February 26, 2002
Media compilation #50: Calling a spade "a Spade"
Dear journalist
I hope you'll be able to find time to review this 50th compilation I've prepared for you. The first Vancouver Sun article below should bring much food for thought to you - some quite challenging material actually! - as well as the rest of this material.
Regards
Jean Hudon
Earth Rainbow Network Coordinator
http://www.cybernaute.com/earthconcert2000
P.S. May I also strongly recommend to your attention this recent speech by US Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich entitled Prayer for America (2/17/02) at http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12477
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn - Russian novelist, Nobel laureate (born 1918)
CONTENTS
1. Follow the money, as they say, and you'll find the smoking gun
2. Haliburton: To the Victors Go the Markets
3. Coyote Rummy: War reporting: no! - Hollywood on the battlefield: yes!
SEE ALSO:
Pentagon and CIA Plans for War Against Iraq
http://www.truthout.com/02.18C.Plans.for.War.htm
Germany and France warn Bush on Iraq
http://www.truthout.com/02.22B.Germany.France.htm
Too Much Surveillance Means Too Little Freedom - 'Big Brother' in America (February 19)
http://www.iht.com/articles/48463.htm
(...) By creating the means to monitor 300 million visits to the United States yearly, this administration and a supine opposition are building a system capable of identifying, tracking and spying on 300 million Americans. So far, the reaction has been a most un-American docility. CLIP
In a Shift, U.S. Uses Airstrikes to Help Kabul
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/asia/19AFGH.html
American forces appear to have opened a new phase in the war in Afghanistan with two bombing raids that were aimed at forces opposed to the new government in Kabul.
Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/international/19PENT.html
The Pentagon is planning to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media in order to influence public opinion in both friendly and unfriendly countries. (...) Headed by Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden of the Air Force, the new office has begun circulating classified proposals calling for aggressive campaigns that use not only the foreign media and the Internet, but also covert operations. (...) General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said. "It goes from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white," a senior Pentagon official said. CLIP
Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=19002
(...) Most recently, Washington Post reporter Doug Struck claims that U.S. soldiers threatened to shoot him if he proceeded with an attempt to investigate a site where civilians had been killed; Struck has stated that for him, the central question raised by the incident is whether the Pentagon is trying to cover up its actions and why it won't allow access by reporters to determine what they're doing here in Afghanistan (CBS, The Early Show, 2/13/02). Taken together, these incidents and policies should raise alarm bells for media throughout the country.
Rumsfeld Says He May Drop New Office of Influence
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/25/international/25MILI.html
Israeli Reservists Show Uncommon Bravery
http://commondreams.org/views02/0213-01.htm
"They are turning us into animals; they are giving free rein to the most sadistic elements among us," the dissident soldiers say on their website. "In all the accounts of the most vicious conflicts known to the 20th century, people have always lauded those few who refused to take part in the atrocities. "This is now our moment of truth, and every one of us has to decide if he is or is not of the human race." Now that we can't claim we didn't know, all that's left for us to do is take a stand.
Bush Appoints Iran-Contra Conspirator
http://www.truthout.com/02.20B.Bush.Conspirator.htm
Expert: FBI Shielding Anthrax Suspect
http://www.truthout.com/02.20C.FBI.Shielding.htm
Anthrax Terrorist Identified — But Who Is He? (21-Feb-2002)
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=1275
Why We Dare Call It Enrongate
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12412
Bush's little lie about his relationship with "Kenny Boy" could be the tip of a much larger iceberg.
Enron's new $5bn black hole
http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,636104,00.html
Investigators extend probe to key firm at heart of energy giant's 3,000 subsidiaries
ENRON AND THE MYTHS OF RUNAWAY CAPITALISM
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12447
The story of Enron's implosion is not about one diabolical company, nor about a few bad apples, or a few broken rules. It's about the ugly guts of our entire economy.
Much more on the EnronGate at http://www.alternet.org/?IssueAreaID=30
1.
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002
From: American Patriot Friends Network <APFN@apfn.org>
Subject: Follow the money, as they say, and you'll find the smoking gun
Follow the money, as they say, and you'll find the smoking gun. The truth is out there ... right?
At first, it all seemed so obvious. It was those Islamic terrorists. Osama bin Laden. Mullah Omar. George W. Bush had nothing to do with it ... did he?
From: http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/story.asp?id=DCC82857-AA3C-41FB-997D-EDA05CC774E3
Also archived at: http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=19225
Ian Mulgrew
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, February 23, 2002
"The right wing benefited so much from September 11 that, if I were still a conspiratorialist, I would believe they'd done it."
Norman Mailer
When the paladin of Camelot joined the fray, I knew 9/11 had become the Kennedy Assassination of the 21st century -- a real-life X-Files episode occurring before my eyes. Like those X-Files accounts of aliens living in oil deposits, this was a story with such staggering implications the mainstream media are loath to go near it. The question isn't who killed the president -- it's who piloted the airplanes that slammed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvanian countryside.
Just as there remains lingering doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald fired a burst of fatally accurate shots from the Texas Book Depository, so there is skepticism that cells of Islamic terrorists secretly coordinated and simultaneously commandeered four commercial jetliners. The culprit responsible for the Sept. 11 attack is now rumoured to be the same one who lurked behind the grassy knoll: the oil-dependent U.S. military-industrial complex.
Not everyone is ready to accept this -- a substitute teacher in North Vancouver's Sherwood Park elementary school has been called on the mat for suggesting to Grade 5 students the Central Intelligence Agency might have been involved in 9/11.
And at last count, there were a dozen U.S. Congressional Committees investigating the tragedies and how such an intelligence and security breakdown was allowed to occur.
But President George W. Bush and his right-hand man, Vice President Dick Cheney, have taken the unprecedented step of trying to restrict those investigations, pouring fuel on the simmering conspiracy theories being propagated in alternative publications, on wingnut Web sites and among some serious media outlets.
In Germany, a former minister of technology, Andreas von Buelow, made headlines when in an interview he dismissed the U.S. government's explanation that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network is responsible for the attacks. His own explanation implicated the White House. "I wonder why many questions are not asked," von Buelow said. "For 60 decisive minutes, the military and intelligence agencies let the fighter planes stay on the ground; 48 hours later, however, the FBI presented a list of suicide attackers. Within 10 days, it emerged that seven of them were still alive."
In Britain, a flight engineer has published a detailed paper asserting the U.S. took the joysticks out of the pilots' hands using a method of remote control developed by the American military in the 1970s.
In the U.S. and Canada, independent publisher and editor Mike Ruppert (a former LAPD cop who hates the CIA) has drawn huge crowds to his two-hour lecture in which he states baldly that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks and had foreknowledge. He opens his documentary presentation with an offer of $1,000 US to anyone who can prove any of his sources were misrepresented or inauthentic.
A former U.S. government agent also has given interviews claiming the CIA has been dealing with Osama bin Laden since 1987.
According to those who do not believe in The Lone Gunman, the truth is as plain as the nose on your face: Sept. 11's terrorist acts were planned and paid for by the CIA to enable the Bush Administration to "legitimately" bomb Afghanistan into submission on behalf of the oil industry.
After all, everyone knows the Bush family has strong and long acknowledged ties to the oil industry, as do other senior members of the administration. Cheney until recently was president of a company servicing the oil patch. National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice was a manager for Chevron. Commerce and Energy Secretaries Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham worked for Tom Brown, another oil giant.
Follow the money, as they say, and you'll find the smoking gun.
Under this scenario, conspiracy theorists say a pliant Afghan regime was essential because of plans to pipe central Asian oil across Afghanistan. And there is a harvest of coincidence and contradiction to feed such imaginings.
Consider first that the intelligence breakdown that led to 9/11 appears to have been a consequence of the Bush Administration telling the Federal Bureau of Investigation to back off on its investigation of Middle Eastern terrorism. A senior FBI investigator resigned from the agency, noisily claiming its main obstacle in the investigation was Big Oil's political influence. In an ironic twist of fate, the agent died in the World Trade Center.
(Fox Mulder, was that you? Is that why they cancelled the series?)
There also are recurring reports the CIA station chief in Dubai met with bin Laden only seven weeks before 9/11 while he was laid up for surgery. (The CIA denies this, but of course you can't believe anything it says.)
Now think about this for a second: The Independent in London questions how Bush could claim in two public appearances to have seen the first plane hit the first tower long before any such TV footage was broadcast. The paper also asks why Dubya continued sitting with elementary school students after the second tower was hit and he'd been told, "America is under attack."
Very mysterious, when standard procedure for such a situation is to whisk the president away to safety. Unless -- and here is the nub -- unless he knew something more than we did that morning. As the Independent asked, "What television station was HE watching?" This is rich stuff for those who see Them under the bed, especially since the financial miasma melds nicely with the already swirling rumour and insinuation.
In the days before the attacks, there was unusually heavy trading in airline and related stocks using a market tactic called a "put option" that essentially bets that a stock will decline in value. If you were Osama, buying puts would be a great way to boost the value of your investment portfolio.
And sure enough, unusually high numbers of put options were purchased in early September for the stocks of AMR Corp. and UAL Corp., the parents of American and United -- each of which had two planes hijacked. The U.S. government is now investigating suspicious trading in 38 companies directly affected by the events of Sept. 11.
The initial survey of beneficiaries, however, turns out not to include one tall, dark-haired, olive-skinned, Allah-loving, Saudi- born sheik. Mainly the profiteers were blue-chip, establishment, red- white-and-blue Americans, some of whom were tenants in the collapsed twin towers, such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Lehman Brothers and the Bank of America, major airlines, cruise companies, General Motors Corp., Raytheon and others. Several insurance companies are also on the 38-name list U.S. and Canadian financial firms were asked to review and compare with their records for any unusual patterns.
(Which may say more about who plays the market than anything else, but why quibble with the quixotic?)
Cynics are also questioning the incredible speed with which evidence in the WTC collapse is being destroyed. Never in the history of fire investigations, they say, has evidence been destroyed before exhaustive investigations are complete.
(Say what? Two skyscrapers' worth of debris should be warehoused?)
And then there were the curious developments swirling around the anthrax public health hysteria triggered shortly after 9/11. Even dullards can appreciate that anthrax sent to a top Democrat and to the U.S. media helped unify the nation behind the war effort while literally shutting down Congress -- a remarkably useful outcome for Dubya and his gang.
Indeed, specialists in biological warfare say the anthrax appears to be a U.S. military strain and the culprit a disgruntled American scientist who possesses a rare combination of laboratory skills that make him (they believe it's a man) relatively easy to identify. Hmmm. And who didn't smell a bad odour two weeks ago when Tennessee driver's licence examiner Katherine Smith died in Memphis under "most unusual and suspicious" circumstances. One day before her arraignment on charges she conspired to provide phoney licences to five Arabs tied by the FBI to the 9/11 attacks, her car crashed into a utility pole. The car was only slightly damaged, the gas tank was full and intact, but the vehicle was immediately engulfed in flames.
As one report pointed out, Smith and the car interior apparently were doused with gasoline, which would certainly qualify in my book as at least "suspicious."
And Memphis ... Memphis? Wasn't that the same place a noted Harvard bio-warfare expert "fell" off a bridge in December?
Scully!
The truth is out there. I know it. You too can help find it.
If you would like an activist kit to get involved in urging a full public investigation of 9/11 and its aftermath, reply to findtruth40@hotmail.com with "Send kit."
But be warned.
The Pentagon has just established a new Office of Strategic Influence that calls for the planting of false stories in the foreign press, phoney e-mails from disguised addresses and other covert activities to manipulate public opinion.
This could be one of them.
© Copyright 2002 Vancouver Sun
SEE ALSO:
O.S.I. = Office of Strategic Influence
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=19055
CIA complicit on September 11?
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/wtc.htm
FAA Alerted Military Immediately On 9.11
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/FAA_9-11.htm
ENRON / BUSH / OIL / CONNECTION
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/enron_bush.htm
TERRORISM / DynCorp / Enron / Herbert "Pug" Winokur DRUGS / HUD / ENRON / DYN CORP / RON BORWN / PUG WINOKUR Enron embraced U.S. government agencies for $1.2 billion Looking For The Bush-Enron Smoking Gun
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=19155
`In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.'
http://disc.server.com/Indices/149495.html
"Michael Moore talks Unocal on the Daily Show"
"Holy crap! Moore talked about Unocal, and Haliburton's secret meetings with Cheney a month before 9/11, and got stunned silence from crowd.
..."Some of the same supposed "conspiracy theories" you see on Indymedia but sporadically reported by mainstream media were just pouring out of Moore's mouth. At one point there was this big collective groan, as if everybody was just shocked sick.
..."Lots of people watch the Daily Show... It was amazing to hear this stuff finally mentioned on the boob tube. Can't ignore this stuff forever."
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=138908
---
"What Can We Do About Terrorism?"
by Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col.USAF ret., President of the Institute for Space and Security Studies 2/22/02
..."You said that we are the target because we stand for democracy, freedom, and human rights in the world. Baloney! We are the target of terrorists because we stand for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation in the world"...
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=139410
2.
From: Drusha L. Mayhue <drusha@bigsky.net>
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2002
Subject: [RunningOnEmpty2] Haliburton: To the Victors Go the Markets
Posted by Drusha from Montana
http://www.southernstudies.org/facingsouth/index.shtml#Commentary1
FACING SOUTH EXCLUSIVE - Haliburton: To the Victors Go the Markets
The influence of big energy corporations in the Bush Administration is no secret. But the story of Dick Cheney and his former company, Haliburton Co., has received little attention -- and it may be the most important
By Jordan Green Institute for Southern Studies
Prospects for democracy in post-Taliban Afghanistan appear dimmed by the bare-knuckled oil services deal-cutting overseen by the victor, the United States. Last December, the US Department of Defense made a no-cap, cost-plus-award contract to Halliburton KBR's Government Operations division. The Dallas-based company is contracted to build forward operating bases to support troop deployments for the next nine years wherever the President chooses to take the anti-terrorism war.
"Augmenting our military troops with contractor-provided support has proven to be an invaluable force multiplier," boasted Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar, celebrating the deal in a euphemistic language that is understood both as military triumphalism - and to Wall Street - as a cue that the new military mobilization could punch up the company's flagging stocks. In an October press release, the CEO who was compensated $11.3 million last year, had forecasted a good fourth quarter for profits in engineering and construction.
A Jan. 29 Washington Post article drew comparisons between Halliburton and Enron, pointing out that both their stocks plunged last fall, and that they share the same accountant, Arthur Andersen. (Halliburton has been plagued with lawsuits over its use of asbestos, discouraging investor confidence.) Another similarity is that their CEOs both cashed out before fall. In Halliburton's case, Vice President Dick Cheney cashed out $20.6 million in stocks before retiring as CEO. With Halliburton now ailing financially, it's only natural that the Defense Department, over which Cheney presided in the administration of Bush I, would provide the bailout.
The Pentagon posts all contract announcements exceeding $5 million on its Website, but in Halliburton's case declined to disclose the estimated value of the award. A spokesperson for Halliburton gave $2.5 billion as the amount the company earned from base support services in the 1990s, acknowledging that the contract value could exceed that number assuming that the scope of US military actions widens in the next decade.
Though the Pentagon may be wary of admitting its favor towards Halliburton, the British Ministry of Defence shows no such reticence. In the third week of December 2001, the Defence Ministry awarded Halliburton's subsidiary Brown & Root Services $418 million to supply large tank transporters, capable of carrying tanks to the front lines at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.
The first increment of Halliburton's award is being subcontracted to Oshkosh Truck Corporation in Wisconsin and King Trailers in Market Harborough, England. Because of Prime Minister Tony Blair's invaluable service of persuading Britain's reluctant public to go along with the American campaign and in providing British peacekeepers to secure Afghanistan, America's junior partner has been rewarded with a boost to its manufacturing base.
But the major rewards are reserved for the Texas oil oligarchy.
Halliburton Company has close connections with the Bush family. Aside from Cheney, there is Lawrence Eagleburger, a Halliburton director and former deputy secretary of defense under Bush Sr. during the Gulf War.
In its earlier incarnation as Brown & Root Services, the company sponsored Texan and future president Lyndon B. Johnson's stolen election to the US Senate in 1948, building the state's spectacular political-industrial muscle.
As the number-one oil field services company in the world, Halliburton has an active interest in positioning itself to exploit the newly-opened oil and gas fields in adjoining Uzbekistan, where the US Army's 10th Mountain Division already occupies a base.
The Bush Administration's chief corporate interest is in advancing the fortunes of the energy industry. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice is a former board member of Chevron, which has been operating the Tengiz oil fields in neighboring Kazakhstan through the past decade. Commerce Secretary Don Evans is the former chairman of the Denver-based oil firm Tom Brown Inc. Houston-based Enron, whose phenomenal implosion has recently brought critical attention, was the single biggest contributor to the Bush campaign last year.
Halliburton's nine-year troop-support contract falls under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, which provides "the warfighter with additional capabilities to rapidly support and augment the logistics requirements of its deployed forces." The company is required to deploy within 72 hours of notification and install forward operating bases for some 25,000 troops within 15 days. The base camp services Halliburton will provide include mess hall, food preparation, potable water, sanitation, laundry, transportation, utilities and warehousing.
Through the past ten years, Halliburton has built bases to support troop deployments in Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans. During the Vietnam War, the company (then as Brown & Root Services) built roads, landing strips, harbors and military bases throughout the areas under US military control.
"They drop these boys in and they construct a town," relates retired Special Forces operative Stan Goff. "In no time at all they'll have barracks and latrines. Then they'll put in a club that serves alcohol, soccer fields, and baseball fields."
Halliburton's publicity material boasts of its ability to establish temporary military bases under often hostile conditions - an invaluable preparation for the second phase of its project: laying the groundwork for oil exploration under often hostile conditions. Vice President Cheney has been famously quoted in reference to the country of Iraq: "The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratic regimes friendly to the United States."
Other oil-rich countries potentially targeted in the US anti-terrorist war in which Halliburton is jockeying for access are Colombia and Venezuela in the Americas. In Colombia, only 20% of the oil reserves have been explored because of political instability. Desperate to increase the country's output, President Andrés Pastrana sweetened the foreign investment terms for multinational oil companies. In 1996, BP Amoco and Occidental joined Enron in the U.S.-Colombia Business Partnership to lobby for more military aid for Plan Colombia.
Venezuela - though not named as a target so far - is the third largest oil supplier to the United States and an influential member of OPEC. President Hugo Chávez convinced the OPEC cartel to cut production in order to raise international oil prices. His high-profile visit to Saddam Hussein last August and refusal to allow the US military to fly over Venezuelan airspace has irritated the United States, leading to speculation that the country will soon find itself subject to the wrath of the American anti-terrorist campaign.
But in the immediate future, the key to the United States' energy security and Halliburton's profit enhancement lies in Central Asia. Its chief competitor in oil fields services, Houston-based Baker Hughes, already has a significant head start in exploiting the immense wealth of natural gas in Uzbekistan. Baker Hughes has entered into a partnership with Uzbekneftegaz, the state holding company that controls the oil and gas sector, to develop the country's North Urtabulak project with options on three other fields.
Baker Hughes has its own political connections to aid its muscling in on the Central Asian prospecting game. Board member Edward P. Djerejian served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs under both the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations. His resume cuts across the arenas of corporate strategy and foreign policy as a director of Occidental Petroleum Global Industries Ltd. and as a director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston.
At stake in Uzbekistan are oil reserves estimated at 600 million barrels. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the country can't modernize its drilling operations fast enough. Despite the fact thatits oil and gas reserves are estimated to be more than that of all the other Central Asian republics combined, Uzbekistan has lagged behind its neighbors in production.
In April 2000, President Islam Karimov announced preferential treatment to foreign investors, including tax exemptions. In what promises to be a phenomenal resource grab, Uzbekistan is opening up 80 oil fields to drilling by multinational oil companies. This year, President Karimov has promised to privatize 49% of the national energy company Uzbekneftegaz.
Chevron, which has successfully developed the Tengiz oil fields in the Caspian Sea in neighboring Kazakhstan, is well poised to expand into Uzbekistan. Shell has recently completed oil explorations in the country. In Turkmenistan, on Afghanistan's northern frontier, ExxonMobil owns a 40% stake in the Burun oil field. UK-based Trinity Energy committed to investing over $400 million for gas exploration in Uzbekistan over the next 40 years.
The proposed Central Asia Oil Pipeline - through Afghanistan to the deepwater port of Gwadar, Pakistan on the Arabian Sea - remains Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan's best opportunity to export its oil to western markets.
Now that the country of Afghanistan has been reduced to rubble by US bombs and the American and British militaries have locked in their occupational forces, Halliburton has established a beachhead for a spectacular expansion.
Jordan Green is an Editorial & Research Associate at the Institute for Southern Studies.
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Visit "Resources for Democracy" at http://bozeman.bigsky.net/drusha Recommended Reading: "Arrogant Capital", by Kevin Phillips
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3.
February 24, 2002
Coyote Rummy
By MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON
The secretary of defense fires off lots of memos, known as "snowflakes" or "Rummygrams." I want Rummy to send a Rummygram telling the Pentagon to kick its addiction to fiction.
A day after we learned that the military's Office of Strategic Influence wanted to plant fake stories in the overseas press, we read in Variety that the Pentagon is teaming with Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of "Top Gun," "Black Hawk Down," "Pearl Harbor" and "Coyote Ugly," and Bertram van Munster, of "Cops," to make a TV docudrama about the war on terrorism.
The 13-episode "reality" series on ABC will profile our troops abroad.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon would also cooperate with a VH1 show called the "Military Diaries Project," which will turn 60 soldiers into Josh Hartnetts as they star in their own war movies, training digital cameras on themselves.
"I'm outraged about the Hollywoodization of the military," Dan Rather told me. "Somebody's got to question whether it's a good idea to limit independent reporting on the battlefield and access of journalists to U.S. military personnel and then conspire with Hollywood."
He said the Bush administration had gotten overly fawning "Hans Christian Andersen" press coverage and was now doing "the equivalent of moonwalking in the end zone."
An ABC News executive said it was "ridiculous" and "very awkward," since the news side had been pounding the Pentagon for months for "bare-bones access" to the war, to see Pentagon officials roll out the camouflage carpet now for ABC's entertainment division.
An ABC Entertainment executive said the Pentagon was eager to "produce what Americans want to see" because they regard it as "an Army recruiting film."
Military reporters say they are more handcuffed now than during Desert Storm. They have had only the most restricted and supervised access to Special Operations units. Even reporters who went to Afghanistan with the Marines found themselves quarantined in warehouses and handed press releases from Central Command in Tampa about casualties less than 100 yards away. Some who got close to the action had film confiscated and guns pointed at them by Special Operations soldiers or their mujahedeen bullies.
The Pentagon said one reason it couldn't give more access was because it was too dangerous. But reporters like Danny Pearl are more than willing to assume that risk. More journalists have been killed in Afghanistan than American soldiers have in hostile fire.
When Don Rumsfeld finally conceded that Special Forces had killed the wrong guys, 16 pro-Karzai Afghan villagers, thinking they were in Al Qaeda, he wouldn't admit an error.
Rummy does not make mistakes. And when the war on terror becomes a Bruckheimer production, you won't be seeing any mistakes either. "We're not going to criticize," Mr. van Munster told Variety. Bruckheimer is the new Patton, and his macho, obvious, hyperpatriotic blockbusters suit the Bushies - and Karl Rove and the Republican National Committee - perfectly.
The Navy even gave Mr. Bruckheimer an aircraft carrier to have the premiere party for "Pearl Harbor" in Hawaii last spring.
The White House and the Pentagon want to write the narrative of the war on terror, and they are willing to use their own soldiers as cameramen and actors in comic book versions of a messy, dirty war.
They would rather make troops available as props in gung-ho videos than available to explain how the commanders let Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda leaders escape or targeted the wrong villages. Mr. Bruckheimer said his program would not usurp reporters' access. "Reporters are after breaking news," he said. "We're doing profiles." He said the Pentagon would check the show before it aired, as it did with "Black Hawk Down": "It's not censorship, but we do have a conversation."
Posters of Bruckheimer war epics hang near the Pentagon's public affairs office. Down the hall is a painting of Ernie Pyle bent over a typewriter, a relic from the days reporters were allowed to cover wars.
The only question is: Will reporters be permitted on the set of Bruckheimer's war, or will that war, too, be closed to the press?
The New York Times Company
