LGF finds The Guardian, always quick to condemn the US on the basis of even rumors of coercive interrogation of captured terrorists, nodding approvingly at coerced (but persuasive!) confession extracted by terrorists themselves.

Blackmailed into a web of treason woven from their own deceit and sexual transgressions, Jefal and his lover faced the justice of the street this week when the 25-year-old Palestinian father was dragged blindfolded into the heart of Balata refugee camp in the West Bank and shot as the worst kind of traitor – a collaborator with Israel. At the execution the mother of one of those he betrayed handed out sweets.

An hour or so later Jefal’s mistress, Wedad Mustafa, a 27-year-old mother of four young children, was hauled from her home by her brothers and killed before a crowd in an act designed to restore the family’s honour.

Public killings of collaborators are not uncommon in the occupied territories. But behind the deaths of Jefal and Wedad lies a tale of both Israeli blackmail, in an operation to stalk one of the most wanted men in Balata, and of two lovers seeking to get rid of an unwanted husband.

Jefal, a member of a respected family in Balata, left an account – coerced but persuasive – of turning traitor. A “confession” video was recorded following interrogation by members of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed Palestinian group responsible for hundreds of deaths in suicide bombings and other attacks and which dominates the refugee camp next to Nablus.

Would that there were only some way to separate our entire treasonous liberal clerisy from the rest of the population of the Western democracies, step aside, and let the Islamofascists have them, to deal with as they choose.

Victor Davis Hanson imagines WWII, as reported in the manner of today’s American MSM.

The Present Debacle

May 21, 1945 — After the debacles of February and March at Iwo Jima, and now the ongoing quagmire on Okinawa, we are asked to accept recent losses that are reaching 20,000 dead brave American soldiers and yet another 50,000 wounded in these near criminally incompetent campaigns euphemistically dubbed “island hopping.”

Meanwhile, we are no closer to victory over Japan. Instead, we are hearing of secret plans of invasion of the Japanese mainland slated for 1946 or even 1947 that may well make Okinawa seem like a cake walk and cost us a million casualties and perhaps involve a half-century of occupation. The extent of the current Kamikaze threat, once written off as the work of a “bunch of dead-enders,” was totally unforeseen, even though such suicidal zealots are in the process of inflicting the worst casualties on the U.S. Navy in its entire history.

Worse still, our sources in the intelligence community speak of a billion-dollar boondoggle now underway in the American southwest. This improbable “super-weapon” (with the patently absurd name “Manhattan Project” — in the midst of a desert no less!) promises in one fell swoop to erase our mistakes and give us instant deliverance from our blunders — no concern, of course, for the thousands of innocents who would be vaporized if such a monstrous fantasy bomb were ever actually to work.

We are only now coming off even more terrible losses in Europe, after being surprised by a supposedly defeated enemy in the Ardennes where another 20,000 Americans were killed and another 60,000 wounded or missing — again, due to our continued strategic incompetence and abject intelligence failures. Macabre reports of American bazooka shells bouncing off German Tiger tanks and our Shermans ablaze like Ronson lighters have only now come to light as we plow the Belgium countryside for yet another new American war cemetery. Tragically, this is not the first, but the fourth year of this war, when victory rather than endless bloodshed has been long promised.

A number of issues arise. Why is Henry Stimson (“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”) still Secretary of War? After the debacles at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines tragedy, the Kasserine Pass disaster, the unforeseen bocage in Normandy, the Falaise Gap escape, the Anzio mess, the fatal detour to Rome, the surprise at the Bulge, the bloodbath at Tarawa, and now the Iwo Jima and Okinawa nightmares, is not five years of his incompetence and arrogance enough? A number of our retired generals seems to agree, who have recently bravely come forward to remind us that Sec. Stimson long ago tried to dismantle key elements of our intelligence services, attempted to curtail the operational command of our Army Air Corps generals in conducting bombings of Europe, and has on more than one occasion intervened to remove targets from Gen. LeMay’s campaign over Japan.

As we see thousands of Americans dying and our enemies still in power after four years of war, it is also legitimate to question the stewardship of Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall. The Sherman tank tragedy, the daylight bombing fiasco, the absence of even minimally suitable anti-tank weapons and torpedoes — all these lapses came on his watch, and the man at the top must take full responsibility for mistakes that have now cost thousands of American lives. Indeed, it is not just that America has worse tanks and guns than our German enemies, but they are inferior even to the rockets and armor of our Soviet allies. The recent publication of “The Sherman Tank Scandal” follows other revelations published in “Asleep at the Philippines,” “The Flight of Gen. MacArthur,” “Gen. Patton and the Atrocities on Sicily,” “Do Americans Execute P.O.Ws?” “Torture on Guadalcanal,” “Incinerating Women and Children?” and “Civilian Massacres in Germany” — publications in their totality that suggest a military out of control as often as it is incompetent…

Recently we have learned that President Roosevelt, the former law school dropout, once again has violated basic freedoms enshrined in our Constitution. Supposed German suspects were subject to military tribunals, tried in secret, and then executed. Tens of thousands of Italians, Germans, and Japanese war-captives are detained in hundreds of American prison compounds, without charges and often in secret. How many were truly captured in uniform, and under what conditions, is never disclosed.

Unfortunately this violation of American values comes not in isolation, but on the heels of the unlawful internment of thousands of American citizens in Western concentration camps, the cover-up of the Cobra disaster in Normandy and the criminally negligent killing of General McNair, and still more rumors that hundreds of American soldiers perished in secret in training exercises on the eve of the Normandy invasion. Yet, the American people to this day have no precise idea how many of their enlisted men and officers have been killed, much less where they perished or how.

Indeed, what little we know comes to light only due to the brave efforts of a few unnamed operatives in the Office of Strategic Services who have in secret provided such information concerning patently illegal activities to the responsible news organizations.

Instapunk explains how the MSM did it.

while the bloggers were fighting their various and diverse battles in the name of truth, justice, and common sense, the MSM ocean was harnessing its entire immensity on just one story, told an infinite number of times, in every possible inflection, from every direction, and with the deadly persistent accuracy of a dripping tap: George W. Bush is no good.

It doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t have to be fair, it doesn’t have to be consistent in its terms. All that matters is that it is repeated with uniform constancy: drip, drip, drip. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Change the headlines, seem to change the subject. Abu Ghraib. European disdain. Tom Delay. Katrina. Deficits. Valerie Plame. Gas prices. Karl Rove. Death in Iraq. Angry mothers. NSA wiretaps. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the lede is always the same. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. George W. Bush is no good. Forget the good news, bury the accomplishments or ignore them altogether. Drip, drip, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good, George W. Bush is no good.

It took the MSM three years to bring George W. Bush’s approval ratings down from their post 9/11 high to 52 percent on election day 2004. It’s taken them just 18 months [corr. per Tim] to bring him down another 20 to 25 points.

He’s perfectly right. Bush survived well enough until the Hurricane Katrina gave the MSM what it needed, a spectacular disaster story, in which exaggerations and distortions could be disseminated day after day after day with no possibility of factual correction. Bush might have prevented their success with a better public relations campaign, but he doesn’t do very much of that sort of thing or do it all that well.

Varifrank has been following news reports and listening to Congressional democrats, and is able to sum up the rules.

Don’t fight before Ramadan as it interrupts the UN sponsored peace process.

Don’t fight during Ramadan because it shows disrespect to an honored people and a great religion.

Don’t fight after Ramadan since so many civilians will simply be caught in the potential crossfire.

And so on.

Jack Kelly observes:

You’ve got to hand it to President Bush

For a pretty decent, straightforward guy, he sure has a knack for making enemies. His job approval rating is in the mid-30s, Nixon-during-Watergate levels. This is remarkable, considering that:

(1) The economy is in better shape than in all but a few months of the Clinton presidency, still fondly described by the news media as a time of milk and honey.

(2) There has been no successful terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11, contrary to the prediction of most terrorism “experts,” including yours truly.

(3) Iraq’s insurgency has pretty much been defeated. Al Qaida operatives there are being ratted out or hunted down by their erstwhile allies, and are looking to relocate.

(4) The president has appointed to the Supreme Court to justices who more than 60 percent of the American people believe to be superbly qualified.

Despite all this (at least apparent) success, President Bush is less popular than was Jimmy Carter, who presided over stagflation and gas lines at home and humiliation abroad.

Much of this is due to the utterly mendacious coverage by the news media of the war in Iraq. Most Americans think we’re losing a war we’re clearly winning.

I think Mr. Kelly is basically right, but overlooks the September miracle last year of the MSM’s turning public opinion fatally against this administration on the basis of a series of false reports revolving around Hurricane Katrina.

We in the Blogosphere took the success of blog reporting in exploding the fabricated CBS National Guard story as signalling a new era, in which MSM propaganda could readily be dissipated by the conservative blogosphere. Hurricane Katrina and Iraq War coverage both prove that incessant MSM broadcasting of a barrage of negative stories is still quite effective at molding public perception and opinion in a fashion immune to factual correction.

A day-after-day avalanche of mendacious Goliaths has been proven to be able to shout down Mr. Reynold’s “Army of Davids.”

I spend too much time every day arguing politics with college classmates via email. Reading some of today’s messages, I feel moved to ask: what is “liberalism,” really?

One could try to identify its ideological components, but it can be wildly inconsistent, and I think it is both more economical and more accurate simply to identify “liberalism” as identical to the consensus of the American elite, based upon the perspectives and assumptions, and the values and agenda, articulated by its own representatives in the establishment media.

Where the Right and the Left really disagree, I would contend, is on the credence, loyalty, and respect due to that consensus.

Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, and prominent public spokesman of the Pouting Spooks Against the Bush Administration, went postal in the Baltimore Sun yesterday, denouncing George W. Bush as a Jacobin and a revolutionary, precisely because Bush has spurned the consensus of the elect.

I think Wilkerson’s editorial was ideationally confused and stylistically turgid, but his piece does, nonetheless, still eloquently and accurately express his own indignation, and that of his class, at the rejection by George W. Bush (and an alternative American leadership) of the intellectual consensus (and the organic process continually manufacturing it) on which both the very identity, and the basic mechanisms of perceiving reality, of the American establishment are based.

Wilkerson is right to feel that Bush and his associates have dared to enter the temple and lain violent hands upon the idols.

Wilkerson emoting earlier on the same theme.

MacRanger, I think, calls it right. The exposure of Mary O. McCarthy is just the beginning. The MSM is wasting all the ink it’s spilling this morning trying to establish a whistleblower defense. Ms. McCarthy is probably not going to jail. She has most likely already made a deal. It’s her associates in the Pouting Spooks Conspiracy who will be going up the river, with her testifyng against them.

..Mary’s discovery definitely came as a part of a tip, most likely on the promise of immunity, which I find most intriguing and amusing. Imagine a mole on the inside who is now spilling the beans on those leakers – such as Mary – who have been leaking stories over the last three years. Its going to be fun to watch the rats devour one another to save their own hides.

As we all know – or should know – since before and especially during the 2004 election cycle leaks were coming out at a fast and furious pace. It was if the State Department and the CIA had suddenly become a 24 hour news service, leaking information specifically designed to undermine the Bush administration, the war effort, and ulitmately was intended to defeat the President’s reelection effort.

We now know that McCarthy was a hire of Sandy Burglar, a Clintonista, and a heavy contributor to failed Presidential candidate John Kerry. In addition she worked out of the IG’s office of the CIA who would have directly worked on the referral to the JD of the Valerie Plame Game. As the Agency is a small sorority, I immediately wonder just how close she was and is to Valerie Plame.

As I noted from the beginning of the Plame Game, the story was never about Joe Wilson’s boondoggle to Niger per-se, but about an elaborate coup by a group of rogue ops to undermine the President of the United States in war time. This is much more than just the leak of CIA prisons – a story which in itself is false, but about the oldest type of war waged and which the CIA is expert at. That being toppling Governments by misinformation propaganda designed to sow discord among the people. Thus the Plame Game was and continues to be a ruse – a paper tiger- a fact that Fitzgerald and his bungling prosecution continually reminds us of.

Wretchard also puts the situation right now into its true perspective.

..look at the picture that is usually trumpeted in the popular press twenty four hours a day, which normally consists of the same stories — ‘today two American soldiers died, bring the number of deaths to’ or ‘newly discovered memos show that in the days leading up to the war’ or ‘defects in body armor have shown that’ — with variations for dates. It is almost intentionally repetitive, designed to convey a narrative that has no sense; no beginning; no end…

..Zarqawi understood that he would get nowhere trying to fight the USA, especially when the new Iraqi Army came on line. He knew that if he was to win he had to play a game where the odds were more in his favor. But Jill Carroll and the MSM pretend not to understand that the Sunni insurgency has lost the campaign. They think Zarqawi is still playing the same old game. The game he gave up. So they continue to say things like: “I think it makes it very clear, it makes very clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones who will win in the end in this war, I think it makes very clear that even with thousands of troops and airplanes and tanks and guns that that doesn’t mean anything here on the ground in Iraq as it shows over time, maybe how many months over time or however (sic) months are left in the occupation that it’s pretty clear that the Mujahedeen are the ones that will have the victory left at the end of the day.”

Does anyone actually think that the Mujahedeen (Sunni insurgency) is going to be able to expel the US Armed Forces and reimpose their former dominion over the Kurds and the Shi’as? No? but people say it all the time though they don’t stop to think what it means. Jill Carroll apparently believes it….

..A realistic assessment should include what has already been gained and what is left to gain. Some people think the Belmont Club is guilty of unwonted optimism simply because it is willing to accept what Zarqawi has practically admitted: that the Sunni insurgency is militarily beaten — and that the struggle for the political outcome is now underway. And some readers may believe that I’ve gone all “gloomy” because I think the political outcome still hangs in the balance. But that is nothing more than stating a fact. Yet the essential difference is this: it’s in context. Those who have done some rock climbing know that while it is important to grope for the next handhold along the line of climb it is equally important to remember the footholds you have already won. Forget where you are standing and you are lost. Unfortunately, much of the regular media coverage is almost designed to conceal where where we are standing and where we have to go. There is no context, as Bill Roggio once put it on a television interview. For most casual listeners of the news the US is trapped in a featureless and starchy soup, with no beginning or end. The War on Terror becomes portrayed as a shapeless shroud from which it is imperative to escape at all costs.

And that’s sad because as Baron von Richthofen said, “Those who are afraid to take the next step will have wasted their entire previous journey.”

There is a regular Intel source who publishes on Free Republic as “Fedora.” Fedora’s latest offering is a partial translation of one of the captured Iraqi documents, which amusingly testifies to the Baathist regime’s recognition of CNN as a sympathetic venue for the distribution of false information injurious to the US-led Coalition cause. Fedora writes:

In this Iraqi document ISGQ 2004-00224003 dated February 7 2001, there was a discussion in upper echelon of the Iraqi intelligence about mass graves in Southern Iraq and how to shift the blame to the Coalition forces and make it look like these mass graves as the results massacres committed by the Coalition forces back in 1991 during Desert Storm Operation. What is also interesting about this document is that it mentions how to give the priority of covering the story to CNN so it will have an effect on the international arena as the documents says.

I did a partial translation of the document highlight the statement related to CNN in bold letters in the body of the translation. The rest of this 3 pages document that I did not translate will go into further deception on how to make big military funerals for the people in the mass graves though out all the Iraq provinces and how high level state officials will participate in these funerals.

Beginning of the Partial Translation

The Republic of Iraq

The Intelligence Apparatus

Date: 7/2/2001

No 1687

In the Name of God the Merciful the Most Compassionate

Secret

To the respectful Mr. Director of the Fourth Directory

Your letter secret and immediate numbered B 264 on 2/4/2001

1. No information is available to us about the Mass Graves in the Southern Region.

2.We see to achieve the observation the following matters:

A. Inspect the graves to confirm the existence of Nuclear Radiations.

B. Were they buried alive or their death was by suffocation.

C. Are they military personnel or civilians.

D. Are there tombstones that carry the names of the martyrs

E. Identify accurate marks and proofs of the graves and the possibility to reach it quickly and identify it.

3. We do not agree that the declaration about it through a direct Iraqi media in the first stage at least and not to cause public and party reaction so that the subject will take as a priority an international interest, and we should work on the following direction during this stage:

A. Leak the news through reliable sources.. News agencies or Satellite stations.. and that there is confusion, and indications from the members of the Coalition forces about the existence of mass graves civilians and military personnel in the South of Iraq.

B. The attempt to search for soldiers from the Coalition forces in a serious way to mention these truth through the agencies.

(1-3)

C. Ask some of the friendly countries with good technology to find these graves and for sure it will be asked from some news agencies in these countries to humanly participate in this effort and in case it is discovered there will be media reactions internationally and foreign and this media must be given a big space to repeat it and leak it to take its natural form of influence on the countries that made this bad deed and give it to the international general opinion.

D. Not to dig these grave by the Iraqi side… and it is possible to make a dialogue with the CNN channel to give them a priority on this subject to have an influence over the international arena and it will be accepted more than the Iraqi media.

End of Partial Translation

Alex Nunez details a sudden outbreak of MSM introspection:

Three years’ worth of negative stories from Iraq, filed without even a cursory attempt to show balance, have finally come back to haunt the MSM. The media people see this, and that’s why they’re trying to address the matter now by talking about the “perception” of bias on their part. That they’re talking about it at all shows just how worried they are.

The narcissists in the elite media are coming to realize, finally, that the average American no longer sees them as credible providers of information, and they can’t handle it. After all, what good are their monolithic soapboxes if people simply tune out what they’re saying from them?

——————————————
Hat tip to PJM.

The Washington Post tries a little pre-emption in tomorrow’s edition:

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI’s Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

Numerous employees at the CIA, FBI, Justice Department and other agencies also have received letters from Justice prohibiting them from discussing even unclassified issues related to the NSA program, according to sources familiar with the notices. Some GOP lawmakers are also considering whether to approve tougher penalties for leaking.

In a little-noticed case in California, FBI agents from Los Angeles have already contacted reporters at the Sacramento Bee about stories published in July that were based on sealed court documents related to a terrorism case in Lodi, according to the newspaper.

Some media watchers, lawyers and editors say that, taken together, the incidents represent perhaps the most extensive and overt campaign against leaks in a generation, and that they have worsened the already-tense relationship between mainstream news.

Fiat justitia, ruat coelum.[Let justice be done, though the Heavens fall.]

Wretchard reflects on Tim Blair‘s observation that the Danish cartoons were more widely published in Islamic countries than in Canada, New Zealand or Australia, and went unpublished by a single major US daily, and concludes that the media’s self-censorship wasn’t really occasioned by fear of Islamic violence.

I think the real reason for the reluctance among Anglospheric publications to print the Danish cartoons was less timidity than the fear of tacitly repudiating the underlying assumption of the President Bush’s War on Terror, that the West is not at war with Islam but only with a small group of extremists who have corrupted “the religion of peace”. The Danish cartoons threatened to convert this limited war into a more general confrontation between the value systems of the West and Islam…

Once the Danish cartoon crisis threatened to knock the props out from under President Bush’s limited war on Islamic renegades and escalate it to a “clash of civilizations” the barrenness of the Lefist intellectual cupboard became obvious even to themselves. There was no recipe to deal with this contingency. A “clash of civilizations” would pull matters from their grasp precisely because they refused to touch it in the first place. They could only continue to pretend Islamism didn’t exist; and so they thrust their heads into the sand even further. The Danish cartoons? What cartoons?