I feel that this administration has proven that It feels Journalists are fair targets in war...
More Journalists have been killed in this war than all of vietnam and we had some risk takers back then.
I found this on google news. Was NYT's David Rosenbaum Assassinated?
Xymphora speculates that
Rosenbaum "might reveal some of the secrets behind the odd relationship
of the Times to the Bush Administration (holding stories of extreme
national importance back for a year, and engaging in discussion of what
news is 'fit to print'), or behind the campaign of lies told by the
Times to help the Bush Administration trick the American people into
the attack on Iraq."
As well, it should be noted that Rosenbaum's final Times piece,
published in late December, revealed that Samuel Alito Jr., Bush's
Supreme Court nominee, had written a 1984 memorandum as a government
lawyer in the Reagan administration "arguing that top officials should
not be subject to lawsuits in any in circumstances, including when they
knowingly violated the law." Alito's memo "offered recommendations
concerning a lawsuit against a former attorney general, John N.
Mitchell, over a wiretap he had authorized in 1970 without a court's
permission," Rosenbaum wrote.
Rosenbaum's article,
co-written with Adam Liptak, prompted the neocon White House to state
"that the issues raised in Mr. Alito's 1984 memorandum were not the
same as those posed by President Bush's orders to the National Security
Agency to eavesdrop on international communications without court
permission." Moreover, the Alito memo set off alarm bells in Congress
and apparently endangers, at least minimally and superficially, his
assured confirmation to the Supreme Court. "Within hours of the release
of the 1984 memorandum, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a
Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Judge Alito that he
intended to question him about warrantless wiretapping during the
judge's confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court next month. And
another Democratic member of the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy
of Massachusetts, said, 'The questions surrounding the Alito nomination
get more troublesome every day,'" Liptak and Rosenbaum wrote.
Is
it possible Rosenbaum was assassinated in order to send a strong
message to the corporate media to tow the line? Of course, the
corporate media has more or less dutifully disseminated the neocon
line--from the so-called "war on terrorism" (rife with lies and fakery)
For instance, consider the
assassination of Steven Vincent, a writer and blogger who made the
deadly mistake of reporting the news in Basra. I wrote last August:
As
the Los Angeles Times reported, one of Vincent's abductors was "an
Interior Ministry employee," and a witness was told it was the "duty"
of the U.S.-installed puppet government to grab people off the street
and murder them. "A few hours later, the journalist's body was found
dumped by a road outside the city, with multiple bullet wounds to the
head. He suffered bruises to his face and shoulder, had been
blindfolded and his hands were tied in front with plastic wire." Smells
like democracy to me.
It's no secret the Interior Ministry is under the control of the CIA, as reported by Knight Ridder
on May 8, 2005. "Right after Saddam's ouster, the U.S.-led coalition
took the top intelligence agents from each of the main opposition
parties and trained them in how to turn raw intelligence into targets
that could be used in operations, said an Iraqi intelligence expert who
participated in the program," Hannah Allam and Warren P. Strobel wrote.
An Iraqi official interviewed by the journalists admitted that
the
CIA recruited agents from SCIRI, Dawa, the two main Kurdish factions,
and two secular Arab parties: the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Accord led by Ayad Allawi, who later
became the interim prime minister. This group, the prototype for an
Iraqi intelligence group that represented Iraq's diversity, became
CMAD: the Collection, Management and Analysis Directorate.
When
the U.S.-led occupation authority ceded power to the semi-sovereign
interim government last June, the official said, CMAD was split, with
roughly half the agents going to the new interior ministry and the rest
to work on military intelligence in the defense ministry. Both
ministries' intelligence departments are led by Kurds, the most
consistently U.S.-friendly group in Iraq, and report to the Iraqi prime
minister.
But an elite corps of CMAD operatives was recruited
into the third and most important Iraqi intelligence agency, the secret
police force known by its Arabic name: the Mukhabarat.... The
Mukhabarat's money comes straight from the CIA.
As Wayne Madsen,
a researcher and former communications security analyst with the NSA in
the 1980s, noted in 2002, the CIA was at that time busy assassinating
political enemies around the world at the behest of the Straussian
neocons. According to Madsen, the CIA enjoys a "new unbridled authority
to assassinate political nuisances to U.S. interests around the world.
In Bush's 'New World Order' ... 'if you're not with us, you're against
us,' [and] social activists and progressive political leaders
everywhere are now within the crosshairs of the CIA and its local
notorious surrogates and warlords. America's traditional concepts of
human rights have been relegated to the dustbin of history in
post-constitutional corporate statist America."
It would be
dangerously naive to believe the CIA does not operate in America (as
its charter supposedly mandates). In October, 2002, the Associated Press
reported that the "CIA is increasing its presence at FBI field offices
by assigning intelligence officers to domestic anti-terrorism teams,"
an excessively worrisome development considering the snoop and murder
agency's track record over the last fifty or so years. Under Operation
CHAOS and Project MERRIMAC, the CIA, according to former CIA undercover
operative Verne Lyon,
"infiltrated agents into domestic groups of all types and activities.
It used its contacts with local police departments and their
intelligence units to pick up its 'police skills' and began in earnest
to pull off burglaries, illegal entries, use of explosives, criminal
frame-ups, shared interrogations, and disinformation."
As
the history of COINTELRPO reveals, the government not only disrupted
and subverted the civil liberties of Americans, but killed more than a
few of them as well. "Among the most remarkable of the COINTELPRO
revelations are those relating to the FBI's attempts to incite gang
warfare and murderous attacks on Black Panther leaders," writes Paul Wolf
(COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story). According to Wolf's research
and "thousands of pages of documentary evidence," the FBI "utilize[d]
private right-wing operatives and terrorists" who conducted
"fire-bombings, burglaries, and shootings" against official enemies. In
the case of the "American Indian Movement in Pine Ridge, South Dakota,
the FBI conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war, complete with
death squads, disappearances and assassinations, recalling Guatemala in
more recent years." It is not encouraging the grand daddy of political
assassination, the CIA, is now soundly ensconced in FBI offices and
local police departments as well.
In 1975, the lid hiding
the activities of the CIA was briefly lifted, revealing all manner of
impropriety. Gerald Ford's Commission on CIA Activities Within the
United States (also known as the Rockefeller Commission) "looked into
all aspects of CIA operations within the United States. Its report,
submitted to the President in June 1975, lists the following
significant areas of investigation: mail intercepts; Intelligence
Community coordination; 'Operation CHAOS' (collecting information on
dissidents); protection of the Agency against threats of violence;
other investigations by the Office of Security; involvement of the CIA
in improper activities for the White House (including Watergate);
domestic activities of the Directorate of Operations; domestic
activities of the Directorate of Science and Technology; CIA
relationships with other federal, state, and local agencies; indices
and files on American citizens; and allegations concerning the
assassination of President Kennedy. The Commission also looked into the
legal authority of the CIA and its internal and external controls."
(See U.S. President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States: Files, [1947-1974] 1975, located at the Gerald R. Ford Library).
Of
course, David Rosenbaum was not a Black Panther nor particularly
radical and worked for a newspaper that was staunchly pro-Bush and gung
ho in its effort to sell the illegal and immoral invasion and
occupation of Iraq to a mostly somnolent American public. Even so,
since the advent of COINTELPRO, the political climate in America, under
the fascist Straussian neocons, has shifted radically to the
reactionary end of the spectrum, parroting in many ways the behavior of
previous fascist and authoritarian regimes.
As Operation
CHAOS reveals, the CIA has never honored its domestic hands-off charter
and it is not a stretch to conclude that it has for some time operated
unfettered in America, using the same murderous tactics it has used and
continues to use elsewhere in the world at the behest of various
presidents and their handlers. In such a highly charged reactionary
climate, it is a distinct possibility the neocons have unleashed death
squads against American journalists, especially journalists who worked
for a corporate media mouthpiece that has recently irked and possibly
embarrassed the neocons by running the NSA snoop story, although it can
be argued as well that the neocons in fact "leaked" the story as a
psychological warfare tactic designed to chill both whistleblowers and
investigative journalists who fear the roving eye of Big Brother,
Straussian-Machiavellian style.