Chris Hedges, CIA?

[seemslikeadream]

Chris Hedges Resigns From Human Rights Organization PEN

Posted on Apr 1, 2013
The Nation Institute and the State Department

The Truthdig columnist was scheduled to speak at events sponsored by PEN American Center next month, but he has resigned his membership in the writers’ organization over its executive director, Suzanne Nossel, a former aide to Hillary Clinton who may have coined the term “soft power.”

The following is from a 2004 Foreign Affairs article by Nossel titled “Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism”:

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism, which posits that a global system of stable liberal democracies would be less prone to war. Washington, the theory goes, should thus offer assertive leadership—diplomatic, economic, and not least, military—to advance a broad array of goals: self-determination, human rights, free trade, the rule of law, economic development, and the quarantine and elimination of dictators and weapons of mass destruction (WMD)

In addition to working for the State Department under Hillary Clinton as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, Nossel has worked as executive director of Amnesty International USA, and for Human Rights Watch and The Wall Street Journal.

Chris Hedges emailed the following statement to PEN and it is reprinted here with his permission:

I will not be participating as a speaker in the PEN World Voices Festival in May. I will not participate because of your decision to select Suzanne Nossel as Executive Director of the PEN American Center. This appointment makes a mockery of PEN as a human rights organization and belittles the values PEN purports to defend. I spent seven years in the Middle East, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. The suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the plight of those caught up in our imperial wars in countries such as Iraq are not abstractions to me. Nossel’s relentless championing of preemptive war—which under international law is illegal—as a State Department official along with her callous disregard for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians and her refusal as a government official to denounce the use of torture and use of extra-judicial killings, makes her utterly unfit to lead any human rights organization, especially one that has global concerns. PEN American Center, by appointing Nossel, has unwittingly highlighted its own failure to defend and speak out for our dissidents, especially Bradley Manning. I hereby resign from PEN. I will wait until the organization returns to its original mandate to defend those who are persecuted, including those within the United States, before returning to the organization.

Sincerely,


Chris Hedges

More about PEN: It is a global organization made up of writer members that advocates for free expression and other human rights causes. The chapter representing the eastern United States is called PEN American Center and was founded in 1922. Its membership has included Robert Frost, Tony Kushner, Langston Hughes, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie and John Steinbeck.

Read more about the controversy at Dissident Voice.

[FourthBase]

Ummm, wouldn't it have been more effective for him to go ahead and speak first, using the opportunity to drop a clusterfuck-bomb of accusatory truth to her fucking face...and then resign? Is he that dumb that he didn't recognize that opportunity? Or was he too cowardly, or "gentlemanly", or...what? Who the fuck cares about a strongly-worded letter?

[seemslikeadream]

[divideandconquer]

Chris Hedges is linked to billionaire Patrick Lannan of The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who canceled John Pilger's documentary “The War You Didn’t See” which was rather critical of Obama’s foreign policy. http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-stra ... al-america

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” He is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lannan Literary Fellow.

I used to love Chris Hedges but I don't trust him anymore. It's easy to fall under the spell of his eloquence, as he comes across as someone who is legitimately speaking truth to power, but, if you really examine his work, especially when he writes about/speaks about foreign policy [regime change]...he's in many instances a mouthpiece for the powers that be, albeit,, a very subtle mouthpiece, oftentimes demonstrated in what he omits.

Here's the thing. No matter how you slice it, he's a gatekeeper. While he chastises the "fake left", the carnival-like media, the celebrity-obsessed masses, islamophobia, he supports one of the biggest lies of all time, the "official" story of 9/11 (not to mention, subtlety supporting the "official" stories regarding foreign policy). Supporting the official 9/11 story is Islamophobia.

Noam Chomsky (who should know) spells it out.

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

And then there is this:

"...about seventy were peace activists who, as usual at such events were joined by a motley collection of conspiracy theorists who insisted that 9/11 was and inside job, or that Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a 2002 plane crash, had been assassinated." -- Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class:

He doesn't do conspiracy, despite the fact that history is full of "plots hatched in hell," and today, in the U.S., it's no different.

[seemslikeadream]

divide and conquer

[FourthBase]

divide and conquer

Sometimes I wonder what all you people are like in real life. For example, when you buy a used car, does the entire process of researching and inspecting the car and sifting through the salesman's bullshit all necessarily end in only one of two possibilities, that either the car is judged completely pristine or the car is judged completely broken?

[seemslikeadream]

divide and conquer

Sometimes I wonder what all you people are like in real life. For example, when you buy a used car, does the entire process of researching and inspecting the car and sifting through the salesman's bullshit all necessarily end in only one of two possibilities, that either the car is judged completely pristine or the car is judged completely broken?

I am not one to see CIA under every progressive/liberal rock....you must have misunderstood my posts..IS EVERYBODY GAY?

divideandconquer is doing exactly what his name suggests

[FourthBase]

divide and conquer

Sometimes I wonder what all you people are like in real life. For example, when you buy a used car, does the entire process of researching and inspecting the car and sifting through the salesman's bullshit all necessarily end in only one of two possibilities, that either the car is judged completely pristine or the car is judged completely broken?

I am not one to see CIA under every progressive/liberal rock....you must have misunderstood my posts..IS EVERYBODY GAY?

divideandconquer is doing exactly what his name suggests

Sorry, was more of a follow-up to your post, not a retort.

And yeah, everybody is at least a little gay.
And everybody is at least a little compromised.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

Sheeeee-it. Say it ain't so.

I just bought two of his books.

[brainpanhandler]

It ain't so

[divideandconquer]

Sorry, my problem is that I'm not very articulate. I didn't say Chris Hedges is CIA, or that he has signed up for the role of "gatekeeper". My point is that he is a "gatekeeper", despite his intentions. However, given how intelligent he obviously is, I find it hard to believe he has no idea what's going on, or that he's a "useful idiot".

Nevertheless, I don't want to asperse his motives because he could be truly conflicted about his role as he seems very uncomfortable every time the subject of 9/11 is brought up. I was watching Michael Moore on Book TV and when 9/11 was brought up, he said that he can't go there because it's too dark. He doesn't want to believe his government is capable of that kind of evil. He also looked extremely uncomfortable. But the result is the same, whether or not they're complicit. When people as widely known and "respected" as Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, and Noam Chomsky back up the "official" story and refuse to confront glaring inconsistencies, and outright lies: they end up serving the corporatocracy by controlling the flow of important information, thereby, supporting the notion that the enemy is "out there". Avoiding the almost certain complicity of at least some of our wealthy and powerful leaders in 9/11 is ignoring the giant elephant in the room as it has become the excuse for practically every decision made over the last decade.

So they might very well be doing their best in the circumstances. given the nature of their funding and employment..I too am truly conflicted on this subject as these people have very important things to say, yet at the same time, one of the biggest obstacles to the spread of 9/11 truth is the Left media. I mean these otherwise well-informed, intelligent, investigative critics of corporate greed, the power elite and the US hegemony keep the focus of their criticism on things like "American empire" “war-for-oil” or “privatization of public resources’ and ignore the goals of the underlying globalist agenda.

Here is a brief summary of “alternative” media outlets linked to foundations the Church Committee identified as receiving CIA pass-through funding It is also of note that they all systematically marginalize journalistic and academic research into 911 and CIA-linked political assassinations. Again, this is not to say that the journalists who work for these alternative media organizations are CIA...just that the organizations they work for are indirectly linked to CIA funding, therefore CIA influence.

MacArthur Foundation

FAIR
The Progressive
Working Assets Radio
The Nation (According to their tax returns, the Nation Institute receives major funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Family Foundation)

Rockefeller Foundation

FAIR
The Progressive
Working Assets Radio

Carnegie Foundation

Democracy Now!

J. M. Kaplan Family Foundation

Democracy Now!
The Nation (According to their tax returns, the Nation Institute receives major funding from the MacArthur Foundation and the J. M. Kaplan Family Foundation)

Soros Family Foundation

Pacifica Radio
The Nation

(Although Soros himself has no known CIA connections, he’s strongly linked to the military industrial complex as a major stockholder in the Carlyle Group and through his direct funding of “color” revolutions in Eastern Europe.)

Schumann Foundation

Mother Jones
Alternet
Fair
Z Magazine

[justdrew]

I would suggest that the findings of a 40+ year old committee have no bearing on what is or isn't receiving "CIA funding" today

All those alternative media sources you list, you'd rather see them all gone? You can honestly not conceive of why they are essential and necessary and good? Because they don't agree that 911 was an inside job? Get real, there is no way that message is ever going to be accepted by the American people, so you can spend the rest of your life fighting a loosing war for hearts and minds that serves no purpose but to isolate and marginalize you or you an move on and focus on something that might make the world a better place. Maybe in another 30 years we'll be able to revisit 911, but not in this generation. (which is not to say that the fire should be let go out, we need good researchers and web sites to keep it alive and likely find out more as time goes on. but it's not a sale-able political reality that'll change made up minds any time soon.)

That said, I've long felt Chris Hedges was a crypto-right winger in that so much of his work seems to be aimed at undermining, de-motivating, and generally plunging into despair people who don't buy into the republican world view.

Not all those people are able to follow into the full on "radical" para-political world, they have families and they need jobs and need to maintain some ability to function and be accepted in this less-than-ideal country and so on. They do the best they can. I'm sick to death of watching people hate these "liberals" for being "insufficiently pure" - IF IT WEREN'T for THEM, we'd be living in a full time fascist hell state already, one democratically elected... And if you think we already ARE, again, get real. Things could be so much worse.

Until the American people change, our politics are doomed to remain less-than-ideal, change is happening, things are getting better, but it's slow going and with too much back sliding; but we must guard against the tendency to get bogged down with in-fighting, it's the most common and primary way to destroy progressive change.

In fact, it's a processes called: divide and conquer

[brekin]

Interesting video of Hedges take on Building 7 and how it looked like a controlled demolition.
Apparently he was there. He agrees it looks like a controlled demolition.
He seems to "hedge" though when it comes to whether or not
he actually believes so. The exchange starts around 3:24 on the video
at the bottom of the page.
http://911blogger.com/topics/chris-hedges

Some really, really interesting body English happens when the person filming
asks point blank to Hedges whether or not Hedges thought it was a controlled demolition.
Even taking into account shaky small camera work, he seems to get knocked over.
Not implying he knows anything either way, just interesting.

[divideandconquer]

I would suggest that the findings of a 40+ year old committee have no bearing on what is or isn't receiving "CIA funding" today

All those alternative media sources you list, you'd rather see them all gone? You can honestly not conceive of why they are essential and necessary and good? Because they don't agree that 911 was an inside job? Get real, there is no way that message is ever going to be accepted by the American people, so you can spend the rest of your life fighting a loosing war for hearts and minds that serves no purpose but to isolate and marginalize you or you an move on and focus on something that might make the world a better place. Maybe in another 30 years we'll be able to revisit 911, but not in this generation. (which is not to say that the fire should be let go out, we need good researchers and web sites to keep it alive and likely find out more as time goes on. but it's not a sale-able political reality that'll change made up minds any time soon.)

That said, I've long felt Chris Hedges was a crypto-right winger in that so much of his work seems to be aimed at undermining, de-motivating, and generally plunging into despair people who don't buy into the republican world view.

Not all those people are able to follow into the full on "radical" para-political world, they have families and they need jobs and need to maintain some ability to function and be accepted in this less-than-ideal country and so on. They do the best they can. I'm sick to death of watching people hate these "liberals" for being "insufficiently pure" - IF IT WEREN'T for THEM, we'd be living in a full time fascist hell state already, one democratically elected... And if you think we already ARE, again, get real. Things could be so much worse.

Until the American people change, our politics are doomed to remain less-than-ideal, change is happening, things are getting better, but it's slow going and with too much back sliding; but we must guard against the tendency to get bogged down with in-fighting, it's the most common and primary way to destroy progressive change.

In fact, it's a processes called: divide and conquer

I'm sorry you took such offense to what I wrote, but maybe you missed where I said these people have important things to say. I never said I'd like to see these organizations "all gone" and I am much more liberal than I am conservative. All I'm saying is that, even aside from 9/11, one must keep in mind from where these organizations get their funding, thus are strongly influenced...yes, even today, especially today.

The Ford Foundation, by supplying so much money to Democracy Now! in 2002, does not have to explicitly tell Democracy Now! how they want 9/11, or possibly other topics, to be covered. Democracy Now! will self-censor, because they want future money from the Ford Foundation. I still watch Democracy Now and will continue to watch it, but, at the very least, I know they are limited in what they can report...and this goes beyond 9/11.

I don't think Chris Hedges is a crypto-right-winger, and I will continue to read his articles, but, once again, I will examine, much more carefully, the evidence or arguments he presents, mindful of the limitation of focus imposed. For example, as Scott Creighton points out, Chris Hedges, in arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is pushing some kind of dictatorial constitution, he failed to link to the English translation of the so-called “Islamist” constitution, where he says the constitutional assembly is "stacked with party members". Well, only 16 out of the 100 members are Brotherhood members.

"The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party ended up having only 16 seats in the assembly while opposition parties had 22 seats. There were 61 independents. Standings in the 2012 Egyptian Constituent Assembly"

http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/chris-hedges-absurd-disinformation-regarding-the-new-color-revolution-in-egypt/#more-22035

[justdrew]

I wasn't greatly offended, sorry if it came off that way