Jeremy Scahill on 9/11

[Paul Rigby]

Paul - so you think Scahill is a spy too, as well as a member of your ever expanding band of "left-gatekeepers", which already includes Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Chris Hedges, several Cockburns etc.

Am I on your list yet?

Is Peter Dale Scott on your list?

It can only be a matter of time.

What a waste of a fine mind.

"The most efficient weapon of offence is truth,"

Hazlitt, "On Disagreeable People," Monthly Magazine, August, 1827

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Jan I assume you are aware of the History of Encounter Magazine, the CIA funded left gatekeeping magazine. How do you propose that we USE this particular history? Do you deny the possibility that similar operations are going on right now? Go ahead and disagree, that's great. But just how do you propose we get the word out about left-gatekeeping. IMO it is strategy #1 in preventing potential majorities from recognizing their own strength. Knowledge of the historical fact of Encounter is sorely lacking in the wide CIA enclave known as the United States.

[Peter Lemkin]

Jan I assume you are aware of the History of Encounter Magazine, the CIA funded left gatekeeping magazine. How do you propose that we USE this particular history? Do you deny the possibility that similar operations are going on right now? Go ahead and disagree, that's great. But just how do you propose we get the word out about left-gatekeeping. IMO it is strategy #1 in preventing potential majorities from recognizing their own strength. Knowledge of the historical fact of Encounter is sorely lacking in the wide CIA enclave known as the United States.

Nat, Paul, I do believe there are 'left-gatekeepers', however, I often disagree with who is branded with that label and who is not. Some are only progressives or semi-progressives who haven't (for a variety of reasons, misinformation, prejudice, or psychological mechanisms) not fully seen the light......

[Austin Kelley]

Ordinary rules of evidence and logic should apply here, too...

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jan I assume you are aware of the History of Encounter Magazine, the CIA funded left gatekeeping magazine. How do you propose that we USE this particular history? Do you deny the possibility that similar operations are going on right now? Go ahead and disagree, that's great. But just how do you propose we get the word out about left-gatekeeping. IMO it is strategy #1 in preventing potential majorities from recognizing their own strength. Knowledge of the historical fact of Encounter is sorely lacking in the wide CIA enclave known as the United States.

Nate - I'm very well aware of the history of Encounter thank you very much. Encounter had a CIA agent on its editorial board in neocon godfather Irving Kristol, and - to my knowledge - published hardly any investigative exposes of deep black operations.

Whereas the list of left gatekeepers, drawn up by those who like to sling such mud - often purely because they interpret a particular event in a fundamentally different fashion - includes many who have produced outstanding investigative journalism.

Hmmmm... Who's playing whom here?

For instance, it was Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair who wrote: "Whiteout, Drugs and the Press", describing in part how the press refused to support or publish Gary Webb's outstanding investigative journalism. The journalism which led to Webb being "suicided", managing the spectacular feat of shooting himself twice in the head.

Yet Counterpunch and the Cockburn tribe are routinely described as "left gatekeepers" by those who throw such labels about.

I find the use of such a label to describe the work of Counterpunch and those who write for it to be destructive and entirely counter-productive.

Nate - let me ask you a question. I believe you regularly post on Democracy Now. Some, including Paul Rigby, describe Amy Goodman as a left gatekeeper.

Do you agree with that label? And, if so, how does it affect your behaviour?

[Paul Rigby]

Encounter had a CIA agent on its editorial board in neocon godfather Irving Kristol, and - to my knowledge - published hardly any investigative exposes of deep black operations.

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...ostcount=9

Encounter, June 1964, pp. 73-74, 76 & 78

Books & Writers: Whodunnit

By Goronwy Rees

Who Killed Kennedy? By Thomas G. Buchanan. Secker and Warburg, 18s.

For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the office of the President has a numinous quality which is reflected upon all its occupants. The President is hedged by a kind of divinity which has long ceased to surround a king. Thus, for Americans, there is something sacrilegious in the murder of a President, which others cannot wholly understand, however much they may sympathise. It is a desecration of the Union’s hallowed ground and for an American it is almost inconceivable that this could be anything except the work of a diseased and deranged personality. To think otherwise, one would have to assume that there are evil men who for their own ends would plot and conspire to violate the most sacred altars of the Republic, and, unless of course such men were Communists, this is something most Americans cannot bring themselves to accept.

Mr. Buchanan, himself an American, has now written a book which will outrage all such beliefs, or superstitions, and at the same time give profound offence to many who believe themselves to be friends of the United States. Who Killed Kennedy? is in many ways an unpleasant book. It is marred by that kind of sour malice, of innuendo and Schadenfreude, to which left-wingers (Mr. Buchanan is a recent ex-Communist) are so often unfortunately prone; even the shade of Jefferson Davis does not escape a perfectly irrelevant sneer. It is also marred by errors of historical interpretation which make one doubt Mr. Buchanan’s credentials as a commentator on the contemporary American scene. If he can be so wrong about the historical situation which led to the assassination of Lincoln, about which after all one knows a great deal, if still not everything, why should we trust his account of the forces which led to the assassination of Kennedy, about which we as yet know very little?

Nevertheless, it would be a pity if its faults denied Mr. Buchanan’s book the attention it deserves. Who Killed Kennedy? asks a serious question which demands a serious answer; and if no better answers are given than those we have already received from Dallas, one might reasonably conclude, as Mr. Buchanan does, that the United States may be threatened by even greater disasters than the murder of a President.

[Jan Klimkowski]

And your point is?

I don't see any original investigative research into deep black operations in that Encounter piece.

[Paul Rigby]

And your point is?

I don't see any original investigative research into deep black operations in that Encounter piece.

Encounter wasn't set up to undertake "original investigative research into deep black operations," as anyone remotely familiar with it knows; but it did do gatekeeping and steerage, which is what both Buchanan's book - published in the UK by the CIA's favourite UK publisher - and Rees' review (ditto) were all about.

Your defence of the left-gatekeeping invites us to confuse evidence with mud. Pish. The evidence is abundant and detailed - the US establishment, like its UK counterpart, funds pseudo-leftists to set limits on dissent. At the heart of this deception lies a trade-off based on a hierarchy of subjects. At the pinnacle of the latter stands the two world-historical post-WWII covert ops, Dallas '63 and 9/11. To keep the Left from asking serious questions about these, they'll trade almost anything, not least elementary consistency, their consciences, and self-respect.

There, the careers of Chomsky and Cockburn in a nutshell.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Paul - the "pish" in this thread is entirely yours.

I'm glad you acknowledge that Encounter didn't conduct orginal investigative journalism.

Counterpunch has published a large amount of investigative journalism.

Scahill has published original investigative journalism.

Democracy Now continues to broadcast original investigative journalism.

Do I agree with everything published or broadcast by Counterpunch, Scahill, Democracy Now, Naomi Klein etc? No, of course not.

But to describe them as "left gatekeepers" because you disagree with this or that and thereby throw out everything published there is plain crazy.

[Paul Rigby]

... to describe them as "left gatekeepers" because you disagree with this or that and thereby throw out everything published there is plain crazy.

Nothing to do with opinion, it's a matter of evidence. Chomsky is a left-gatekeeper not because I want him to be so, or don't like the cut of his gib, but because he lies, chiefly, but by no means exclusively, by selectivity, hypocrisy, omission and inversion. The evidence for this is unarguable. You demonstrate this rather well by your steadfast refusal to engage with it. I don't blame you.

Chomsky on the Lone Nutter in the White House, 1961-63

Stone’s JFK, whatever its precise strengths and weaknesses, provoked a new generation to look at the assassination. This bubble of interest had to be swiftly deflated, and America’s centre-left preserved from contamination by conspiratorialist fever. Who better to inject the narcotic of conformity than the CIA’s favourite left-gatekeeper, the Gnome?

Rethinking Camelot, the preferred delivery mechanism, is one of the crudest pieces of CIA hackwork ever written. Much of it is laughably bad. Consider the question of responsibility for the US assault on Vietnam.

Early on in the book - all the quotations to follow are from the Verso paperback edition published in London in 1993 – Chomsky serves up one of those impressive-seeming, quasi-aphoristic criterion which so intoxicate his army of academic exegetes and hagiographers:

“Policy flows from institutions reflecting the needs of power and privilege within them, and can be understood only if these factors are recognized, including the case now under review” (p.9).

That eternal verity solemnly proclaimed, Chomsky proceeds to ignore it more or less entirely for the rest of the book.

How so? The text is littered with a mantra which makes nonsense of Chomsky’s assertion: It wasn’t an institution what done it, after all, it was that bloody awful man Kennedy. Single-handedly. Count the violations of Chomsky’s own tenet:

“Kennedy escalated” (p.2); “John F. Kennedy’s escalation” (p.23); “Kennedy’s escalation” (p.27); “Kennedy…escalated the war” (p.37); “JFK raised the level of US attack” (p.43); “As he prepared to escalate the war…in late 1961” (p.46); “Kennedy’s 1961-62 escalation” (p.51); “his 1961-1962 escalation” (p.67).

Just in case his less nimble readers missed the point, the Gnome served up a variation on the theme. Subtlety, as we shall see, was not his strongpoint:

”Kennedy’s war” (p.2); “Kennedy’s war” (p.36); “Kennedy’s war” (p.39); “Kennedy’s war” (p.52); “Kennedy’s war” (p.53); “Kennedy’s war” (p.69); “Kennedy’s war” (p.73); “Kennedy’s war” (p.81); “Kennedy’s war” (p.86); “Kennedy’s war” (p.105).

Still not got it? Chomsky had a third variant on the same basic slogan:

”Kennedy…his aggression” (p.15); “Kennedy moved on to armed attack” (p.25); “JFK’s aggression” (p.32); “JFK’s aggression” (p.35); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.52); “Kennedy’s aggression” (p.63); “JFK’s 1961-1962 aggression” (p.66); “JFK’s aggression” (p.115).

Impressively sophisticated stuff: If you can’t convince ‘em with the quality of your argument or evidence, beat ‘em into submission by mindless repetition. Was Chomsky’s real research at MIT anything to do with mind control/MK Ultra, one wonders? Psychic driving, anyone?