Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

12/5/05 – From Egypt to Afghanistan, when terrorists and gangsters need a place to meet, to relax, maybe to invest, they head to Dubai, a bustling city-state on the Persian Gulf. The Middle East’s unquestioned financial capital, Dubai is the showcase of the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich federation of sheikdoms. Forty years ago, Dubai was a backwater; today, it hosts dozens of banks and one of the world’s busiest ports; its free-trade zones are crammed with thousands of companies. Construction is everywhere–skyscrapers, malls, hotels, and, soon, the world’s tallest building.

But Dubai also serves as the region’s criminal crossroads, a hub for smuggling, money laundering, and underground banking. There are Russian and Indian mobsters, Iranian arms traffickers, and Arab jihadists. Funds for the 9/11 hijackers and African embassy bombers were transferred through the city. It was the heart of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan’s black market in nuclear technology and other proliferation cases. Half of all applications to buy U.S. military equipment from Dubai are from bogus front companies, officials say. “Iran,” adds one U.S. official, “is building a bomb through Dubai.” Last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents thwarted the shipment of 3,000 U.S. military night-vision goggles by an Iranian pair based in Dubai. Moving goods undetected is not hard. Dhows–rickety wooden boats that have plowed the Arabian Sea for centuries–move along the city center, uninspected, down the aptly named Smuggler’s Creek.

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Posted to the web on Wednesday July 14, 2004

33 internal FOX editorial memos reviewed by MMFA reveal FOX News Channel’s inner workings

Summary:

Documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s new film Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, which interviews former FOX employees to provide “an in-depth look at Fox News [Channel] and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know,” premiered at the New School University in New York on July 13. The FOX News Channel markets itself as “fair and balanced,” promising that “We report. You decide.”

As The Washington Post reported on July 11, Greenwald’s film features “a handful of memos from a top FOX executive that appear to suggest tilting the news.” Media Matters for America has analyzed 33 such internal FOX memos, issued by FOX News Senior Vice President, News Editorial John Moody and Los Angeles Bureau Chief Ken LaCoste between May 9 and June 3, 2003 and March 12 and May 5, 2004.

In the memos, some of which appear in Outfoxed, Moody instructs employees on the approach to take on particular stories. His instructions reflect a clear interest in furthering a conservative agenda and in supporting the Bush administration. The Post quoted Larry Johnson, identified by the paper as “a former part-time Fox commentator who appears in the film,” describing the Moody memos as “talking points instructing us what the themes are supposed to be, and God help you if you stray.” On July 13, Salon.com reviewed the film, and provided “some of the most notable excerpts” from the memos, referred to as “marching orders” by Jon DuPre, whom Salon identifies as “formerly of Fox News.”

In an interview with the Post, Moody rejected “the implication that I’m controlling the news coverage” and said, “People are free to call me or message me and say, ‘I think you’re off base.’ Sometimes I take the advice, sometimes I don’t.”

The following is a sample of reporting instructions issued by Moody to the FOX News staff.

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Tucked away in the Bush administration

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House GOP calls corruption report corrupt

By Josephine Hearn

The House Republicans’ campaign operation is charging that a recently released Democratic report on Republican corruption violated ethics rules.

The 103-page report, “America for Sale: The Cost of Republican Corruption,” was compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Rules Committee and released by the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Louise Slaughter (N.Y.), last week.

The report reiterates repeats many of Democrats’ long-held concerns about Republicans’ actions on healthcare, energy, the environment, homeland security and Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s a political document through and through. The headline is all you need to know it’s a political document,” said Ed Patru, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). “It’s nothing more than Democrats using official resources to promote political talking points.”

House ethics rules prohibit members of Congress from using official resources to fund campaign activities. Democrats, however, counter that chronicling Republican ethical abuses is well within the rules.

“It is … deeply ironic that the NRCC would have the audacity to suggest that a detailed, fact-based report documenting the collapse of our legislative system would constitute unethical behavior,” Slaughter said in a statement, “while at the same time, top Republican officials … have willingly undermined ethical behavior in our House.”

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By Robert Parry

The U.S. news media is experiencing a cognitive meltdown as it tries to hold onto the traditional view of the United States as a beacon for human rights while facing the new reality in which George W. Bush has plunged the nation into the dark arts of torture, assassination and

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Dubai Does Brisk War Business

by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch

Every morning, from dawn till about noon, cargo and passenger flights to Iraq and Afghanistan make Dubai airport

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The New York Times sued the U.S.
Defense Department on Monday demanding that it hand over
documents about the National Security Agency’s domestic spying
program.

The Times wants a list of documents including all internal
memos and e-mails about the program of monitoring phone calls
without court approval. It also seeks the names of the people
or groups identified by it.

The Times in December broke the story that the NSA had
begun intercepting domestic communications believed linked to
al Qaeda following the September 11 attacks. That provoked
renewed criticism of the way U.S. President George W. Bush is
handling his declared war on terrorism.

Bush called the disclosure of the program to the Times a
“shameful act” and the U.S. Justice Department has launched an
investigation into who leaked it.

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by ARUNDHATI ROY

On his triumphalist tour of India and Pakistan, where he hopes to wave
imperiously at people he considers potential subjects, President Bush has an itinerary that’s getting curiouser and curiouser.

For Bush’s March 2 pit stop in New Delhi, the Indian government tried very
hard to have him address our parliament. A not inconsequential number
of MPs threatened to heckle him, so Plan One was hastily shelved. Plan
Two was to have Bush address the masses from the ramparts of the
magnificent Red Fort, where the Indian prime minister traditionally
delivers his Independence Day address. But the Red Fort, surrounded as
it is by the predominantly Muslim population of Old Delhi, was
considered a security
nightmare. So now we’re into Plan Three: President George Bush
speaks from Purana Qila, the Old Fort.

Ironic, isn’t it, that the only safe public space for a man who has
recently been so enthusiastic about India’s modernity should be a
crumbling medieval fort?

Since the Purana Qila also houses the Delhi zoo, George Bush’s audience
will be a few hundred caged animals and an approved list of caged human
beings, who in India go under the category of “eminent persons.”
They’re mostly rich folk who live in our poor country like captive
animals, incarcerated by their own wealth, locked and barred in their
gilded cages, protecting themselves from the threat of the vulgar and
unruly multitudes whom they have systematically dispossessed over the
centuries.

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Hagan’s proposal: Ban Republicans from adopting children.

John Nichols

Bob Hagan has for decades been one of Ohio’s most progressive-minded and intellectually adventurous legislators. So it comes as no surprise that the Democratic state senator from Youngstown would blaze a new policy-making trail with a plan to reform adoption laws.

Hagan’s proposal: Ban Republicans from adopting children.

In an email dispatched to fellow legislators last week, the senator announced his plan to “introduce legislation in the near future that would ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children or acting as foster parents.”

Explaining that “policymakers in (Ohio) have ignored this growing threat to our communities for far too long,” Hagan wrote that: “Credible research exists that strongly suggests that adopted children raised in Republican households, though significantly wealthier than their Democrat-raised counterparts, are more at risk for developing emotional problems, social stigmas, inflated egos, an alarming lack of tolerance for others they deem different than themselves, and an air of overconfidence to mask their insecurities.”

“In addition,” the Democrat noted, “I have spoken to many adopted children raised in Republican households who have admitted that ‘Well, it’s just plain boring most of the time.’”

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posted by Jane Hamsher

Back in the days when newspapers and magazines were printed on paper once something was committed to ink that was pretty much it, you had to live with it. And while I do look quite fetching in my tin foil hat I generally like to save it for special occasions, but there’s something unexplained and a little disturbing going on with internet news scrubbing.

We’ve seen quite a few instances of it recently and it usually has to do with explosive comments that are unfavorable to the narrative being disseminated by the administration (and quite often the Vice President):

. Josh Marshall noticed that it happened in a Washington Post article referring to a conversation on Air Force II:

On July 12, the day Cheney and Libby flew together from Norfolk, the vice president instructed his aide to alert reporters of an attack launched that morning on Wilson’s credibility by Fleischer, according to a well-placed source. (WaPo, October 30 2005)

. The comments about Sherrif’s being turned away from the Armstrong ranch were removed from the CBS online site:

CBS News White House correspondent Peter Maer reports Texas authorities are complaining that the Secret Service barred them from speaking to Cheney after the incident. (CBSnews.com, February 13, 2006)

. Katharine Armstrong’s references to alcohol being served on the day Cheney shot the old man in the face were scrubbed from the MSNBC site:

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By DAVID E. SANGER