I have been just sick at heart. When a war is gone so lousy that entire families in their homes are murdered, and Marines are so strung out that shooting a three year old in the head appears justified, we know we are reaching rock bottom.
My hope was that the media would finally crack. Unable to hold back the flood, I hoped it would be forced to confront the truth and stop the spinning.
But we live in Bush World: one big corporation. Over the past couple of days, here is what I saw the media do. For me, it seemed that Haditha had merged with the Aspens, that all of it is one big propaganda job.
First, we're treated by Fox to the illuminating news that this horror can be laid at the feet of John Murtha and the Democrats:
Surely if there was any marginally believable way for FOX News to accuse Congressman John Murtha of having personally murdered innocent Iraqis in Haditha for the sake of political gain, Sean Hannity and Michael Reagan would have done so last night (5/31/06) on Hannity & Colmes. They are clearly so desperate to change the subject away from what actually happened in Haditha and the likely cover-up that followed, that they can't say enough bad things about Democrats in general and John Murtha in particular. http://www.newshounds.us/...
OK, if you don't buy the frame that the Democrats are responsible, how about the Iraqis themselves? Brian Unger, standing in for the vacationing Keith Olbermann, interviewed Martin Terrazas, brother of the 20-year old Miguel Terrazas whose death sparked the massacre in Haditha:
UNGER: I asked Martin about what his brother had told him about the insurgency in Iraq and how, in a haunting reminder of the Viet Cong in Vietnam, the enemy in Iraq is often indistinguishable from civilians.
TERRAZAS: They're all dressed the same. They all dress alike. They're all dressed the same. You can't tell if it's a woman or a man. That's what he would tell me. http://video.msn.com/...
They're all dressed the same. You can't tell if it's a man or a woman -- or a three year old little girl wearing plastic sandals and clutching a doll.
Then there was "The Situation" with Tucker Carlson. That's when my bullshit meter went to full tilt. Carlson had a guest by the name of McCann, who wore a polo shirt with the company name Kroll emblazoned on one shoulder. His take was that maybe ... just maybe ... the insurgents did it. Yes, that's it: the insurgents did this, blamed the Marines, and somehow got military brass to do cover-up jujitsu just for the hell of it, as well as pay reparations to surviving relatives.
Who is Kroll? Who is this "expert," invited by a major news network to pontificate on the events at Haditha? Turns out, Kroll is on the administration payroll big time.
Here's some background info, though there's tons more, and now Kroll is a subsidiary of yet another company. It's an ever-changing organization where the same cast of characters move in and out.
In 1993, Maurice Greenberg's American International Group (AIG ->), became co-owner of the "private spy agency", Kroll Associates, as a result of rescuing Kroll from bankruptcy with a cash infusion. Kroll was notorious during the 1980s as the "CIA of Wall Street" due to the prevalence of former CIA, FBI, Scotland Yard, British secret service and British Special Air Service men Kroll employed for corporate espionage in takeover bids, as well as for destabilization of foreign nations. (See Greenberg,Maurice) Maurice Greenberg was deeply involved in chinese trade in the 80s, where Henry Kissinger was one of his representatives. In the China trade, Greenberg became very close to Shaul Eisenberg, the leader of the Asian section of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and agent for the sales of sophisticated military equipment to the Chinese military. Maurice Raymond Greenberg was born in New York City May 4, 1925, the son of Jacob Greenberg and Ada (Rheingold) Greenberg. The young man adopted the nickname "Hank" to make people think of a popular American baseball player with the name, Hank Greenberg. Greenberg served in the U.S. Army in the Korea conflict. He joined the insurance firm, Continental Casualty Co., in 1952. Continental executive J. Milburn Smith recommended Greenberg to the C.V. Starr insurance/spy organization, which made Greenberg its vice president in 1960, its president and CEO in 1967, and its chairman, succeeding Starr, in 1969. From 1988 to 1995, Greenberg was a director of the New York Federal Reserve bank - this branch of the system is the main instrument through which Federal Reserve chiefs and the Bank of England traditionally execute their U.S. political-economic policy. Greenberg was deputy chairman of the New York Fed in 1992 and 1993, and New York Fed chairman in 1994 and 1995. During 1996, while Greenberg was deputy chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (See Cfr, he chaired the CFR task force on intelligence, which published "Making Intelligence Smarter: The future of U.S. Intelligence." This report mostly served to exhibit Greenberg's access to the intelligence community; but he parlayed it into a nomination by Senator Arlen Specter and others, for Greenberg to be Director of the Cia
Greenberg has used his connections to covert intelligence, supranational institutions, private bankers and speculators, and his huge global cash inflow, to shape a unique personal empire. Since 1997, Frank G. Wisner, Jr., has been a board member of Kroll , and is currently Greenberg's Deputy Chairman for External Affairs. Wisner's father was a founder of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, who killed himself over the scandal from his being duped by British-Soviet masterspy Kim Philby. Frank Wisner, Jr., is a director of the George Bush-linked energy giant Enron (a client for whom AIG negotiated payments from Peru over nationalization of Enron operations).
You can also check out this link at The Center for Public Integrity: http://www.publicintegrity.org/.... Note that while dollar values of contracts are listed at on the Center's website, no information has been divulged about just how much Kroll is being paid for its work for our government [http://www.publicintegrity.org/...].
Here are some other links to information about Kroll, a shadowy company of former and future administration officials, CIA agents, FBI staffers, Carlyle and Enron employees, and others:
http://www.caveat.net/...
http://www.yourbbsucks.com/...
http://www.libertyforum.org/...
I wonder how they do it, but I think I know. Karen Hughes, or Stephen Hadley, or John Bolton, or whomever is responsible for stacking the Sunday political shows with neocons and K-Street hacks called Kroll and said "we need to throw another story out there." McCann shows up at NBC studios and is presented as simply "a security expert working in Iraq."
I was digging around for hours online figuring out this Kroll stuff. [I did a long diary that disappeared when I hit "submit" which spooked me out at 4 a.m.] None of it led anywhere comforting.
The media is not going to help deliver the unvarnished truth. If it's not directly a part of the aspens, it's entirely susceptible to the propaganda machine. Guess who went to work recently for Kroll? Judith Miller. No telling what a former New York Times reporter can do for a company that's on the Bushco payroll this big time. You think they don't all "turn together?" Just follow these folks, like Jerome Hauer, who worked at Kroll, was head of HHS (Health & Human Services), and who arranged the security job at the Twin Towers for FBI Agent John O'Neill (right when O'Neill was investigating ENRON's business deals with the Taliban).
This is what my gut tells me: Bush is indeed the CEO president. And we are witnessing daily the work of a very large, very creepy corporation all working to fleece Iraq, and Americans, too. This corporation profits -- whether or not the war goes well or badly. That little girl -- and all the others -- were collateral damage. I'll bet yesterday Karen Hughes, or John Bolton, or whomever is running the propaganda office called McCann and said "Good job, buddy. That was great. We appreciate it. George appreciates it."
Did that little girl die first? Or did she suffer to watch her mother's head blown off before she died? The corporation does not care. After all, it's really the Democrats' fault. And that communist Murtha. Plus, you know how the Iraqis wear pajamas all day. Not to mention that -- and here's an expert from Kroll to tell you -- we probably didn't even do it.