THE REAL BATTLE: IRAQ OR DEMOCRACY?
by Marta Steele

BBC and Guardian/Observer Laureate (and book author) Greg Palast

Educates NYU Journalism students 9/10/02;

Sponsored by Ted Magder and Mark Crispin Miller,

directors of the NYU affiliated research center PROMO

     It is 9/11/02. Thinking back to a year ago today, this morning, I was glued to the radio and the static output of Peter Jennings; his account was the first I came upon and I stayed with it as if it were a bomb shelter, paralyzed in judgment and shock. I had expected other cataclysms this day. Democrats.com, along with the prominent author and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, were going to hold a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce formal opposition to the Bush regime; the number of supporters had grown sufficiently to warrant this decisive move. We expected impeachment to follow, or hoped for it, or saw it as a less remote possibility. What a response I received to the e-mails I had sent out the night before with exhortations like “Give them hell!” Instead, a year later, Bugliosi is virtually invisible and the only active war is going on in Iraq. Events last 9/11 changed a lot of things.

But the opposition is still active. Mainstream press is beginning to acknowledge that liberals still exist and may even still have the right to protest; every once in a while, these days, a protest makes it to the news. A liberal commentator is back on prime time TV, Phil Donahue (see my story on Greg Palast’s appearance on his show last 9/5/02). Last night, September 10, the Project on Media Ownership (PROMO), a research center affiliated with New York University, launched its public lecture series with a presentation by Greg Palast, the renowned investigative journalist and tv news commentator for BBC and the Guardian/Observer in England.

the war on truth

On the heals of two New York Times (op ed, 9/10/02)  interpretations of the chaotic situation surrounding Iraq (Susan Sonntag: it’s a metaphor for war; Paul Krugman: there’s no war, merely an intricate global web of criminal cells), Greg Palast instead opined that the real war is the war on truth; in the words of best-selling author and PROMO executive director Mark Crispin Miller (The Bush Dyslexicon), “we no longer have a free press; on 9/6/02 100 jets, British and American, attacked the largest installation in western Iraq while Bush goes through the motions of deliberating such a war with Congress…. There is no difference between the media in the USSR before 1989 and media today in this country.”

     Mr. Palast, who emigrated to England after uncovering episodes of corruption (the Shoreham Nuclear Plant, other instances of racketeering) the media here refused to cover during the nineties, before this era of “increasing consolidation of the cultural industry,” found welcome refuge with the British media, even though they are unprotected by their constitution or any First Amendment rights. As a matter of fact, he informed us later in his talk, it is illegal in this country to sue a journalist for revealing what is true, whereas in England it is not. “You speak at the leave of the crown.” That the media there were so supportive in covering news people in this country would not touch is perplexing; one would think that the right-wing tendencies of “the crown” there would hold more power than they seem to.

     In England, via the Guardian/Observer and the BBC, Mr. Palast regularly reported “things we’re not supposed to know.” He gained prominence in this effort after being horrified at some news segments shown in London on election day in Florida (11/7/00) that revealed black voters again and again being turned away, “accused of knocking off a 7/11 in Utah or else told to come back next year.” This led to his discovery of the database scam that enabled Bush’s takeover (aired finally on U.S. prime time tv but not the news 9/5/02; see preceding story cited above).

     Making a long saga short, Mr. Palast cited NAACP findings resulting from his revelation: according to the NAACP, of 94,000 people targeted for exclusion from the polls, 50% were black and no more than 3,000 had felonious associations that according to Florida law would eliminate them from ever voting in that state. Ignored by the media in this country, with sporadic exceptions like salon.com, The Nation, and then The Washington Post the following June (simultaneously with The San Francisco Chronicle, only after the U.S. Civil Rights Commission had agreed Palast was correct), this appeared as the top segment on BBC’s Newsnight no later than Palast handed it in to his employers.

    After the fact, that is, when the findings could no longer affect outcomes, “our demographers counted a loss of 22,000 votes, Palast continued. This he knew three weeks after the presidential election.  In that 93% of people who have ever served prison terms in the United States vote Democratic, Gore lost 20,460 votes, not counting others lost in Palm Beach County via the butterfly ballot “mix-up” and further documented instances of discrimination.

     CBS initially jumped onto the bandwagon, said Palast, but jumped off just as quickly, withdrawing their offer to run a 90-second segment (his counterparts in England averaged 10–14 minutes, said Palast) after attempting to verify his findings by phoning Jeb Bush’s office. When Jeb denied all charges, there went a very crucial and timely 90 seconds. Dan Rather, whose chagrin as Walter Cronkite’s protégé seems evident to me (it certainly was on election 2000 night when the color of Florida went from red to blue after projections that the Democrats had won the state were suddenly reversed), opined that in this country the news entails “repeating, not reporting,” when he was later interviewed on the BBC Newsnight. “We don’t dare ask questions and challenge. Americans have failed,” he admitted sadly. Indeed, journalists in this country are leaving their jobs and resorting to teaching, at much lower pay, added Mark Crispin Miller later, in response to audience questions.

things disappear

      Exemplifying biased news coverage of other events, Palast cited New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle coverage of the 24-hour coup that temporarily removed President Hugo Chavez from office in Venezuela. Both papers reported the 600,000 wealthy people marching against Chavez, though across town, unmentioned by these media, 500,000 poorer people marched in support of him. “Things disappear” in the U.S. media, he said. A video report of the Venezuela coup is archived at Palast’s web site.

     Other news we “are not supposed to know” is the background to Bush’s freeing U.S. gold miners from an obligation imposed on them by Clinton to clean up cyanide poisons from the sites. The largest gold-mining operation in this country is Barrick Gold Mine, among whose prominent employees is George Herbert Walker Bush. The 41^st president of this country, while in office, allowed Barrick to lay claim to the largest ore deposit in this country for less than $10,000. After his presidency he became their employee. Palast was sued for publicizing this information. In their mention of relevant news (Bush Jr.’s actions relevant to cyanide poisoning), The New York Times omitted mention of both Bush Sr. and Barrick, though in this country a lawsuit would have been illegal.

     “You can’t even report when you have solid evidence,” said Palast, who this evening had with him not only the illegal Choice Point database he had obtained from the office of then Secretary of State Katherine Harris, but also letters relevant to his subsequent push to obtain fairness in that election that now goes down in history as a blight on the Fourteenth Amendment and our further constitutional rights as voters.

     What irony for all this to be exploding on the thirtieth anniversary of the Watergate investigations so heroically supported by The Washington Post. How ironic also for Katherine Graham to have died just after all the database news broke and this time her newspaper failed to cooperate in time (the database scandal was by-lined by Palast in her paper in June, six months after the Supreme Court had placed Bush in the White House; she died in July), given such a chance to help oust a president at least as corrupt and dangerous as Nixon was. 

     The Guardian Project Censored award winner of the year 2001 was, however, not Salon.com’s breaking news story of the year, Palast on the Florida database scam, but rather, Palast’s  November 7 story FBI AND US SPY AGENTS SAY BUSH SPIKED BIN LADEN PROBES BEFORE 11 SEPTEMBER. Background to this was that on September 13, 2001, an FBI agent left a file on Palast’s desk that detailed investigations of the bin Laden family other than Osama, those whom Palast called the “gray sheep.” Too late to prevent 9/11, Palast found out that such investigations, held up by Clinton but stopped dead by Bush, included a meeting in Paris in 1976 between Saudi billionaires and al Quaeda on issues of funding terrorism. “We didn’t find that Bush knew about 9/11 or helped to plan it,” said Palast, “but something even more invidious: there was prejudice involving politicians and Saudis. We couldn’t ask questions” despite evidence for long-term connections between the bin Ladens and Bushes. The FBI was aware, for instance, of Islamic charities in this country that were actually terrorist fund-raising fronts, among which was WAMY (World Assembly of Muslim Youth) headed by Abdullah bin Laden, who resided in Falls Church, Virginia, a town where two of the 9/11 hijackers also stayed. 

Who Taught Them Everything They Know?

      A source of great chagrin to the FBI (another relevant interview is on the web page www.gregpalast.com) is that, in the words of one agent, “we helped set them up.” Many of the al Quaeda terrorists learned the skills they are applying against us in training in this country in the 1980s by the FBI to fight the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan. Such “renegade” terrorists are called “blowbacks” by the FBI.

      Amplifying on the theme of the death of freedom of the U.S. press, Palast concluded by warning the audience of NYU journalism students, “Dissent will be punished.” A prime, recent exemplar is, of course, the recently ousted 5-term Democratic Congresswoman from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney, who received negative publicity recently by being misquoted as claiming that Bush knew about 9/11 and said nothing because he foresaw the lucrative potential of the cataclysm. McKinney denied the allegation repeatedly. She was further damaged in her bid for reelection because of her sympathy toward the Palestinians, even though she also wanted investigation of the terrorist front Muslim charities, the suicide bombers in Israel, and the Bush-Saudi connections.

     “She was the only Congressperson to ask the BBC for the evidence regarding the illegalities surrounding election 2000; she held special hearings to investigate; Choice Point is her district’s big employer,” Palast informed us. Further, she, like he, was “publicly hung” for involving herself (via congressional investigation and personally visiting the site) with the 1996 bulldozing (and burial alive) of miners at a site in Tanzania purchased by Barrick from the Canadian company Sutton.  Bush Sr. had helped Barrick acquire this mine. The Guardian was sued for publicizing this atrocity. Leading black politicians in Georgia, Andrew Young and Vernon Jordan, did not protect McKinney or support her through her ordeal that lost her the primary renomination.

    Dissent will be punished, but if we are silenced, what really will we have left?

    Further audience questions elicited the total lack of sympathy for Bush Jr. among the British public; Tony Blair had been a close friend of Clinton and Gore but got word he’d be punished for it. The British loved Clinton but there is at present no “strong, articulate opposition” to Blair despite his present loyalty to Bush.

     Palast mentioned that a month before 9/11 a book published by a leftish political press ended with a warning of bin Laden’s present projects in Afghanistan.

     Other audience questions concerned U.S. press bias toward coverage of the Israel-Palestine ongoing conflict at the expense of events in Venezuela and Africa, for instance; more news sooner on the Taliban might have stimulated leftists to work harder to oust Saddam Hussein; the bombing of Basra, a Shi’ite settlement in Iraq, might have been engineered by Hussein instead of the British-U.S. alliance, he said.

     One young student asked Mr. Palast how he had managed to corral the Choice Point database files. He answered that in Florida an open records act made it impossible for the governor’s office to withhold them, but “they made it difficult” for him.

     Mark C. Miller, in answer to another question, reiterated the significance of Jeb Bush being the first to claim emergency powers in Florida after 9/11, which includes suspending Sunshine Laws.

     “The internet is our salvation,” concluded Palast, in indirect tribute to Al Gore’s pioneering efforts in the early 1990s, “even though some of the information isn’t reliable.” Neither is that bastion of “all the news that’s fit to print,” he had reiterated throughout his presentation. Newspapers and television represent “the roars of dinosaurs sinking into their tar pits.” The journalists of tomorrow have to be “ready to lose their jobs.”

Greg Palast’s bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy was published by Pluto Press earlier this year and will reappear as a Penguin Paperback in this country;