AMERICAN VOTERS HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN IRAQ ACCORDING TO CBS’S FORMER CHIEF FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
LARA LOGAN IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPRESSIVE FOREIGN REPORTERS I HAVE SEEN SINCE THE WAR BEGAN.
SHE TELLS IT LIKE IT IS AND DOES NOT BLINK AN EYE WHILE TELLING IT.
I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Monday thru Thursday with the regularity of a sun rise.
Last week, Lara Logan, the Chief Correspondence for CBS appeared and told a story that should cause every American to rise up and march against the four television networks while shooting paint guns at the cars of the network executive as they leave their lavish corporate headquarters in their chauffeured black limousines.
It is not only the CEO’s of the broadcast networks, or the newspaper conglomerates, it is the producers, directors, i.e. the middle executives who labor diligently to keep their jobs and continue to climb the flimsy corporate ladder by agreeing to publish and to edit only those stories guaranteed to earn their corporation’s approval. It is the producers in the field who determines what stories will be aired and what stories will die on the cutting room floor.
It is the editors at the newspapers and the magazines who decide what cover will produce the most newsstand sales, what headlines will draw the biggest readership, and what stories will grab the attention of the readers who have come to read papers by distilling from the headlines what is important to them and what is not.
Lara Logan covered the war in Iraq in the early days as a reporter for CBS and later became its chief foreign correspondence. The biggest hurdle in completing her assignment was to get the “suits” who made the final decision on the stories that would be carried and those that would not. She did everything to persuade her bosses to show the American people the war as it really was being fought. She had to yell, scream, plead and beg to get stories to the American viewers about what was actually happening in a war the people of this country hesitantly agreed to, but later realized that they had been misled, manipulated and conned by their leaders in Washington at the highest levels.
She had to get somebody’s attention because she had a story that she considered necessary for the American viewers to see:
“In 2007, she sent out an email begging for help because her CBS producers wouldn't air a graphic story, that included critical remarks about the U.S. occupation from Iraqi civilians, called "The Battle for Haifa Street."
“Logan’s email, with the one-word subject line of ‘help’, was sent to friends and colleagues imploring them to lobby CBS to highlight that people are interested in seeing the piece. In it, Logan argues that the story is “not too gruesome to air, but rather too important to ignore… It should be seen. And people should know about this.”
Most of the time the important stories were passed over by her producer who was more interested in pleasing the bosses in penthouse suites in New York rather than informing the millions of readers who depended on Lara Logan and others like her to fill in the blanks in their knowledge of this misadventure that more and more appeared to be the product of massive lies fathered by special interests. Iraq is the product of what General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address when he urged the American people to be cognizant of and defensively alert to the “military-industrial complex.”
Bush, our present president, is not only cognizant of these powerful multifarious corporations that make their money off of war, ammunitions, revolutions and, in the United States, missions, real or fanciful, that will require the maximum amount of military related hardware, or to put it another way, squeeze the largest defense budgets out of their bought and paid for Congress to keep the profits flowing into their coffers, he and his buddy Cheney are members of the inner circle.
Lara Logan worked hard for the information she dug up by placing herself and her very life in the deepest and darkest jeopardy. Baghdad is not a safe place. In fact, it may be one of the most dangerous cities in the world ever since the United States bombed this ancient metropolis into shambles. She put it this way:
Five years into the war in Iraq and nearly seven years into the war in Afghanistan, getting news of the conflicts onto television is harder than ever.
“If I were to watch the news that you hear here in the United States, I would just blow my brains out because it would drive me nuts,” Ms. Logan said.
Logan, when interviewed by The New York Times expanded upon her remarks:
“Ms. Logan said she begged for months to be embedded with a group of Navy Seals, and when she came back with the story, a CBS producer said to her, “One guy in uniform looks like any other guy in a uniform.” In the follow-up phone interview, Ms. Logan said the producer no longer worked at CBS. And in both interviews, she emphasized that many journalists at CBS News are pushing for war coverage, specifically citing Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” CBS News won a Peabody Award last week for a “60 Minutes” report about a Marine charged in the killings at Haditha.
On “The Daily Show,” Ms. Logan echoed the comments of other journalists when she said that many Americans seem uninterested in the wars now.
Early on in the conflict, while our newspapers were soft soaping the hard news stories that were coming to them on the wire, Baghdad was in pandemonium. Electricity was available but a few hours a day if at all; gun fire was coming from behind every darkened corner; only a toxic water supply was available to drink, wash the dishes and the clothes; bodies unattended for days at a time were rotting in the streets—these conditions were the foundation in which the bewildered and confused people of Iraq were introduced to this new-fangled democracy.
Equally confounding to the Shiite radicals, the Sunni and Kurdish citizens of this recently conquered Iraq who had waited long-sufferingly for decades to be freed from the vicious dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, was the very real fact that under this new so-called “democratic” regime their lives were ten times worse than they were under the iron fist of Hussein and his unscrupulous and ruthless subordinates.
Even today while General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, report to Congress that things have improved, the statistics demonstrate that in Baghdad there are fewer American soldiers killed by insurgents and militia and equally important there are fewer Iraqis being slaughtered by their opposition forces, the success of the surge is at risk.
Moqtada ad Sadr, the revolutionary cleric who is the head of the Mahdi Army of 60,000 Shiites is truly the one who has made this surge a success. When Bush called for a surge of 30,000 additional combat troops to be deployed to Baghdad, Moqtada al Sadr called upon his army to retreat into the safe confines of their homes until the American military, feeling they had successfully accomplished their goals, pulled out of Iraq or pulled backed into a neighboring country out of harm’s way.
At that point, the Mahdi army would emerge from their hiding places and again take up their objective of committing genocide against their enemies.
The success of the surge is a charade, and our military minds have fallen for it. John McCain visited Iraq three times on one of his luxury tours where he was accompanied by a hundred-man teams of body guards, overhead helicopters and was introduced to the Iraqis who following their script to the last word, came home raving about the great success of the surge.
Lara Logan and many other journalists know that these American visitors are not being allowed to see the real Iraq. These VIP are exposed to the showcase sections of Baghdad under the protection of heavily guarded military escorts with the top generals who act as their tour guides.
In other words, they see only the best of Baghdad. Not only do they see the showplaces that reminds one of model homes in a new development, the VIP’s are permitted to visit only those Iraqi officials the top Commanders know will provide the best impression and present the most excellent portrait of the small portion of Baghdad that has been restored. The really wretched conditions that comprise the rest of the city and most of the remainder of the country are hidden behind the impressive public facade.
Lara Logan has seen the real Iraq, the Iraq behind the “for private viewing only” portion of the city that is especially designed to buildup the achievements of the surge to heights beyond its reality.” In other words, Lara sees behind the veneer and she reports what she sees. However, for some unwarranted reason, some of the producers and other news executives do not want to “tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
In 1896, when the when Ochs Schulzberger family became the owners of the New York Times, the masthead of what was to become one of the most influential newspapers in the country boldly stated their philosophy—“All the News that’s Fit to Print.”
Over the years, their slogan was abbreviated to “All the News that Fits….” by their critics. Today, the motto of most media has been modified to reflect the safe, secure and politically correct position of the corporation that owns and has the ultimate power over the medium, the personnel who make the line decisions and, of course, the best interests of the organization. Informing the readers, listeners or viewers is not taken into consideration when decisions about subject matter are under advisement.
Henry S. Herman, in Z Magazine wrote this about the Ochs-Schulzberger family and its philosophy for operating the newspaper: … The New York Times Company explains the special voting rights that assure family control in terms of the desire for "an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare."
Take a moment and ask yourself how many newspapers in the United States today are “independent…entirely fearless…free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.” Even the contemporary New York Times does not live up to its own high standards.
If we believe that Thomas Jefferson was correct when he bestowed upon newspapers (and media in general today) their importance to the maintenance of a healthy democracy and the citizenries ability to read and its restraint to be duly informed on the significant issues of the day through reading the newspapers and watching news and public affairs programs on television, and, in general, being dedicated to seeking the truth, then they most certainly will insure the future of democracy. Beyond that a knowledgeable and informed electorate will inevitably be free.
That is precisely what the U. S. lacks today—an independent, fearless media that is free of ulterior influence and is unselfishly devoted to the public welfare.
Equally important, we require an informed and knowledgeable electorate. Large percentages of those who vote can either swallow what they read or see and hear, or they pay no attention to any news of the day that would give them at least a smidgeon of information to help them to decide how to vote on issues vital to their personal welfare and the welfare of the nation. Instead they vote for the person with whom they would like to sit down on a bar stool and have a few beers while talking about baseball scores. George W. Bush got elected because he seemed nicer than Al Gore and John Kerry. We have so few voters who do not go, or do not finish college, who do not travel beyond the confines of their home that they have no idea what the real world is all about.
If anybody votes Republicans after what the Bush Administration has done to our constitution, our financial wellbeing, our health care costs, and who have overtly allowed corruption to permeate every branch of government costing the taxpayers billions of dollars, they are at best ignorant and at the worst immoral.
The July 6, 2008 edition of the Chicago Tribune ran an article written by Lisa Anderson entitled So how Dumb are we? Like so many of us the author began her piece by calling her readers attention to Jay Leno’s regularly scheduled installment, Jay Walking during which he walks the streets of L.A. asking you men and women questions about geography, the name of political leaders and major recent events, i.e. what is the capital of …, who is the Secretary of Homeland Security, who is our Secretary of State?
The Tribune interviewed adults ages 18-24 asking questions similar to those that Leno asks. The results were pathetically uninformed. 87% could not find Afghanistan on a map. 75% could not find Israel or Iran.
Like the majority of Americans too many journalists could not find their way to an important story if they fell over its plot in the middle of the street.
The U. S. got into the tragedy of Iraq because we had a press so enchanted with the events of 9/11 and so “patriotic” that they and their bosses dare not come across as disloyal Americans at a time when the nation had just been severely attached.
More importantly, even when the rationale for the build up to our preemptive invasion of Iraq went through more stages than the changing colors of a chameleon being pursued by an aggressive predator.
But not one legitimate news organization sent its investigative reporters to Iraq to find out if Saddam Hussein really was behind 9/11, whether he had financed the al Qaeda, or possessed weapons of mass destruction, or attempted to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger.
For reasons yet to be revealed Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were so determined to take possession of Iraq that they were making up justifications for an invasion faster than a cheetah chasing a zebra. Meanwhile, the people did not know who to believe, did not have a press with sufficient professional curiosity and the desire for the truth to dig for the facts behind Bush’s eager effort to place our young men and women in harm’s way. We needed reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who through their own sweat, blood, and finely tuned instincts worked day and night to find the criminals in the Nixon administration who were behind the Watergate break-in and to bring down a president who himself was a crook.
The Bush administration, particularly in the case of Iraq, has surely been guilty of crimes that a dedicated and assiduous team of reporters devoted to the truth could have and would have broken the story of the century.
More specifically, we need reporters like Lara Logan who has the fortitude, the courage and the strength of mind to see a story and go after it with all of the power she can muster and stay with it until the elusive truth is finally discovered.
10:18:34 PM 
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