Michael Wolff’s “piece” in Vanity Fair on Politico or the Paris tap water that produced the explosive diarrhea on a hot sweaty July night in the City of Lights, we’ll never know…

Time moves both slow and fast in these Dog Days of Summer and the memory hole of the past eight bloody years is fading and digging deeper.

I take you back to the city of D.C.

A few years ago…
A quaint city, soon to written about like Rome, gilded on their own lily and pathetic to boot.

Sucked in to television, watching the camera moves, editing, and heavy music to a story about a mom and a dad and a wife who lose their little/big man to a fiery explosion in Iraq. The soldier leaves a “just in case” final video for his bride, tells her of his deep love, and urges her to go on with life: “get married, have kids”  It’s a noble gesture from a brave young man and the camera cuts to the weeping widow watching the tape.

The evening news comes on and the 80 year-old man who marched against Iraq in a February freeze watches a report on two dead Marines and 17 Iraqi dead civilians . Remember seeing that look on the face of the Marines’ mother or the site of yet another widow with two babies that finally punches the gut.

At this point in the war,  President Bush hadn’t been to one funeral service for them.

Remember.

Remember banned television cameras at the arrival of the bodies from Germany, at the base in Delaware .

The cowering, obedient press corpse giving the President a free pass after 9/11 and the Administration using it to make the United States less safe, less secure, and spoil environmental and geopolitical progress for years to come.

Remembering Television and Freedom Fries and Terror Alerts here in Paris 6  years later, the mind once again boggles and crunches the serious, sad, mistaken war of choice that ignored all plans and warnings of consequences.

Powered by arrogance and breathtaking hubris and television’s Meet The Press and This Week With Will for the latest talking points of the day.

MR. RUSSERT: All right, this way: Should the blogs, talk radio, cable TV—should people lower their voices, and, and, and control their rhetoric?

Remember that very same week when the Vice-President poked a fat finger in the eye of Russia while the Bush Administration reflexively rejected the first written communication from Iran in seventeen years. Neither Vice President Cheney’s speech or the letter was ever mentioned on either program.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had blown the cover of longtime C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame who it turns out was working on nuclear proliferation. Her contacts through front company Brewster Jennings were actively working the underground nukes world. That intel might have been helpful that very same week in dealing with Iran.

Instead, the latest Cool-Kids Media Club Memes emerged: “Anger on the Blogs”

That’s right. Three different allusions to blogs and anger on both Meet The Press and This Week complete with an obligatory question from Tim Russert to new/old ham Newt Gingrich.

Schmuck David Brooks, perpetual mealy-mouthed defender of the Bush administration throwing out his  shoulder shrugging off the incident at Haditha in front of two shocked Marines: Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer.

Remember when columnist Tony Blankley said the war protests were organized by the communist party and the Press corps labeled Al Gore as Crazy for his pre-war criticism about invading Iraq.
How about when war hero Max Cleland was derisively compared to both Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in a television advertisement by his republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss during their Senate race? Mr. Cleland lost his legs and an arm during Vietnam but the republican claimed the democrat was soft on National Security. Mr. Chambliss sat out the war with a bad knee.

Go back in time and recall when Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had no idea how many Americans had been killed in Iraq and called the idea of two hundred thousand troops needed in Iraq as  “wildly off the mark”

It’s apparent that there Was Not a massive intelligence failure and the administration indeed was warned about the vagueness of the information about Iraq.

Remember that classic “Everybody thought-even-France and Germany” song about W.M.D.’s.
The Memory-Hole pieces together the events of the past six years but can never illuminate fully how one of the most brilliant countries in history could now be cowardly defending war atrocities and blaming, as Mr. Blankley said that very same week about the incident at Haditha: “Over reporting by a gleeful media is more damaging than any single fact”

Come to think of it-maybe that gleeful, fluffy, Politico piece that completely failed to mention the publication’s Reagan connection was responsible for that gut bomb the other night.

Either way, I’m still sick as a dog.

JT

Paris, France

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CIA Ordered To Hand Over Information About Destroyed Torture Tapes

CIA, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Raw Story, Steven Bradbury, Torture

John Byrne

THE RAW STORY

torture_719b2The Central Intelligence Agency must turn over records regarding detainee interrogation tapes the agency destroyed in an alleged effort to protect the identity of its officers.

A federal judge rejected the CIA’s attempt to withhold records relating to the agency’s destruction of 92 videotapes that depicted interrogation of CIA prisoners in a ruling Friday afternoon. The tapes were said to have shown some detainees’ torture.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing for the documents’ release under the Freedom of Information Act, and aims to have the agency held in contempt of court for refusing to provide them.

The ACLU has been remarkably successful at obtaining previously secret government documents. President Barack Obama was recently forced to release Bush administration memos which outlined torture techniques to be employed on detainees.

ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh lauded the court’s decision.

“We welcome the court’s recognition that the ACLU’s contempt motion against the CIA must be promptly resolved,” Singh said in a release. “Recent disclosures about the CIA’s torture methods further confirm that there is no basis for the agency to continue to withhold records relating to the content of the destroyed videotapes or documents that shed light upon who authorized their destruction and why.

“The public has a right to this information and the CIA must be held accountable for its flagrant disregard for the rule of law,” Singh added.

In a release, the civil liberties group noted “the CIA had previously said it would only turn over documents from August 2002 that relate to the content of the videotapes. But U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York today ordered the CIA to produce records from April through December 2002 that relate to the content of the tapes, as well as documents from April 2002 through June 2003 that related to the destruction of the tapes and information about the persons and reasons behind their destruction.”

“Judge Hellerstein also ordered the government to reconsider the extent of redactions it intends to make to the documents in light of last week’s release, also as part of the ACLU’s FOIA litigation, of four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture,” the release adds. “In addition, the court ordered the government to explain whether contempt proceedings would interfere with a federal criminal investigation into the destruction of the tapes led by prosecutor John Durham.”

Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects

CIA, Rendition, Torture

THE NEW YORK TIMES

April 20, 2009
By SCOTT SHANE

CHICKENHAWK GRAHAMC.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method was not previously known.

The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.

President Obama plans to visit C.I.A. headquarters Monday and make public remarks to employees, as well as meet privately with officials, an agency spokesman said Sunday night. It will be his first visit to the agency, whose use of harsh interrogation methods he often condemned during the presidential campaign and whose secret prisons he ordered closed on the second full day of his presidency.

C.I.A. officials had opposed the release of the interrogation memo, dated May 30, 2005, which was one of four secret legal memos on interrogation that Mr. Obama ordered to be released last Thursday.

Mr. Obama said C.I.A. officers who had used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods with the approval of the Justice Department would not be prosecuted. He has repeatedly suggested that he opposes Congressional proposals for a “truth commission” to examine Bush administration counterterrorism programs, including interrogation and warrantless eavesdropping.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has begun a yearlong, closed-door investigation of the C.I.A. interrogation program, in part to assess claims of Bush administration officials that brutal treatment, including slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in standing positions for days and confining them in small boxes, was necessary to get information.

The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times may raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as about assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines.

A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the C.I.A. rules permitted.

The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo.

The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers.

Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A. for the last two years of the Bush administration, would not comment when asked on the program “Fox News Sunday” if Mr. Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. He said he believed that that information was still classified.

A C.I.A. spokesman, reached Sunday night, also would not comment on the new information.

Mr. Hayden said he had opposed the release of the memos, even though President Obama has said the techniques will never be used again, because they would tell Al Qaeda “the outer limits that any American would ever go in terms of interrogating an Al Qaeda terrorist.”

He also disputed an article in The New York Times on Saturday that said Abu Zubaydah had revealed nothing new after being waterboarded, saying that he believed that after unspecified “techniques” were used, Abu Zubaydah revealed information that led to the capture of another terrorist suspect, Ramzi Binalshibh.

The Times article, based on information from former intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Zubaydah had revealed a great deal of information before harsh methods were used and after his captors stripped him of clothes, kept him in a cold cell and kept him awake at night. The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding.

He revealed no new information after being waterboarded, the article said, a conclusion that appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been “unnecessary” in his case.

"We've Got a Terrible Situation With This Great Patriot, He's Out of Control and We Must Save Him From Himself"

CIA, George Patton, Wild Bill Donovan, World War Two

By Tim Shipman in Washington

The Telegraph UK

general-george

George S. Patton, America’s greatest combat general of the Second World War, was assassinated after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.

“We’ve got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he’s out of control and we must save him from   himself'”

-WILD BILL DONOVAN


The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General “Wild Bill” Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname “Old Blood and Guts”.

His book, “Target Patton”, contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton’s Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Mr Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph that when he spoke to Mr Bazata: “He was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, that he was ordered to do so by Wild Bill Donovan.

“Donovan told him: ‘We’ve got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he’s out of control and we must save him from himself and from ruining everything the allies have done.’ I believe Douglas Bazata. He’s a sterling guy.”

Mr Bazata led an extraordinary life. He was a member of the Jedburghs, the elite unit who parachuted into France to help organise the Resistance in the run up to D-Day in 1944. He earned four purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre three times over for his efforts.

After the war he became a celebrated artist who enjoyed the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

He was friends with Salvador Dali, who painted a portrait of Bazata as Don Quixote.

He ended his career as an aide to President Ronald Reagan’s Navy Secretary John Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission and adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Mr Wilcox also tracked down and interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin’s death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

“You have two strong witnesses here,” Mr Wilcox said. “The evidence is that the Russians finished the job.”

The scenario sounds far fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton’s body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert from Detroit, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving.

“That is a cover-up,” Mr Wilcox said.

George Patton, a dynamic controversialist who wore ivory-handled revolvers on each hip and was the subject of an Oscar winning film starring George C. Scott, commanded the US 3rd Army, which cut a swathe through France after D-Day.

But his ambition to get to Berlin before Soviet forces was thwarted by supreme allied commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, who gave Patton’s petrol supplies to the more cautious British General Bernard Montgomery.

Patton, who distrusted the Russians, believed Eisenhower wrongly prevented him closing the so-called Falaise Gap in the autumn of 1944, allowing hundreds of thousands of German troops to escape to fight again,. This led to the deaths of thousands of Americans during their winter counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

In order to placate Stalin, the 3rd Army was also ordered to a halt as it reached the German border and was prevented from seizing either Berlin or Prague, moves that could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the war.

Mr Wilcox told The Sunday Telegraph: “Patton was going to resign from the Army. He wanted to go to war with the Russians. The administration thought he was nuts.

“He also knew secrets of the war which would have ruined careers.

I don’t think Dwight Eisenhower would ever have been elected president if Patton had lived to say the things he wanted to say.” Mr Wilcox added: “I think there’s enough evidence here that if I were to go to a grand jury I could probably get an indictment, but perhaps not a conviction.”

Charles Province, President of the George S. Patton Historical Society, said he hopes the book will lead to definitive proof of the plot being uncovered. He said: “There were a lot of people who were pretty damn glad that Patton died. He was going to really open the door on a lot of things that they screwed up over there.”

Karl Rove Discusses His Second Subpoena From House Judiciary Committee

CIA, David Iglesias, Don Siegelman, Guantanamo, Iraq, Joe Wilson, Justice Department, Karl Rove, Torture, U.S. Attorney Firings, Valerie Plame, Wiretapping, WMD

Former White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer Conveniently Forgets About George W. Bush's Favorite Gay Escort : Jeff Gannon / James Dale Guckert

Ari Fleischer, CIA, Gay GOP, George W. Bush, GOPUSA, Howard Kurtz, Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, Joe Wilson, Niger, Politics, Talon News, Yellowcake

THINK PROGRESS has  this piece up today mentioning the elusive and shadowy figure- Jeff Gannon..

Here’s an excerpt:

If Bush was relying on Fleischer to screen the “dotcoms and oddballs,” he was poorly served. Take, for example, case of Jeff Gannon, the male escort-turned-White House correspondent for the right-wing news outlet Talon News. The White House press office granted Gannon access to the White House under an assumed name and with no background check. Once Gannon got in the door under Fleischer’s watch in 2003, he was called on by Bush at a press conference in January 2005. Gannon lobbed Bush a softball:

GANNON: Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. … Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. … [H]ow are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

Here’s my piece from 2005:

BY JOHN TULLY
THE LOS ANGELES SUN
FEB 23 2005

A weekend journalism-school reporter, using a fake name, was given access to the President of the United States at White House press briefings before he even worked for any news organization.

He claims that he has seen a confidential, so-called C.I.A. document which reveals the name of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife and shows her recommending him for the trip to Niger to investigate yellowcake uranium sales to the Iraqis.

It turns out that Secret Service has been waving James Guckert by the guardhouse for two and a half years and once inside, he became Jeff Gannon. He wrote for a fake website, Talon News, run by Republican strategist Bobby Eberle and the organization GOPUSA.

To understand how something like this could Not be a story, that this could happen to begin with, is to understand how The District of Columbia really runs. However, one can only watch and wait as the laws of physics begin to rear their ugly head. Try as they might and for whatever reason, The Mainstream Media (as good of a description as any) just can’t keep this monster down.

Howard Kurtz, the longtime and wise sage media critic with The Washington Post, trusted by little old Quaker ladies in Cleveland Park D.C. and lobbyists alike, just could not figure out what the big fuss was all about and immediately chalked it up to over-eager WWW types and their preoccupation with the salacious part of the story.
Oh that.

The Great Diversion and the reason why non-political junkies in America are apparently not talking about this story is that this fella’ publicly advertised his services as a male prostitute on numerous sites on the Internet and registered and launched numerous gay male pornographic websites.

Really.

CNN’s Aaron Brown, so brilliant in his earlier years on the old ABC overnight news program, pooh-poohed the scandal as a bit of “so what”. On Wolf Blitzer’s “Hard News” program, Mr. Guckert/Gannon was treated almost softly, as if not to upset.

The New York Times finally ran the story, deep in the back pages on Friday, Feb 11th, more than a week after website journalists began to fully reveal this fake journalist’s deceptions.The shockjock mentality came out instantly in the groupthink mainstream media with a curious mix of apathy and frat-boy jokes.

There was no outrage to be outraged over. Meanwhile, writers on web sites like The Daily Kos, David Brock’s Media Matters and John Aravosis’s America Blog, among others, had been doing their own journalism and found out that Mr. Guckert was not who or what he appeared to be. They started their dig after witnessing a press briefing by the President back in late January. A strange reporter asked a clearly partisan question / pronouncement that, among other things, stated that the Democrats were “divorced from reality”.

They got dirt all right.

Columnists Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd finally had to write cute pieces about the mess nearing the end of last week. Katie, Matt, and The Today Show eventually did a quick three- minute story in the first hour last Wednesday. Radio man Don Imus couldn’t get anyone to bite and wondered aloud about the titillating aspect of the thing.

This was now more than ten days since the story had broken, or hadn’t broken. No one was even discussing, outside of the Web, the nasty business of the C.I.A. memo that Mr.Guckert had claimed to have seen or knew about right there on Mr. Blitzer’s show.
Links to web sites where Mr. Guckert solicited clients for sex were widely available at the very same time Mr. Blitzer was tripping all over himself to give Mr. Guckert an Easypass.

Ultimate Washington insider Mary Matalin, Vice President Cheney’s sometimes consultant, told Imus that she just wished Ms. Dowd would just come in from the cold and get with the program.

Why did President Bush and Scott McClellan, the President’s spokesman, call on Mr. Guckert/Gannon so often in those two and a half years and how could other reporters not write about Talon News and GOPUSA’s illegitimacy? Veterans of the White House beat sometimes don’t see a question for years. Was he a plant?

But just like the high school sophomores that they are, the Washington Press Corps have hemmed and hawed and giggled their way for weeks now through a real-live genuine scandal unfurling at the White House. Waving their collective finger, they dismissed the whole affair in full. It was simply The Bloggers and their liberal retribution for the Rather/CBS assassination and a lurid fascination with the X-rated angle thrown in for good measure.

Now the simply idiotic Bush-Tapes story, along with a long weekend and a brilliant fake-outrage campaign over a congressman’s comments about Karl Rove, is threatening to bury forever a story that the entire profession of journalism would like to pretend was never born to begin with.

Everyone seems to be looking around at each other and tsk-tsking the lack of outrage on each other’s part, as if to say “This is terrible -someone do some real reporting”.

“Someone did – as Mr. Bush would say, on the “Internets”.

Stay Tuned.

© 2005 THE LOS ANGELES SUN

ALSO IN:

DISSIDENT VOICE

SMIRKING CHIMP

NEIL ROGERS SHOW

PULSE TWIN CITIES

BARTCOP

More Tully:

“Howard Kurtz, the longtime and wise sage media critic for The Washington Post, trusted by little old Quaker ladies in Cleveland Park D.C. and lobbyists alike, just could not figure out what the big fuss was all about and immediately chalked it up to over-eager WWW types and their preoccupation with the salacious part of the story”