[WCUSP] Fw: Lebanon: A Media Cover-up?

[Libby or Mort Frank]

(This is kind of long and detailed and very informative.  Libby)

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Subject: Lebanon: A Media Cover-up?


> Lebanon: A Media Cover-up?
>
> By Carl Bloice
>
> Black Commentator - June 7, 2007
>
> http://www.blackcommentator.com/232/232_cover_left_margin_lebanon_media_coverup.html
>
>
> On the morning of May 22, 2007, CNN International (not
> to be confused with the network's often horrid domestic
> service), carried what could only be called a
> sensational report. While Lebanese Army forces were
> bombarding the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp
> in Tripoli, the station interviewed veteran journalist
> Seymour Hersh, who sketched a quite different
> background to the fighting than that being offered by
> most of the major media. It seems that Fatah al-Islam,
> the group that touched off the conflict, is not
> primarily a Palestinian organization. Its existence has
> been known for some time and it has been able to
> function freely because officials of Lebanon minority
> government welcomed it as a weapon against the popular
> Lebanese group, Hezbollah.
>
> After viewing the Hersh interview, I phoned a friend to
> tell him about it, and his response was, 'Well, if the
> major papers pick up this report it could really become
> interesting.'
>
> They didn't.
>
> The information in the Hersh interview was cited
> frequently on the internet and in foreign media. A few
> days after the CNN International appearance, Hearst was
> interviewed on the radio show Democracy Now. But the
> major media? Not a mumbling word.
>
> The New York Times totally ignored the Hersh
> revelations - which actually were not new but had been
> contained in a February article in the New Yorker. In
> it, he writes that under the sponsorship of Vice-
> President Dick Cheney, an arrangement was worked out to
> create conflict between militant Sunni groups and
> Shiite Hezbollah.
>
> Actually, the Times editors didn't need Hersh to give
> an accurate picture of Fatah al-Islam. On Mar. 16, the
> paper ran a report by four of its own reporters about
> the group, which included an interview with its leader
> Shaker al-Absi. In it, he is described as 'a fugitive
> Palestinian' who 'has set up operations in a refugee
> camp, here, where he trains fighters and spreads the
> ideology of Al Qaeda.'
>
> Now get this: a man who had been sentenced to death in
> absentia in Jordan for the murder of a U.S. diplomat,
> Laurence Foley, and has arrest warrants out for him in
> three countries, is able to set up shop in Tripoli with
> a band of 150 fighters 'and an arsenal of explosives,
> rockets and even an antiaircraft gun'? Not only that,
> intelligence officials in Beirut told the Times
> reporters 'he has also exploited another source of
> manpower: they estimate he has 50 militants from Saudi
> Arabia and other Arab countries fresh from fighting
> with the insurgency in Iraq.'
>
> Where was the CIA?
>
> The Times interviewed Abssi inside the Nahr al Bared
> refugee camp where he 'seems to be building his
> operation with little interference....despite being on
> terrorism watch lists around the world, he has set
> himself up in a Palestinian refugee camp where, because
> of Lebanese politics, he is largely shielded from the
> government,' The Times reported. And the CIA? And, what
> Lebanese politics? Surely if, as Lebanese government
> officials and the major U.S. media continue to insist,
> he is an agent of neighboring Syria, who would be
> protecting him?
>
> 'And what is the laugh riot and the reason I'm actually
> talking to you guys about this - I usually don't like
> to do interviews unless I have a story in The New
> Yorker - the reason I'm talking about it is because the
> American government keeps on putting out this story
> that Syria is behind the Fatah group, which is just
> beyond belief,' Hersh told Amy Goodman and Juan
> Gonzalez on Democracy Now.  'There's no way - it may be
> possible, but the chances of it are very slight, simply
> because Syria is a very big supporter, obviously, of
> [Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah, and [Syrian President]
> Bashar al-Assad has told me that he's in awe of
> Nasrallah, that he worships at his feet and has great
> respect for him. The idea that the Syrians would be
> sponsoring Sunni jihadist groups whose sole mission are
> to kill the apostates - that is, anybody who doesn't
> support their view, the Wahhabi or Salafist view of
> Sunni religion - that includes the Shia - anybody who
> doesn't believe - support these guys' religions are
> apostates and are killable, that's basically one of the
> crazy aspects of all this, and it's just inconceivable.
> Nothing can be ruled out, but that doesn't make much of
> a case, and I noticed that in the papers today there's
> fewer and fewer references to this. The newspapers in
> America are beginning to wise up, that this can't be -
> this isn't very logical. The White House is putting it
> out hot and heavy as part of the anti-Syria campaign,
> but it's not flying, because it doesn't make sense. So
> there we are. It's another mess.'
>
> By the time the fighting around the Nahr al-Bared camp
> was underway, the information in the paper's March
> report had apparently vanished into thin air, never to
> be cited. In fact, Lebanon itself apparently
> disappeared; as the fighting continued, days went by
> with no reports from there at all. What accounts for
> the Times' - and all the other big Times, and Posts and
> Globes - not mentioning the Hersh report? I have no
> idea. It could be that they just stuck their finger in
> the air and sensed that the wind was blowing strongly
> in the direction of pinning the whole thing on Syria -
> even in the absence of any evidence. However, by
> shutting out the information on Fatah al-Islam's
> origins and possible intentions, the media wittingly or
> unwittingly served to cover-up the nature of current
> Bush administration maneuvering in the Middle East,
> illustrated by Vice-President Cheney's recent foray
> into the region.
>
> 'To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the
> Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to
> reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East,' wrote
> Hersh in The New Yorker.  'In Lebanon, the
> Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia's
> government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations
> that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite
> organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also
> taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and
> its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has
> been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that
> espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to
> America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.'
>
> 'The key players behind the redirection are Vice-
> President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security
> adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to
> Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador),
> Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the
> Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been
> deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former
> and current officials said that the clandestine side
> has been guided by Cheney,' wrote Hersh.
>
> 'American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told
> me that the Siniora government and its allies had
> allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging
> Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa
> Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the
> south,' wrote Hersh. 'These groups, though small, are
> seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their
> ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.'
>
> 'The Lebanese government is opening space for these
> people to come in. It could be very dangerous,' Hersh
> says he was told by Alastair Crooke, a former British
> intelligence agent now with the Conflicts Forum think
> tank in Beirut. Hersh writes, 'Crooke said that one
> Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered
> from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in
> the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon.
> Its membership at the time was less than two hundred.
> ‘I was told that within twenty-four hours they were
> being offered weapons and money by people presenting
> themselves as representatives of the Lebanese
> government's interests - presumably to take on
> Hezbollah,' Crooke said.'
>
> Hersh described Lebanese authorities as quite candid
> about what was going on, one 'senior official' saying,
> 'We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types
> to have a presence here.' he said.
>
> Let's see; have I got this right? The Bush
> Administration colludes with its client government in
> Ethiopia, invades and bombs Somalia on the pretext of
> hunting down Al Qaeda types while at the same time,
> under the watchful eye of the Beirut Embassy and CIA
> station, and with Saudi money, Al Qaeda types are
> setting up bases in Lebanon and battling the Lebanese
> Army. Maybe the editors of the big business media are
> just too confused by all this.
>
> As one watches the shelling of Nahr al-Bared it's hard
> to imagine that the heavy bombardment is intended
> solely to take out a couple hundred poorly armed
> fighters. Whatever the intent, the effect has been to
> wreck great devastation on the impoverished community
> and to turn tens of thousands of Palestinians into
> refugees once more. In response, there have been
> demonstrations at many of the 12 refugee camps across
> the country.
>
> 'If the random shelling does not stop... there will be
> uprisings in all the camps in Lebanon," Sultan Abul
> Aynayn, the head of the Palestinian group Fatah in
> Lebanon, told the AFP news agency.  "No Palestinian or
> Palestinian faction in Lebanon will accept seeing the
> Palestinian people slaughtered in a collective
> punishment, as is happening in Nahr al-Bared."
>
> "They are trying to drag the Palestinians into the
> war," one refugee told the news service Aljazeera.
> "They use the word Fatah, because it is related to
> Palestinians and Islam because there is a campaign
> around the world against Islam." Another said: "We are
> against what Fatah al-Islam is doing, but at the same
> time there are civilians being hurt; there are
> civilians being killed."
>
> 'The dangers of a conflagration that could spread
> across the country are serious,' Professor Charles Harb
> of American University of Beirut wrote in the Guardian
> (UK) May 24. 'The US once nurtured the mujahideen in
> Afghanistan, only to pay the price much later. In the
> dangerous game of sectarian conflict, everyone stands
> to lose.'
>
> [Black Commentator Editorial Board member Carl Bloice
> is a writer in San Francisco, is also one of the
> moderators of portside, is a member of the National
> Coordinating Committee of the Committees of
> Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly
> worked for a healthcare union.]
>
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