AIM Report: A Con Job from Al-Jazeera’s Riz Khan - September B
AIM Report | September 18, 2006
No serious observer of the global media disputes the fact that Al-Jazeera has had an anti-American and anti-Israel bias and has been encouraging jihad against the West.
A CON JOB FROM AL-JAZEERA'S RIZ KHAN
Riz Khan of Al-Jazeera International made a dramatic appearance in Washington, D.C. on September 6, assuring an influential group presided over by conservative activist Grover Norquist that America has nothing to fear from the new channel being launched by the Arab regime of Qatar.
Accuracy in Media disagrees.
If the United States wants to win the war against Islamic terrorism, Khan and his Arab backers should be told in no uncertain terms that an English-language affiliate of Osama bin Laden's favorite TV channel is not welcome on U.S. cable and satellite systems.
The stakes are high: If Al-Jazeera International gets access to American households, it is probable, if not inevitable, that we will lose the war, not only in Iraq but worldwide. Such a channel could not only further tilt global media coverage against the U.S. position in the world, but could incite Arabs and Muslims inside the U.S. to engage in jihad and commit terrorist acts. That is exactly what the Arabic version has done in Iraq, and that is why it is banned by the new democratic government there.
Khan attended the conservative meeting in the wake of very powerful speeches by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the tremendous stakes in this war. Both say we are facing an enemy as determined as the fascists and Nazis of World War II. And both emphasized how al Qaeda uses the media and the Internet against our side.
Yet there was Khan, a former CNN journalist who wrote a fawning biography of the Saudi billionaire Prince Alaweed bin Talal, passing out a flier claiming that Al-Jazeera International will simply offer a "fresh perspective on global news and current affairs."
Whitewash
His flier also made reference to his sister channel, the Arabic Al-Jazeera. Its "ground-breaking work" was said to have "changed the face of news within the Middle East and brought fair and free journalism to the region…" The flier said that Al-Jazeera International is part of "a growing network focused on accurate, impartial and fair reporting." The words "accurate, impartial and fair reporting" were highlighted in bold.
If Riz Khan really believes this, then Al-Jazeera International is the danger we at AIM have been warning about, and Khan and perhaps his cohorts, David Frost and Dave Marash, are parrots of a company line. If Khan expects us to believe that rubbish about being fair and accurate, then he must think we are fools.
Al-Jazeera began in 1996, the same year bin Laden declared war on America. They have been working together ever since. In addition to the numerous al-Qaeda videos and statements aired by the channel, its anchors openly refer to suicide bombers as "martyrs" for the cause. In other words, it actively recruits Muslims to kill Americans and Israelis. Being a terrorist channel, however, does have its advantages. Al-Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda was singled out to obtain exclusive interviews with the al-Qaeda architects of 9/11, who wanted credit for killing almost 3,000 Americans. Such terrorist "exclusives" are what Al-Jazeera specializes in.
Terrorist Arrests
However, this can get them in trouble. One Al-Jazeera employee is currently at Guantanamo Bay, facing charges of collaborating with al Qaeda and the Taliban, and a former Al-Jazeera Afghanistan correspondent is in prison in Spain, having been convicted of being an agent of al Qaeda. His legal bills continue to be paid by Al-Jazeera, which is funded by the emir of Qatar, supposedly a friend of America. On the U.N. Security Council recently, Qatar was the only member of the 15-member body voting not to require Iran to stop producing nuclear weapons. Some friend.
The channel's first managing director was booted after evidence emerged that he was a lackey of the Iraqi dictator's son Uday Hussein. Captured film footage shows him acting like a lapdog of the notorious murderer and sadist. All of this has been well-documented in the AIM DVD, "Terror Television," which also shows captured terrorists saying they came to kill Americans in Iraq because of what they saw on Al-Jazeera.
No serious observer of the global media disputes the fact that Al-Jazeera has had an anti-American and anti-Israel bias and has been encouraging jihad against the West. The debate has been over what kind of approach the U.S. should take toward it. Bombing the channel's headquarters in Qatar has obviously been ruled out because American troops are stationed there, and U.S. corporations have offices in the country and conduct extensive commercial relations with the regime. The founding members of the U.S.-Qatar Business Council include major U.S. oil companies as well as Al-Jazeera. But the U.S. presence doesn't mean the regime is a friend of the U.S. After all, Saudi Arabia was a host to U.S. troops while al Qaeda was active there and producing most of the 9/11 hijackers.
While Rumsfeld used to regularly denounce Al-Jazeera, things seemed to change when Karen Hughes, an old friend of the President, was put in charge of "public diplomacy" at the State Department. She has been encouraging U.S. officials to go on the channel, as if they can persuade the Arab and Muslim audience that America wants to be their friend. That's hard to do when the channel repeatedly emphasizes the blood and carnage that the U.S. is said to have brought to Iraq and other places around the world. The Hughes plan of being nice to Al-Jazeera is doomed to fail.
The Arabic Al-Jazeera has to be dealt with if America wants to win this war, but the immediate problem is to make sure the threat doesn't get worse with Al-Jazeera International taking a place alongside CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC on your cable or satellite system.
Deception
If Khan had washed his hands of the Arabic channel, his pitch for the English-language version might have been worth listening to. But the failure to account for the Arabic channel's well-documented relationship with al Qaeda means that Khan simply does not want to be honest with his potential audience. At least Dave Marash was honest when he admitted to the New York Sun that the channel had inspired those who want to kill us. "Undoubtedly, some Al-Jazeera programs may have inspired some social misfits to undertake terrorism," he said.
Khan's deceptive public relations campaign can only mean that Al-Jazeera International is as potentially dangerous as its sister channel. That always figured to be the case, since they are funded by the same Arab government, which had connections to al Qaeda before 9/11, and personnel between the channels overlaps.
One conservative who heard Khan's sales pitch in D.C. said that he came across as "slick"—perhaps as slick as the Arab petro-dollars paying his salary and the cost of the new network, which is said to be reaching a staggering $1 billion. The sheer cost means that the channel, despite reluctance by cable and satellite systems to carry it, could buy its way into the American media market.
Congress Must Act
Strangely, however, while Congress erupted in anger over an Arab-owned firm taking over some American ports, the prospect of an Arab-financed "news" channel directly broadcasting al-Qaeda propaganda into American homes has failed to make it on the list of top congressional priorities. But if the analogy to World War II is appropriate, we should take some time to consider that America's "greatest generation" would never have tolerated the prospect of fascist and Nazi agents and sympathizers getting access to America's airwaves. That would have been unthinkable, even treasonous. Americans knew that we had to win in the media and on the battlefield and that the enemy could not be permitted to use our own media against us.
After several delays, the channel is planning to launch in November.
MEDIA CAUGHT LYING ABOUT "SECRET PRISONS"
Led by the Associated Press (AP), the media have falsely reported that President Bush acknowledged the existence of CIA "secret prisons" in a September 6 speech. News flash! The President never used the term in the speech.
Type in the words "secret prisons" in the Google search engine for current news and see how many hits you get in connection with the Bush speech. Some say Bush "admitted" or "confirmed" the existence of "secret prisons." But notice that Bush's acknowledgement, admission, or confirmation is never presented in quotation marks. That's the tip-off that he didn't say what the media claim he said. Our media lied.
Telling The Truth
Leave it to Bob Schieffer, the former CBS Evening News anchorman, to state the truth as he was being interviewed about the speech by new anchor Katie Couric on the September 6 broadcast. "He never used the term 'prison,'" said Schieffer.
But if the President didn't use the word, then how can the media report that he did so? It's called "interpretive reporting." It's been taught in journalism classes for decades.
Left-wing blogs, even some supposedly devoted to being media watchdogs, cited the erroneous news accounts of the Bush speech as "proof" that "secret prisons" existed. They didn't bother to check the actual text.
All of this, however, is secondary to the fact that a secret CIA program to interrogate terrorists, including the architects of 9/11, did exist and should never have been the subject of stories in the media in the first place. But because of the exaggerated media coverage and attention given to the story, as well as a flawed Supreme Court decision about how to handle terrorists, the architects of 9/11 have now been transferred to the Guantanamo detention facility, once described by Amnesty International as the "gulag of our times" but which now serves Big Macs and offers first-class medical and dental care.
The distortions about what Bush said should be a lesson to news consumers to not accept what they see, read, or hear in the major media. Another lesson is not to trust the liberal blogs which accept anything negative about Bush they can find in that same media.
For the record, the President acknowledged that the CIA has maintained an interrogation "program" in which "a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States…" Bush said, "This group includes individuals believed to be the key architects of the September the 11th attacks, and attacks on the USS Cole, an operative involved in the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and individuals involved in other attacks that have taken the lives of innocent civilians across the world. These are dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for new attacks. The security of our nation and the lives of our citizens depend on our ability to learn what these terrorists know." He referred to them having been "held in CIA custody."
Bush added, "Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged. Doing so would provide our enemies with information they could use to take retribution against our allies and harm our country."
Those details are precisely what Dana Priest of the Washington Post was trying to expose in her November 2, 2005, Pulitzer Prize-winning story alleging that the "secret prisons" existed. Priest was attacked on various grounds for that story. Some suggested she should never have revealed the existence of such a program. AIM contended, and still does, that the story was essentially false, and that her prize should be revoked on that basis.
In addition to using the phrase "secret prisons," Priest's tabloid treatment of the controversy included calling it a "covert prison system," a "hidden global internment network," and a "secret detention system." At the request of the administration, the Post agreed to delete certain country names from her article, but she retained the rhetoric in the very first paragraph about some al-Qaeda captives being kept at "a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe."
Left-wing Bent
That phrase provided an important insight into her motivation. She was trying to compare U.S. treatment of terrorists to Soviet mistreatment of dissidents. In fact, when Priest later gave an interview on the subject, she did not dispute the use of the term "secret gulags" in referring to the "secret prisons."
What Priest did was pull a Dick Durbin, the liberal Illinois senator who earlier, in June 2005, had compared Guantanamo to the Soviet gulags and suggested that U.S. personnel interrogating suspected terrorists were acting like Communists, Nazis and Pol Pot. While Durbin eventually apologized for his remarks, Priest won an award for her story, which caused European leftists to go crazy with investigations of the CIA.
Some might say that it doesn't matter whether the terrorists were held at prisons, detention facilities, camps, or whatever. But it does matter if accuracy in the media is to be upheld and for Priest to retain her Pulitzer. This Dick Durbin-style of journalism is a disgrace.
The word "prison" in the American context suggests something like Alcatraz, the federal penitentiary with guards and towers that was closed in 1963. It held as many as 300 inmates. The number of detainees in the "secret prison" system, according to the Post itself, was about 100 "at various times," meaning the figure was usually much lower, and only 14, now transferred to Guantanamo, had remained. Bush referred to a "small number" in the CIA program. So how big of a "global internment network" was this anyway? A European politician investigating the matter told a Washington news conference earlier this year that he had heard reports that some of the terrorists may have been held in hotels or private homes.
The Facts
The basic disclosures from Bush were not a surprise. The issue wasn't whether CIA flights with suspected terrorists had landed in some foreign countries and that terrorists were detained on foreign soil. The issue is whether these constituted some "network" of "secret prisons" that rivaled those of the Soviet era. Priest exaggerated the program into something it was not, in order to kill it.
One current factor in the distorted coverage was the desire to make Bush look bad by suggesting he has finally come clean about a controversial counter-terrorist program. Another factor was to salvage the reputation of Dana Priest herself, whose coverage had come under searing attack. Priest became an embattled reporter whose marriage to a prominent anti-Bush activist, and alleged use of a pro-John Kerry fired CIA officer named Mary McCarthy as a source, had become a matter of public interest. It is still not clear what role that rogue elements in the CIA played in her "scoop." Did they feed Priest disinformation? Or did she get the story wrong on her own?
If Priest had simply reported that the CIA was holding a few terrorists and moving them around the globe, the reaction would have been ho-hum. She would have been lucky to have gotten the story on page 15. But when the issue became "secret prisons" like the Soviet gulags, that got page-one treatment and helped to create an international controversy. Priest, in short, had created a stink. And that's apparently what Pulitzers are for. But it's the story that stinks.
Lies From AP
Another stinker was the first story AIM noticed erroneously reporting that Bush had "acknowledged Wednesday the existence of previous secret CIA prisons." It was written by Associated Press writer Nedra Pickler and AIM editor Cliff Kincaid called to ask about her claim. "My story speaks for itself," she said. "I don't want to do any interviews on what went into writing the story." This exchange then ensued:
Kincaid: I'm asking you where the term prisons came from because it's not in the speech. The term secret prisons just isn't there.
Pickler: I don't want to discuss this any further but if you want to talk to some of our spokespeople you can but this isn't something I do—conduct interviews about what's in my stories.
Kincaid: Can you just tell me where the term secret prisons came from in his speech? That's all.
Pickler: I don't want to discuss how my stories were written. No.
Kincaid: Well, your story is wrong. I think you ought to have the integrity to admit it. He did not use the term secret prisons. Why don't you just report the facts? That's all I'm asking you."
Pickler: (Silence. Hangs up the phone).
The truth will, of course, never catch up with the original erroneous reports, and our suspicion as the story developed was that even some anonymous administration officials would begin to be cited as confirming the use of "secret prisons." This is how "conventional wisdom" based on media misinformation develops, even though the facts may be something else entirely.
In fact, Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief for AP, later informed AIM that they checked the Pickler story with somebody at the White House, who said that the report about the President confirming the "secret prisons" was "just fine." But the identity of the White House official, she said, will just have to remain secret.
AP seems to have perfected a method of reporting that avoids the facts and the need to correct mistakes. This bad journalism shows that AP can't be trusted.
What You Can Do
Please send the linked postcard in an envelope to AIM with a generous contribution so we can accelerate our campaign against Al-Jazeera. And please send the other postcards or cards and letters of your own choosing to Democratic Party leaders Howard Dean and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, asking them to disavow the views of a Democratic House candidate in Florida who promotes the view that 9/11 was an "inside job."
CLIFF'S NOTES
by Cliff Kincaid
DEAR FELLOW MEDIA WATCHDOG: September 14, 2006
IN ANOTHER MAJOR SETBACK FOR THE AL-JAZEERA SPIN-OFF NETWORK known as Al-Jazeera International, a new public opinion poll conducted for Accuracy in Media finds that a majority of Americans oppose the channel coming into their homes through U.S. cable and satellite systems. We released the results on September 13. The poll also finds that, by 2-1, Americans think the U.S. Government should oppose giving this new English-language channel access to the U.S. media market. This proves that there are tens of millions of Americans who agree with AIM's campaign to keep Al-Jazeera International out of the U.S. On the other hand, as our lead article shows, Al-Jazeera International is conducting its own offensive, even sending Riz Khan to try to convince a conservative group that they should welcome the introduction of this channel.
THAT IS WHY I HAVE TO COME BACK TO OUR AIM SUPPORTERS—LIKE YOU—TO HELP US GET our message out. You have already been extremely generous in contributing to our cause. But I need to ask you to come through again, to provide the largest possible contribution you can afford so that we can keep our campaign going and expanding. If you can write a check for $500, $10,000, or even $100,000, please do so today and drop it in an envelope together with the postcard I have included with this AIM Report.
THIS POLL, CONDUCTED FOR AIM BY THE POLLING COMPANY HEADED BY NOTED POLLSTER Kellyanne Conway, was not cheap. But we felt it was necessary to determine what kind of support we had for our campaign in the general population. The results show that we have touched a nerve and that the public is solidly behind us. The AIM poll finds that the channel's launch is opposed by more than one-half (53 percent) of the American people, a figure which dwarfs the number of those (29 percent) supporting it. We are now trying to interest the media in covering these poll results. In this regard, U.S. News & World Report has run a story on the new channel by Liz Halloran, who noted that "the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media has mounted an effort to stop the network and released a video titled Terror Television: The Rise of Al-Jazeera and the Hate America Media." We are getting more and more attention.
MY STATEMENT NOTED THAT "AL-JAZEERA INTERNATIONAL HAS BEEN TAINTED BY ITS association with the channel that regularly broadcasts propaganda from the terrorist killers of almost 3,000 Americans on 9/11. That is an association, however, that it will not be able to escape as long as it is funded by the same Arab government sponsoring Al-Jazeera. The poll backs up our contention that the American people don't want to take a risk on a new channel bringing more terrorist propaganda into the U.S. media market and inciting more anti-American violence." Recently, however, the media were preoccupied with ABC's miniseries "The Path to 9/11," which depicted the former Clinton Administration in an unflattering light. Al-Jazeera is far more of a danger and threat than any "docudrama."
OUR SECOND ARTICLE ON THE "SECRET PRISONS" CONTROVERSY MAY STRIKE SOME AS AN argument over semantics. But it's a matter of factual accuracy and honest journalism. I checked this matter with Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombers. I asked him about the media's use of the term "secret prisons" to describe the places where al-Qaeda terrorists had been kept. He agreed with me that the term, which was NOT used by President Bush in that speech, was unwarranted. He reiterated that the President had only made reference to the terrorists being in the "custody" of the CIA. Is it too much to ask that the media simply report the facts?
I WAS IN NEW YORK CITY ON 9/11 AT A CONFERENCE SPONSORED BY THE HUDSON Institute on foreign policy issues. One of the speakers, scholar Bernard Lewis, concluded his analysis of events in the Middle East by saying about the Muslim Arabs, "Either we free them or they will destroy us." That was the problem facing President Bush after 9/11. He decided we could not accept the status quo. Not only would we have to destroy the al-Qaeda base of operations in Afghanistan, we would have to challenge those Arab regimes that were totalitarian and aggressive in nature. The Saddam Hussein regime was a natural place to start with such a campaign because of its recent history of developing (and using) weapons of mass destruction and threatening and invading its neighbors. Bush is criticized for invading Iraq when a case can be made that he was really enforcing U.N. resolutions (17 in all stretching back to 1991) that had required proof of Saddam disarming. That was proof that Saddam did not give. The U.N., of course, was unwilling to enforce its own resolutions, as it also appears to be unable to do in the case of Iran's development of nuclear weapons. The success of Bush's policy has to be judged not only in terms of what is happening in Iraq, where a democratic government is struggling to survive, but the failure of al Qaeda to stage a major terrorist attack on the U.S. since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks.
BEFORE I ATTENDED THE HUDSON EVENT, I COVERED A "9/11 TRUTH MOVEMENT" RALLY IN New York City. This group, which absolves al Qaeda of responsibility for the attacks, believes 9/11 was an "inside job" carried out by members of an invisible government and blamed on Muslim Arabs. One poll indicates that about one-third of the American people share this view. Politically, it is represented by Bob Bowman, who recently won the Democratic Party's congressional primary election in Florida's 15th district. I asked Bowman, who spoke to the rally, if the national Democratic Party had given him any support. "So far, no," he replied. But he was anticipating that support might be forthcoming. Bowman's victory suggests that the Democratic Party constituency has moved beyond the far-left fringe into science fiction. Bowman, who got 55 percent of the vote, left no doubt as to what he would try to do if he wins in November and takes office in January, declaring that Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached and indicted for treason. Please drop the enclosed postcards on this matter to Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, and Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, asking them to disavow Bowman's bizarre views.
PEOPLE BELIEVE SUCH NONSENSE BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN CONDITIONED BY THE NEWS media. Consider the Joe Wilson story, which we exposed years ago as a fraud. Most of the major media treated Wilson as a saint for three years because he challenged the Bush Administration on Iraq. He alleged there was an organized conspiracy against him from the White House. Now we have learned that the "leaking" of information about his wife's affiliation with the CIA came from former State Department official Richard Armitage, who was NOT a supporter of Bush's aggressive approach to Iraq.
TRAGICALLY, AS THE "SECRET PRISONS" STORY PROVES, WE HAVE A MEDIA THAT DON'T even bother reporting the facts anymore. Their purpose is to make Bush look bad and bring liberals to power in the November elections. We have made great strides in challenging their power and setting the record straight on some matters. But we clearly have a long way to go. Help us make more progress.
For Accuracy in Media,
Cliff Kincaid
Editor
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