19-10-2017, 05:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 19-10-2017, 07:33 AM by Anthony Thorne.)
Shenon's long run of NYT articles are still archived on their site. I picked a couple at random.
From September 21st, 2006.
CLAIM 9/11 TERRORISTS WERE IDENTIFIED IS REJECTED
One of the people making the claims that were 'rejected' was Congressman Curt Weldon, previously a weapon industry darling from years of lobbying on their behalf. When Weldon began looking into some of the murkier events surrounding 9/11, he was targeted as a troublemaker, and removed as quickly as possible. The day before his vote for re-election, the FBI did a public raid on his daughter's house over corruption allegations. Weldon lost the election the next day. Once he had lost his seat, the FBI dropped everything and never mentioned the allegations again. Weldon discusses the incident here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o64tHp_Q...e=youtu.be
The allegations were concocted to give an excuse for the FBI to raid his family's house the day before people went to vote, and Shenon's NYT piece was designed to tell everyone, forget all that stuff Weldon was talking about, it's been debunked and you can safely ignore the whole thing.
A later Shenon piece from December 6th, 2006 -
LEE. H. HAMILTON, A COMPROMISER WHO OPERATES ABOVE THE PARTISAN FRAY.
The whole article is basically about what a nice, non-partisan guy Lee Hamilton is, and that Iran Contra prosecution thing was not his fault as he went into it with blinders, trusting everyone, and they pulled the wool over his eyes, so he presumably would have gone after them if he'd known more about what was happening, honourable guy that he is.
Robert Parry did a long piece on Hamilton that made it clear his m/o is basically to look the other way.
https://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/091710.html
This is why Hamilton was put onto the Jonestown inquiry, why he was given the task of (not) investigating Iran Contra, and it's why he was chosen to sit and smile and give kiss-ass interviews to various people during the 9/11 Commission that now basically read like PR puff-pieces. There used to be a circa 2007 lecture with Hamilton at a college on Youtube where he took questions from the crowd. A friendly young woman stood up on camera and hesitantly asked Hamilton why some articles had called him "..the king of cover-ups", and could he offer any comments as to why they might say this about him? To the laughter of the crowd, Hamilton immediately turned tail and walked offstage without answering the question.
With this in mind, Shenon's NYT piece was designed to put a nice spin on Hamilton's history, and reassure readers that he's a well-intentioned guy who you could trust to do the right thing. This is so far from the truth, it's basically a joke. Spin of this sort is visible in most of Shenon's pieces, and I suspect if you spent time on Google you'd probably see it's visible in all of his pieces. His JFK stuff this year is no different.
From September 21st, 2006.
CLAIM 9/11 TERRORISTS WERE IDENTIFIED IS REJECTED
Quote:WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 The Defense Department's inspector general on Thursday dismissed claims by military officers and others who had insisted that a secret Pentagon program identified Mohamed Atta and other terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks before the attacks occurred.
The inspector general's office, which acts as the Defense Department's internal watchdog, said in a report that its investigators found no evidence to suggest that the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified Mr. Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the attacks, or any of the other terrorists before Sept. 11.
"We concluded that prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Able Danger team members did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijackers," the report said. "While we interviewed four witnesses who claimed to have seen a chart depicting Mohamed Atta and possibly other terrorists or cells' involved in 9/11, we determined that their recollections were not accurate."
The claim that a secret Pentagon data-mining program had known of Mr. Atta and other hijackers before Sept. 11 created a stir when the witnesses' accounts became public last year, because it suggested that the Defense Department had information that might have helped pre-empt the attacks had it been shared outside of the Pentagon.
One of the people making the claims that were 'rejected' was Congressman Curt Weldon, previously a weapon industry darling from years of lobbying on their behalf. When Weldon began looking into some of the murkier events surrounding 9/11, he was targeted as a troublemaker, and removed as quickly as possible. The day before his vote for re-election, the FBI did a public raid on his daughter's house over corruption allegations. Weldon lost the election the next day. Once he had lost his seat, the FBI dropped everything and never mentioned the allegations again. Weldon discusses the incident here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o64tHp_Q...e=youtu.be
The allegations were concocted to give an excuse for the FBI to raid his family's house the day before people went to vote, and Shenon's NYT piece was designed to tell everyone, forget all that stuff Weldon was talking about, it's been debunked and you can safely ignore the whole thing.
A later Shenon piece from December 6th, 2006 -
LEE. H. HAMILTON, A COMPROMISER WHO OPERATES ABOVE THE PARTISAN FRAY.
Quote:...his willingness to hear out the White House won him the respect of the commission's Republicans, making them more willing to compromise when it came time to write a final report.
Similar complaints from Democrats about Mr. Hamilton's dealings with the White House were heard in the mid-1980s, when he led the House intelligence committee and appeared reluctant to follow up on news reports that the Reagan administration had sold weapons to Iran and diverted the proceeds to Nicaraguan rebels, called the contras.
The reports proved to be true, and Mr. Hamilton acknowledged later that he had been duped by senior Reagan administration officials. "I basically believed them," he said after the Iran-contra affair was exposed. "My attitude was, I don't have any hard evidence not to believe.' " He later led the House investigation of the scandal.
The whole article is basically about what a nice, non-partisan guy Lee Hamilton is, and that Iran Contra prosecution thing was not his fault as he went into it with blinders, trusting everyone, and they pulled the wool over his eyes, so he presumably would have gone after them if he'd known more about what was happening, honourable guy that he is.
Robert Parry did a long piece on Hamilton that made it clear his m/o is basically to look the other way.
https://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/091710.html
This is why Hamilton was put onto the Jonestown inquiry, why he was given the task of (not) investigating Iran Contra, and it's why he was chosen to sit and smile and give kiss-ass interviews to various people during the 9/11 Commission that now basically read like PR puff-pieces. There used to be a circa 2007 lecture with Hamilton at a college on Youtube where he took questions from the crowd. A friendly young woman stood up on camera and hesitantly asked Hamilton why some articles had called him "..the king of cover-ups", and could he offer any comments as to why they might say this about him? To the laughter of the crowd, Hamilton immediately turned tail and walked offstage without answering the question.
With this in mind, Shenon's NYT piece was designed to put a nice spin on Hamilton's history, and reassure readers that he's a well-intentioned guy who you could trust to do the right thing. This is so far from the truth, it's basically a joke. Spin of this sort is visible in most of Shenon's pieces, and I suspect if you spent time on Google you'd probably see it's visible in all of his pieces. His JFK stuff this year is no different.