So what follows is me attempting to discuss that AFP has yet again got it wrong, how embarrassing they are, then I make a joke/jab about Prashant Rao and his buddy the 'analyst' and go to the analyst's webpage to get a link and see, for the first time, a subheading of paranoid delusion. I thought maybe the banner was a joke. It's not. I found a post where he talks about how he's wanted and hunted.
Jane Arraf and Prashant Rao -- of Al Jazeera, the Christian Science Monitor and AFP -- are re-Tweeting and influenced in their 'reporting' by a crackpot who claims he's being followed by a crime-unit all over the globe and that, among other things, the FBI poses as the CIA. Hence, in honor of Rona's scoop all those years ago, the headline of "A crackpot runs AFP, Al Jazeera and the Christian Science Monitor." It unfolds below, this is just a preface because this was going to be an "I Hate The War" post but instead the Mr. Crazy brought the humor. Join us for his wild ride, here we go now.
AFP's gotta be the dumbest and trashiest in the secretarial pool as evidenced by their latest nonsense. Nouri's gone on state TV (which he controls) to say what's happening in Syria is causing sectarian strife in Iraq. Who knew AFP was also Iraqi state TV?
It must be because all it can do is present his comments in a vacuum, as if to exonerate his own actions and convict the Iraqis.
The most obvious point to make re: Syria is that, if true (it's not), how interesting that Nouri chose not to side with the west on the issue.
What goes on in Syria is not why there is sectarian strife in Iraq.
AFP fails at their job repeatedly acting as a megaphone for whomever's in power. In this case, we're dealing with a paranoid tyrant. AFP sends their stenography out over the wires and, in doing so, does tremendous damage. The press is supposed to be a watchodg not a stenographer.
This is the week that saw Nouri (illegally) kick Kurds out of the Cabinet. For the record, the sectarian strife Nouri's alarmed about at this second is Sunni v. Shi'ite. But it takes a lot of never when you conduct your war on the Kurds to, in the same week, insist others are playing sectarian games. Nouri's always been enabled by a slovenly and unprofessional western press.
In 2010, Nouri agreed to the US-brokered Erbil Agreement.
Now Nouri's a known liar who's failed to keep every promise he's made in his first and second term. For those who missed Nouri's first broken promise, he was out of Iraq at the time, and only a few months into being prime minister, when the US began putting up blast walls and barricades throughout Baghdad. An enraged Nouri insisted they were coming down immediately as soon as he returned to Iraq, he even used the words "promise" in the statement. Of course, Nouri returned and the walls stayed up. Add "being Joshua with the rams horns outside the walls of Jericho" to a list of the many things Nouri has tried to be but instead failed miserably at.
Nouri only agreed to it because he wanted a second term as prime minister and he never planned to honor it. Other political blocs thought it was for real -- because the US government brokered it and vouched for it -- and signed on. If Nouri's having trouble and you're an outlet reporting today, you can't ignore The Erbil Agreement. Since the summer of 2011, Iraqiya (who won in the 2010 elections), the Kurds (Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, KRG President Massoud Barzani, etc) and clric and movement leader Moqtada al-Sadr have been demanding that Nouri stop postponing and implement The Erbil Agreement as he was supposed to at the end of 2010.
Nouri's failure to implement the contract has disenfranchised many. When a people stop believing that their voices are listened to, they find means other than conversation to make their points. What's happening isn't surprising unless you're a stenographer for AFP. You sort of picture Prahsant Rao and Reider Visser lunching on plain yogurt and lamenting how their thunder thighs will look next weekend in their bridesmaids dresses.
By the way, why do Jane Arraf and Prashant Rao continue to dialogue with the idiot Reider Visser? The assertion, at the top of Visser's website, that he's "a Victim of the Human Rights Crimes of the Norwegian Government" should be more than enough to get the quack classified a conspiracy loon.
The man's a loon. Read his September 2012 post for laughs. He's being 'punished' and 'stalked' by the police in his country because . . . he took photos. He didn't understand it was a crime, he writes, before making a xenophobic remark about the Japanese. But Reider was done with his country. He moved to England. But the Norwegian police followed him there as well! And continued to harass him. So he went to the US and, "The Norwegians came after me to the United States as well. Easily recognisable officers of the organised crime unit within the Oslo police even followed me into research libraries where they deliberately sat next to me and made noise in order to disturb my work on Iraq."
Yeah, watch out, in US libraries, for those Norwegian police crime units.
I can't stop laughing. Okay, Reider, you crackpot, you. As a woman, let me explain what you apparently fail to understand. If you can't scare the person away, you get up and move.
If they follow you in the library to another table, you inform the staff -- though I'd leave out nutty talk about the harasser being with a police crime unit -- that this person makes you uncomfortable so you moved and he persists in following you. They will send a security guard over who will explain to the person that the library is a place of research, not harassment, and that if there are any more complaints, the harasser will be asked to leave.
Reider's a lunatic. I just got off the phone with friends in the State Dept because I thought, "You know, you never know." So I asked, "Did the FBI start spying on the State Dept and enter it?" Reider claims that meetings "at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA" were "infiltrated by the FBI on the request of the Norewegians."
He claims "the same Norwegian police officers came after me to Qatar" -- the same officers -- from a crime unit -- traveling over the whole globe -- London, the US and Qatar! -- to follow him. So Reider goes to Jordan to meet with the CIA. Apparently, they weren't letting crackpots have visitor passes at Langley.
So he goes to Jordan to meet with the CIA and offers his services (no one's impressed with his crap but Jane Arraf and Prahsant Rao) only to be rebuffed.
Because the CIA wasn't interested in hiring him on the spot in Jordan, he's "not convinced that the person I met in Amman was really CIA."
Is this for real?
I can't stop laughing and I'm reading sections of it to two State Dept friends I have on conference call right now. They can't stop laughing either.
Okay, deep breath, let's move on. So now Reider goes to the Netherlands and considers going public. But decides not to. Instead, he apparently decided it was better to make a list of the 200 people "who had cooperated criminally with the police against me. Some were even academics and people I formerly considered friends."
It just gets funnier in the comments. Reider wants to convince you that this is true and he's sane and he does it by explaining he "voluntarily met regularly with a psychiatrist" that his parents insisted he see -- even his parents think he's nuts.
Reading his 'analysis' on Iraq over the last few years -- I never knew of him until Prashant Rao couldn't stop Tweeting recommendations to Reider's loony analysis -- it was clear that the elevator never made it to the top.
I still wasn't prepared for that post. All of the tension has left my body. I've got to bookmark that for when I need a really good laugh. It's not often that a dime-store analyst is wanted by a nation's crime-unit or that the crime-unit can get the cooperation of British authorities, Qatar authorities, Jordanian authorities, US authorites and more. Or that the FBI impersonates CIA.
This is the man that Jane Arraf and Prashant Rao listen to?
In the words of the great Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), "Excuse me, I have to call everyone I have ever met, right now."
As Mia Farrow says in Rosemary's Baby, "There are plots against people, aren't there?" Yes, there are. But they usually have a level of plausibility.
Now the shocking ignorance of Jane Arraf and Prashant Rao makes so much more sense: They're disciples of a crackpot.
What a proud moment for their employers.
Reider went public with the crazy in September of last year (I just saw it today, it is hilarious). Here's Jane Arraf retweeting him last month:
-
Interviewed new patriarch of world's Chaldean Catholics Louis Sako re future of
#Iraq Christians - "hope is a fragile thing, like love." -
Significant development for
#Iraq watchers: 3 Iraqiya ministers returned to cabinet today http://www.ikhnews.com/index.php?page=article&id=79271 … -
jane arraf
Reidar Visser
Here's Prashant Rao re-tweeting Reider this week!
-
@prashantrao Interesting: In conflict w govt, IHEC today said 18 May wd be right date for Anbar & Nineveh elections http://ihec.iq/ar/news-archive/4336.html … -
NEW YORK (AP) — Stock market briefly dropped, then recovered, after the
@AP's Twitter account was hacked. (Dow Jones fell some 150 points.) -
Wave of protest-related clashes and attacks in
#Iraq kills 49 people; two Sunni ministers resign http://bit.ly/13swUJX@AFP
Jon Gambrell
W.G. Dunlop
We note that because there's a strong chance those Tweets above and others will disappear -- at the request of their employers. Joel Wing's another fanatic for the 'keen insights' of crackpot Reider. Reider's always wrong about Iraq and his 'analysis' has been laughable from the start. Now we know he's a crackpot and he's influencing the coverage from three outlets -- plus Jane's on PRI's The World, she's on NPR and The NewsHour. Does everyone realize she's the disciple of a crackpot?
It's over, I'm done writing songs about love
There's a war going on
So I'm holding my gun with a strap and a glove
And I'm writing a song about war
And it goes
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Na na na na na na na
I hate the war
Oh oh oh oh
-- "I Hate The War" (written by Greg Goldberg, on The Ballet's Mattachine!)
The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4488.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
iraq
i hate the war
the ballet
