Re: Surprise! FUX News, but not CNN, was invited to Bush's Iraq turkey PR stunt

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abracadabra wrote:

>>   The original stpry had the times incorrect. The President and the
>> troops had a traditional dinner at dinner time
> 
> Thanks for the update.

repost:

Wagging the Media
By WAYNE MADSEN

The consequence of the Bush White House's cutting a secret deal with cherry 
picked reporters in the White House press pool was predictable. By cutting 
out editors and bureau chiefs from the reporting process, one of the first 
news reports about President Bush's secret trip to Baghdad, by Mike Allen 
of The Washington Post, one of the few reporters invited to fly on board 
Air Force One and with the strict provision he could not tell his editor or 
bureau chief in Washington, muddied the waters for people anxious for 
details about the trip. Allen's report, titled, "Flight to Baghdad: Untold 
Story," stated, "A little after 5 am Baghdad time, about 10 hours after 
takeoff from Andrews, the cabin lights were turned off and all the shades 
were down. Twenty minutes later, we touched down in Baghdad." The story was 
run in the Friday, November 29 print edition of the Post, on the Post's web 
site, and by the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post wire service. Soon, the 
5 am arrival time was being carried in print editions and on the web around 
the world and the United States in such papers as the Buffalo News, Tacoma 
News Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Sydney Morning Herald, Melbourne Age, and 
The Telegraph of Calcutta. The "Untold Story" that the plane landed at 5:20 
am and not pm, as now seems to be the case, was the first record of events 
hundreds of thousands of Americans and those abroad would initially read.

Preliminary details from Air Force concerning the trip were spotty at best, 
with no mention made on Thanksgiving Day about various takeoff and landing 
times. All we knew was that Bush quickly snuck in and out of Baghdad for a 
meal with the troops without being detected by Iraqi insurgents armed with 
portable surface-to-air missiles. Allen's report was the first to give any 
details about the itinerary but he gave the false impression that Air Force 
One touched down in Baghdad at o'dark thirty in the morning, an hour and a 
half before sunrise in the Iraqi capital. Allen later told CNN that none of 
the on-board pool reporters were able to file their stories until Air Force 
One got above 10,000 feet. In the same interview, he stated that the 
reporters were not permitted to file until Air Force One had cleared 
"airspace." If he meant Iraqi airspace, it is doubtful that the aircraft 
would have been flying in Iraqi airspace at 10,000 feet and then ascended 
over Syria or Turkey. More inconsistencies in a story so full of holes it 
could pass for a piece of Swiss cheese.

In an age of instantaneous news from the Internet and cable TV, the public 
and the media are more reliant on first hand accounts of events. The fact 
that the Post's editors were cut out from the secret trip to Baghdad 
practically guaranteed that an erroneous 5:20 am Baghdad time account would 
have crept into the Post's early morning edition. A number of people who 
read the Post print edition Friday morning were also given the impression 
that there was an early morning landing and that Bush was serving 
Thanksgiving dinner to the troops in the morning. And they would stay 
confused. Outrageously, by Sunday, November 30, the Post still had not 
corrected its error.

The only correction it published in its Sunday, November 30 edition was the 
following less-than-critical one: "The headline "Carving the Bird" was 
inadvertently omitted from the crossword puzzle in the Nov. 23 Magazine." 
But the bird carving that the Post first indicated took place in the wee 
hours of the morning at the Bob Hope Dining Facility at Baghdad airport 
went uncorrected.

Phil Taubman, the New York Time's Washington bureau chief, expressed the 
distaste for this kind of White House stealth reporting when he told the 
Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, that when the White House "decided to do 
a stealth trip, they bought into a whole series of things that are 
questionable." Indeed, including corrupted information in initial filings.

That kind of reporting is a far cry from what Bush told his hand selected 
press agents on board Air Force One during the trip back from Baghdad, 
"You're a credit to your nation, a credit to your profession."

Then there is the very odd time line for the visit that CNN, which was not 
included on the press pool manifest, filed on Wednesday, November 26, the 
day before the actual landing in Baghdad. The time line, retrieved from 
Nexis, with a load date of November 28, contains the departure times from 
Waco, Texas and Andrews Air Force Base. Fair enough. That could have been 
filed on the 26th, although it would have been rather late, 11:06 pm EST. 
But the CNN report also contains the landing time in Baghdad (5:31 pm 
Baghdad time) and the departure time (8:00 pm Baghdad time). Was the White 
House visit so carefully scripted, the arrival and departure times in 
Baghdad were known a day in advance? Was it another typo on the date? Did 
the White House advance planners provide the time line to CNN? A day before 
when the actual arrival and departure times would not have been easily 
known? Maybe. But the following cannot be explained so easily. In the CNN 
report filed on November 26, the president is quoted telling the reporters 
on Thursday night, November 27, after takeoff from Baghdad, "I was fully 
prepared to turn this baby around and come home," he says. "Three hours 
out, I checked with our Secret Service and checked with the people on the 
ground. They assured me that we still had a tight hold on the information." 
Incredible, CNN was told the day before what the President would tell 
reporters the next day? More inconsistencies. Or possibly, clairvoyants are 
once again employed by the White House staff.

Fox News, the only TV news crew permitted to fly with Bush, initially 
reported on Thanksgiving Day that Air Force One flew across the Atlantic 
and Europe during total darkness and in total radio silence. Of course, 
that also gave the impression that the plane must have left Washington much 
earlier than later reported in order to give it the cover of darkness over 
the normally busy daytime air corridors of Europe. It was later reported 
that a British Airways pilot radioed Air Force One and asked whether he 
was, in fact, seeing the presidential plane whizzing by. We were told that 
Air Force One responded to the pilot by claiming it was a much smaller 
Gulfstream 5 executive jet, to which the British pilot replied, "Oh." Of 
course, by radioing the British plane, which now appears to have been a 
phantom, the Air Force One broke the radio silence originally reported by 
Fox News. But Fox reports and you'll have to decide.

According to a Reuters report from Crawford, Texas, British Airways later 
denied any such encounter with one of its planes, stating that if it 
occurred, company regulations required a report be filed. No such report 
was filed.

A 5:30 pm landing in Baghdad would have put Air Force One over very crowded 
air corridors in Europe at the height of the evening business "rush hour" 
into such busy airports as Heathrow, Frankfurt and Charles DeGaulle. But we 
were told by the White House that only a British Airways pilot saw the 
plane, either during total darkness or during daylight hours, maybe over 
the Atlantic or maybe not. No one has come forward to report the encounter 
as required by British Airway's own regulations. On the other hand, no 
Lufthansa, Air France, Aeroflot, Sabena, Olympia, or Turkish Airlines 
pilots saw the plane with its military escort. Perhaps only the airlines of 
the "coalition of the willing" countries were trustworthy enough to spot 
the plane. Now it appears that no other pilot saw Air Force One en route to 
Iraq.

Agence France Presse also reported from Crawford that hours after Air Force 
One landed in Texas, a local tourist shop was selling pins depicting the 
encounter between Air Force One and a British Airways plane. Ironically, 
the image of Air Force One, according to the French wire service, is shown 
flying into the sunset, something that only happened if it flew west, not 
east. Unless it was flying into sunrise. Did Allen make a typo in his 
report of a morning landing? Not if the crack souvenir makers in Crawford 
are to be believed.

The American public was also told that Air Force One made a difficult "cork 
screw" landing in Baghdad. The Post's Allen later reported that the plane 
"touched down in swift abrupt landing." He later reported the plane made "a 
dramatic corkscrew landing." The Dallas Morning News Matt Stiles reported, 
"The plane made an abrupt descent into Baghdad International Airport." An 
abrupt descent is not the same as a complicated corkscrew landing. More 
inconsistencies.

We all saw the press being co-opted by providing "embedded" reporters with 
military units during the invasion of Iraq. And we were treated to a real 
life Hollywood-style rendition of "Saving Private Lynch," the Special 
Forces "rescue" of Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital where she was taken 
after she was injured in a vehicle accident. Lynch later told ABC News that 
she felt "used" by the administration and refuted earlier U.S. military 
reports that she was tortured. The Central Command's press center in Qatar 
was designed by a Hollywood set designer giving the false impression that 
the interior of a warehouse was a desert command tent on the battlefront. 
It would appear that the Bush White House is a real life version of the 
movie, "Wag the Dog." According to a Navy Judge Advocate General (JAG) 
officer, before Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln, he was authorized 
to have locked up in the brig any sailor deemed "unstable" during the 
duration of the presidential visit. Were the troops Bush served dinner to 
on Thanksgiving Day similarly vetted?

Bush's emcee for the Baghdad stopover, L. Paul Bremer, who had been saying 
for months that the security situation in Baghdad was improving, was 
criticized by his predecessor as Iraqi pro-consul, retired General Jay 
Garner. The general told the BBC it was a mistake for Bremer to disband the 
Iraqi army and he indicated that his warnings about future destabilization 
in Iraq caused problems for him with the highest levels in the 
administration, meaning either Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. More 
proof of Bush's smoke and mirrors tactics.

After all the Bush administration's tall tales about Saddam's weapons of 
mass destruction, his links to Al Qaeda, Iraq's desire to purchase 
yellowcake uranium from Niger, Britain's "dodgy dossier," the "suicides" of 
Dr. David Kelly and State Department intelligence analyst John Kokal, 
Jessica Lynch's dramatic "rescue," "Mission Accomplished" carrier landings, 
Valerie Plame Wilson's "non-importance" to the CIA's covert operations, 
Cuba's biological weapons, Syria's support for Iraqi insurgents, the threat 
of Iran's nuclear arsenal, North Korea's "non-threatening" nuclear arsenal, 
Saudi Arabia's support in the war on terrorism, Pakistan's assistance in 
stamping out the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the "coalition of the willing," 
everyone, including Mike Allen, his and other newspaper editors and bureau 
chiefs, broadcast news anchors, can be forgiven if they are confused about 
what they are being fed by the White House on a daily basis.

The most germane quote is from Morpheus in The Matrix:

"You take the blue pill--the story ends, you wake up in your bed and 
believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill--you stay in 
Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. " 


http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen12012003.html


-- 
TheTruthHurts.


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