Friday, November 28, 2008

Alissa J. Rubin, the paper's media crack whore

Alissa J. Rubin's tag-line these days is apparently, "If I have only one life to live, let me live it as a Judith Miller." The fates have bowed to her wishes. Bowed to her wishes and then some because if Judy Miller was so frequently referred to as a (media) whore, Alissa J. Rubin is a media crack whore.

So desperate for a fix, she's sold everything she has several times over and stares past you with glassy eyes and a zonked out expression. It results in non-reporting like "Iraq Approves Deal Charting End Of U.S. Role" (New York Times) which she writes with Campbell Robertson. Yes, it's time to lie about the treaty but you don't have to know that to grasp how far from reporting Alissa is. Take for example this alleged piece of 'reporting': "Since then the [Iraqi] government has furiously worked to gain approval of the measure, which goes into effect on January 1, 2009, when the current United Nations mandate the currently governs American troop operations in the country expires."

Media crack whore needs to put down her pipe and the paper needs to stop enabling her. The treay was approved by al-Maliki's cabinet and (yesterday) was voted on by the Parliament. But a reporter (shake Alissa, she's nodding off like the junkie she is) cannot, at this point, say that it "goes into effect on January 1, 2009" because it still has to win the approval of the presidency council.

Was she so desperate for a fix that she didn't grasp that? She can type up that sentence after the council approves it (if they do) but, at this point, that's a prediction, it's not reporting.

She drags her knees across the carpet to offer up that "the vote on Thursday represent a coming of age for the three-year-old Parliament." Really? You know that is just what the Middle East needs, more pompous asshole Westerners determining when they 'mature' and when they don't. Look up Ugly America and you'll see a picture of Alissa J. today (though the photo might not be suitable for all ages).

It's all so much garbage from the person in charge of the paper's Baghdad coverage.

We'll ignore the others on the garbage chain -- there are many. But remember it wasn't just Judith Miller that sold the illegal war. It took an entire network of people willing to pass off stenography as reporting and that's what's taking place today.

They can't even --check your outlet -- note the actual news of how, yesterday, the White House finally released some version of the treaty in English. But noting it might require that they actually have to read it and, as their 'reporting' has repeatedly indicated, they have no desire to do that when they can just ask the administration what to write.

In the world and climate of media whoring, it makes the actual few independent journalists all the more important, appreciated and something to be thankful for. One such person is John Pilger and this is from his "The Corruption That Makes Unpeople Of An Entire Nation" (Information Clearing House):


I went to the Houses of Parliament on 22 October to join a disconsolate group of shivering people who had arrived from a faraway tropical place and were being prevented from entering the Public Gallery to hear their fate. This was not headline news; the BBC reporter seemed almost embarrassed. Crimes of such magnitude are not news when they are ours, and neither is injustice or corruption at the apex of British power.
Lizette Talatte was there, her tiny frail self swallowed by the cavernous stone grey of Westminster Hall. I first saw her in a Colonial Office film from the 1950s which described her homeland, the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as a paradise long settled by people "born and brought up in conditions most tranquil and benign". Lizette was then 14 years old. She remembers the producer saying to her and her friends, "Keep smiling, girls!" When we met in Mauritius, four years ago, she said: "We didn't need to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in Diego Garcia. My great-grandmother was born there, and I made six children there. Maybe only the English can make a film that showed we were an established community, then deny their own evidence and invent the lie that we were transient workers."
During the 1960s and 1970s British governments, Labour and Tory, tricked and expelled the entire population of the Chagos Archipelago, more than 2,000 British citizens, so that Diego Garcia could be given to the United States as the site for a military base. It was an act of mass kidnapping carried out in high secrecy. As unclassified official files now show, Foreign Office officials conspired to lie, coaching each other to "maintain" and "argue" the "fiction" that the Chagossians existed only as a "floating population". On 28 July 1965, a senior Foreign Office official, T C D Jerrom, wrote to the British representative at the United Nations, instructing him to lie to the General Assembly that the Chagos Archipelago was "uninhabited when the United Kingdom government first acquired it". Nine years later, the Ministry of Defence went further, lying that "there is nothing in our files about inhabitants [of the Chagos] or about an evacuation". "To get us out of our homes," Lizette told me, "they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs. The American soldiers who had arrived to build the base backed several of their big vehicles against a brick shed, and hundreds of dogs were rounded up and imprisoned there, and they gassed them through a tube from the trucks' exhaust. You could hear them crying. Then they burned them on a pyre, many still alive."
Lizette and her family were finally forced on to a rusting freighter and made to lie on a cargo of bird fertiliser during a voyage, through stormy seas, to the slums of Port Louis, Mauritius. Within months, she had lost Jollice, aged eight, and Regis, aged ten months. "They died of sadness," she said. "The eight-year-old had seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. The doctor said he could not treat sadness."


If everyone had John Pilger's courage and strength, maybe the Washington Post wouldn't bury the following in today's article about the treaty:

While it sets a clear deadline for an American withdrawal, the pact also allows the Iraqi government to negotiate with the United States to extend the presence of U.S. troops if conditions on the ground are not stable. The pact also allows certain foreign security contractors to be tried under Iraqi law for crimes.

For the record, a treaty that allows for an extension has not set "a clear deadline for an American withdrawal." That's not how it works in the English language. Oh for the days when the only reporters with degrees were English majors. And if everyone had John Pilger's courage and strength, maybe the Los Angeles Times wouldn't bury the following in their print article on the treaty today:

The pact allows for amendments if both sides agree to them. U.S. officials have indicated that they interpret that as permitting an extension, if security conditions in Iraq are deemed too shaky to leave Iraqi forces in charge.
"There is a provision for extension, by agreement of both sides," one U.S. official said.

But both outlets can take comfort in the fact that no one media whores like Alissa J. Contrasted with Alissa J., they're all just a bunch of horny teenagers.

American Freedom Campaign picks the lack of US Congressional input into the treaty as the abuse of the week:


Iraq Parliament to vote on U.S.-Iraq agreement, while Congress has no input
During the Bush administration, the power of the executive branch has been greatly expanded. At times, President Bush has treated Congress like an inferior branch of government – and, to be honest, Congress has done very little to demonstrate it minds being treated that way.
Case in point: On November 17, the New York Times
reported that the U.S. and Iraq had reached an agreement setting the terms of the U.S.’s presence in Iraq after the expiration of the UN mandate on December 31. Although the Bush administration is calling this agreement a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a category of international agreement that does not require congressional approval, it is clear that the agreement goes well beyond a traditional SOFA.
Not surprisingly, the Bush administration has no plans to seek congressional approval. What makes this even worse is that under the Iraqi constitution, this kind of agreement must be approved by the Iraqi Parliament. So we are left with a situation in which the Iraqi Parliament is voting on an agreement that will affect the lives of U.S. soldiers, but Congress has no voice at all in the process. And what is Congress doing about this? Very, very little so far…



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the new york times
campbell robertson
alissa j. rubin
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american freedom campaign