(
Cross posted at All Spin Zone.)
Lord knows the last month or two haven't been kind to the Bush administration and its supporters and apologists. When Joe Scarborough starts publicly questioning the administration, you know that RoveCo's hit a rough patch, and can't respond to facts on the ground.
The DeLay mess, Iraq, the failed Bamboozlepalooza Tour, threats of nuclear option, the Downing Street Memo that's starting to gain some media traction - all have been dominating the headlines in recent weeks. Then, in the past week, Newsweek printed an article which alleged (via "anonymous sources" ) that interrogators in Gitmo had been flushing pages of the Quran down the toilet in front of Muslim detainees during scheduled "grillings". Needless to say, the Islamic world reacted about the same as the Christian fundies in the U.S. would have reacted had someone published an account of Al Qaida flushing pages of the King James version down the hopper. (more below the fold...)
Well, sort of, anyway. Somehow, the story started making the rounds in Afghanistan, and in the past week there's been a
good deal of violence there as a result of the reports. Again, kind of like the outcry that there would have been from the U.S. holy warriors, except for the Kalashnikov / AK-47 rifle action. The response in Afghanistan has prompted international outrage, and even Bush toady Karzai's been asking for an explanation - exactly the kind of reaction intel operatives would hope for from a disinformation sting.
Then this afternoon, out of the blue, Newsweek's editor issued an apology (of sorts) for printing the allegations. The usual "unnamed high level sources", mysterious document passthroughs, and lack of journalistic fact checking were cited as excuses. Ok, so now another Rathergate fires up the neocon noise machine.
The whole incident kind of reeks of a Lee Atwater Memorial Countermeasures campaign. RoveCo was getting desperate to regain control of the newscycle, and I can assure you that this will be topic one on Rush, Hannity, and Savage tomorrow. I can also assure you that Newsweek will now go through a purging of "liberals" - the editor is history, the story writers are history, and Newsweek will convene the corporate equivalent of a Grand Jury to investigate how they got the story so wrong.
In other words, exactly what the noise machine wanted. Another "chilling" of the corporate media. They were getting uppity again.
There is no question in my mind, even in this early hour of journalistic confusion at Newsweek, that they were set up like bowling pins. It's RoveCo modus operandi. And someone, half a world away, also stoked the fires in a country where news doesn't flow in a good month, much less immediately after publication of such accusations against the U.S. military.
But of course, the U.S. corporate media won't see this, or question the timing, or the motivation. MiniTru won't allow it. The Wurlitzer will simply discredit, forever, Newsweek's credibility in reporting anything other than the Michael Jackson trial. And another media voice is lost. And the lesson is pressed on the rest of the corporate media whores - cross the Bush administration, make them look bad, and you're going down.
Tom Hagen couldn't have done a better horsehead job.