Chris Hedges, CIA?

[brainpanhandler]

The CIA is Everywhere. Long time ago...I hit one in the head with a snowball. If Chris Hedges is CIA, then so am I, but I have no way of knowing either way for sure.

That should have been the last post in this thread.

[brekin]

brainpanhandler wrote:

That should have been the last post in this thread.

Yeah, a rock video is always a safe bet instead of actually examining say what
the person in question has written. Say for example a story relating to Iraq and
biological weapons before American invaded and devastated that country.

brianpanhandler I'm curious. What do you think about Hedges participation below in helping stoke the Bush war machine
with his fictitious NYT's story that you felt deserved to be bumped by a music video?

November 6-8, 2001: Fabricated INC Story of Muslim Terrorists Training in Iraq Electrifies Media, Builds Case for War

http://www.historycommons.org/context.j ... _iraq_1194

Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, posing as Jamal al-Ghurairy for Frontline.Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, posing as Jamal al-Ghurairy for Frontline. [Source: PBS]An Iraqi defector identifying himself as Jamal al-Ghurairy, a former lieutenant general in Saddam Hussein’s intelligence corps, the Mukhabarat, tells two US reporters that he has witnessed foreign Islamic militants training to hijack airplanes at an alleged Iraqi terrorist training camp at Salman Pak, near Baghdad. Al-Ghurairy also claims to know of a secret compound at Salman Pak where Iraqi scientists, led by a German, are producing biological weapons. Al-Ghurairy is lying both about his experiences and even his identity, though the reporters, New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges and PBS’s Christopher Buchanan, do not know this. The meeting between al-Ghurairy and the reporters, which takes place on November 6, 2001, in a luxury suite in a Beirut hotel, was arranged by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC). Buchanan later recalls knowing little about al-Ghurairy, except that “[h]is life might be in danger. I didn’t know much else.” Hedges recalls the former general’s “fierce” appearance and “military bearing.… He looked the part.” Al-Ghurairy is accompanied by several other people, including the INC’s political liaison, Nabeel Musawi. “They were slick and well organized,” Buchanan recalls. Hedges confirms al-Ghurairy’s credibility with the US embassy in Turkey, where he is told that CIA and FBI agents had recently debriefed him. The interview is excerpted for an upcoming PBS Frontline episode, along with another interview with an INC-provided defector, former Iraqi sergeant Sabah Khodada, who echoes al-Ghurairy’s tale. While the excerpt of al-Ghurairy’s interview is relatively short, the interview itself takes over an hour. Al-Ghurairy does not allow his face to be shown on camera.

Times Reports Defectors' Tale - Two days later, on November 8, Hedges publishes a story about al-Ghurairy in the New York Times Times. The Frontline episode airs that same evening. [New York Times, 11/8/2001; Mother Jones, 4/2006] Hedges does not identify al-Ghurairy by name, but reports that he, Khodada, and a third unnamed Iraqi sergeant claim to have “worked for several years at a secret Iraqi government camp that had trained Islamic terrorists in rotations of five or six months since 1995. They said the training at the camp, south of Baghdad, was aimed at carrying out attacks against neighboring countries and possibly Europe and the United States.” Whether the militants being trained are linked to al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, the defectors cannot be sure, nor do they know of any specific attacks carried out by the militants. Hedges writes that the interviews were “set up by an Iraqi group that seeks the overthrow of… Hussein.” He quotes al-Ghurairy as saying, “There is a lot we do not know. We were forbidden to speak about our activities among each other, even off duty. But over the years, you see and hear things. These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot. They needed a lot of training, especially physical training. But from speaking with them, it was clear they came from a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, and Morocco. We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this.” He uses Khodada’s statements as support for al-Ghurairy’s, identifies Khodada by name, and says that Khodada “immigrated to Texas” in May 2001 “after working as an instructor for eight years at Salman Pak…” He quotes the sergeant as saying, “We could see them train around the fuselage. We could see them practice taking over the plane.” Al-Ghurairy adds that the militants were trained to take over a plane without using weapons. Hedges reports that Richard Sperzel, the former chief of the UN biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq, says that the Iraqis always claimed Salman Pak was an anti-terror training camp for Iraqi special forces. However, Sperzel says, “[M]any of us had our own private suspicions. We had nothing specific as evidence.” The US officials who debriefed al-Ghurairy, Hedges reports, do not believe that the Salman Pak training has any links to the 9/11 hijackings. Hedges asks about one of the militants, a clean-shaven Egyptian. “No, he was not Mohamed Atta.” Atta led the 9/11 hijackers. Hedges notes that stories such as this one will likely prompt “an intense debate in Washington over whether to extend the war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government of Afghanistan to include Iraq.” [New York Times, 11/8/2001; Columbia Journalism Review, 7/1/2004]

Heavy Press Coverage - The US media immediately reacts, with op-eds running in major newspapers throughout the country and cable-news pundits bringing the story to their audiences. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice says of the story, “I think it surprises no one that Saddam Hussein is engaged in all kinds of activities that are destabilizing.” The White House will use al-Ghurairy’s claims in its background paper, “Decade of Deception and Defiance,” prepared for President’s Bush September 12, 2002 speech to the UN General Assembly (see September 12, 2002). Though the tale lacks specifics, it helps bolster the White House’s attempts to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 hijackers, and helps promote Iraq as a legitimate target in the administration’s war on terror. (Five years later, the reporters involved in the story admit they were duped—see April 2006.)

Complete Fiction - The story, as it turns out, is, in the later words of Mother Jones reporter Jack Fairweather, “an elaborate scam.” Not only did US agents in Turkey dismiss the purported lieutenant general’s claims out of hand—a fact they did not pass on to Hedges—but the man who speaks with Hedges and Buchanan is not even Jamal al-Ghurairy. The man they interviewed is actually a former Iraqi sergeant living in Turkey under the pseudonym Abu Zainab. (His real name is later ascertained to be Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, and is a former Iraqi general and senior officer in the Mukhabarat.) The real al-Ghurairy has never left Iraq. In 2006, he will be interviewed by Fairweather, and will confirm that he was not the man interviewed in 2001 (see October 2005). [Columbia Journalism Review, 7/1/2004; Mother Jones, 4/2006] Hedges and Buchanan were not the first reporters to be approached for the story. The INC’s Francis Brooke tried to interest Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff in interviewing Khodada to discuss Salman Pak. Isikoff will recall in 2004 that “he didn’t know what to make of the whole thing or have any way to evaluate the story so I didn’t write about it.” [Columbia Journalism Review, 7/1/2004]

"The Perfect Hoax" - The interview was set up by Chalabi, the leader of the INC, and former CBS producer Lowell Bergman. Bergman had interviewed Khodada previously, but was unable to journey to Beirut, so he and Chalabi briefed Hedges in London before sending him to meet with the defector. Chalabi and Bergman have a long relationship; Chalabi has been a source for Bergman since 1991. The CIA withdrew funding from the group in 1996 (see January 1996) due to its poor intelligence and attempts at deception. For years, the INC combed the large Iraqi exile communities in Damascus and Amman for those who would trade information—real or fabricated—in return for the INC’s assistance in obtaining asylum to the West. Helping run that network was Mohammed al-Zubaidi, who after 9/11 began actively coaching defectors, according to an ex-INC official involved in the INC’s media operations (see December 17, 2001 and July 9, 2004). The ex-INC official, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, did everything from help defectors brush up and polish their stories, to concocting scripts that defectors with little or no knowledge could recite: “They learned the words, and then we handed them over to the American agencies and journalists.” After 9/11, the INC wanted to come up with a big story that would fix the public perception of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Al-Zubaidi was given the task. He came up with al-Ghurairy. He chose Zainab for his knowledge of the Iraqi military, brought him to Beirut, paid him, and began prepping him. In the process, al-Zainab made himself known to American and Turkish intelligence officials as al-Ghurairy. “It was the perfect hoax,” al-Haideri will recall in 2006. “The man was a born liar and knew enough about the military to get by, whilst Saddam’s regime could hardly produce the real Ghurairy without revealing at least some of the truth of the story.” Al-Haideri will say that the reality of the Salman Pak story was much as the Iraqis claimed—Iraqi special forces were trained in hostage and hijack scenarios. Al-Zubaidi, who in 2004 will admit to his propaganda activities, calls Al-Zainab “an opportunist, cheap and manipulative. He has poetic interests and has a vivid imagination in making up stories.” [Mother Jones, 4/2006]

Stories Strain Credulity - Knight Ridder reporter Jonathan Landay later says of al-Qurairy, “As you track their stories, they become ever more fantastic, and they’re the same people who are telling these stories, until you get to the most fantastic tales of all, which appeared in Vanity Fair magazine.” Perhaps al-Qurairy’s most fabulous story is that of a training exercise to blow up a full-size mockup of a US destroyer in a lake in central Iraq. Landay adds, “Or, jumping into pits of fouled water and having to kill a dog with your bare teeth. I mean, and this was coming from people, who are appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank would change.… And, you’re saying, ‘Wait a minute. There’s something wrong here, because in this story he was a major, but in this story the guy’s a colonel. And, in this story this was his function, but now he says in this story he was doing something else.’” Landay’s bureau chief, John Walcott, says of al-Qurairy, “What he did was reasonably clever but fairly obvious, which is he gave the same stuff to some reporters that, for one reason or another, he felt would simply report it. And then he gave the same stuff to people in the Vice President’s office [Dick Cheney] and in the Secretary of Defense’s office [Donald Rumsfeld]. And so, if the reporter called the Department of Defense or the Vice President’s office to check, they would’ve said, ‘Oh, I think that’s… you can go with that. We have that, too.’ So, you create the appearance, or Chalabi created the appearance, that there were two sources, and that the information had been independently confirmed, when, in fact, there was only one source. And it hadn’t been confirmed by anybody.” Landay adds, “[L]et’s not forget how close these people were to this administration, which raises the question, was there coordination? I can’t tell you that there was, but it sure looked like it.” [PBS, 4/25/2007]

No Evidence Found - On April 6, 2003, US forces will overrun the Salman Pak facility. They will find nothing to indicate that the base was ever used to train terrorists (see April 6, 2003).

Entity Tags: Osama bin Laden, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Richard Sperzel, Newsweek, Saddam Hussein, Taliban, New York Times, Sabah Khodada, Washington Post, United Nations, Vanity Fair, Nabeel Musawi, Public Broadcasting System, Mother Jones, Ahmed Chalabi, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, Chris Hedges, Al-Qaeda, CBS News, Bush administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Mukhabarat, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Francis Brooke, Lowell Bergman, Michael Isikoff, Mohammed al-Zubaidi, Jonathan Landay, John Walcott, Jamal al-Ghurairy, Jack Fairweather, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Christopher Buchanan, Iraqi National Congress

Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Events Leading to Iraq Invasion, Domestic

[Sounder]

Hey BPH, thanks for helping me out with my thinking.

wordspeak2, I did note your past warnings about Mr. Hedges and your view makes more sense after reading about his praise of Chomsky and brekins post on Mr. Hedges Iraq reporting.

Generally I tend to allow folk to exhibit the natural shortcomings of their conditioning but this seems to be more a case where rhetoric that keeps a person in the game has become much more important than is service to the larger human community.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Brekin, you've done noble work in this thread, thank you for the brainfood.

[brainpanhandler]

Brekin, you've done noble work in this thread, thank you for the brainfood.

I agree. Brekin, CIA?

[American Dream]

The CIA is Everywhere. Long time ago...I hit one in the head with a snowball. ]

The CIA Is Trying To Kill Me





I'm paranoid, tell me what the fuck they asked you
You fuck around with me and Im'a have to blast you
The CIA tryna kill me, we bad news
Get the fuck up out my way when I pass through
I'm paranoid, tell me what the fuck they asked you
You fuck around with me and Im'a have to blast you
The CIA tryna kill me, we bad news

[The Consul]

Kudos to Brekin. Only the very best journalists can avoid being duped and that is because of how well they have developed their sources, which can be another form of compromise. I guess the problem is when their search for the truth starts to take a back seat to their idea of what it should be (or probably is). In this case, Hedges was approaching Judith Millerism. As far as my posting "rock video" well....in the old pre youtube days Jeff used to quote Dylan after the header of almost all his posts. My way of avoiding madness is through levity, I refuse all other medications except when I am flying or having to deal with type A misfits. I think of things that make me laugh, I don't think of whether they are actually funny. Life is too short.

[Sounder]

AD is so predictable. Party line all the way baby.

[Nordic]

Hm, it looks to me like Hedges got punked. Nice people tend to be a bit more trusting than others ....

Live and learn, right? I still see zero evidence that Hedges was "CIA".

[brekin]

Nordic wrote:

Hm, it looks to me like Hedges got punked. Nice people tend to be a bit more trusting than others ....
Live and learn, right? I still see zero evidence that Hedges was "CIA".

Well short of his photo in a CIA yearbook we probably will never have strong evidence.
But do you really think though Hedges was just a rube in the operation and there was no coordination
between the administration, NIC, the NYT and various intelligence agencies? Frontline airs
a whole episode relating to it the very same night his article is published and Condoleeza, Bush, Cheney are quoting from it
shortly after. Curious how he's the middle east expert when he is pontificating but when called out on this
historical fuck up he's just the luckless guy caught up in someone elses show.

Of course maybe it was all just convenient timing. I mean it's not like they would create bogus evidence and then
feed it to the media to further their own agenda. And live and learn indeed. At the bare minimum Hedges was a useful idiot for spreading
false propaganda to preemptively invade and destroy another civilization. Oops people of Iraq, sorry bout that. Hedges made a boo boo, but
he is a nice man who writes good books now that really tell it like it is.

[Nordic]

I'd say the likelihood he was used by the PTB'ers is greater than the likelihood of him being a willing conspirator.

I mean, I don't see Judith Miller raging against the machine these days. I mean, where is she, anyway?

If Hedges got duped, then maybe he should come out and admit to it.

And I sure don't trust anyone 100 percent (nobody in any sort of remotely "mainstream" journalism anyway), but in the last few years I've been reading him I haven't smelled anything remotely of bullshit.

In fact, I would be more likely to believe that he's being smeared rather expertly right now for coming out as being quite against any sort of destruction or violence in Occupy.

God knows what the provocateurs so desperately want is for that movement to go violent and destructive. They're salivating for that.

So Hedges comes out strongly against that, and the next thing you know he's being accused of spookery by the "indie-alt" press?

Now there are a couple of dots to connect!

[Simulist]

I'd say the likelihood he was used by the PTB'ers is greater than the likelihood of him being a willing conspirator.

I mean, I don't see Judith Miller raging against the machine these days. I mean, where is she, anyway?

If Hedges got duped, then maybe he should come out and admit to it.

And I sure don't trust anyone 100 percent (nobody in any sort of remotely "mainstream" journalism anyway), but in the last few years I've been reading him I haven't smelled anything remotely of bullshit.

In fact, I would be more likely to believe that he's being smeared rather expertly right now for coming out as being quite against any sort of destruction or violence in Occupy.

God knows what the provocateurs so desperately want is for that movement to go violent and destructive. They're salivating for that.

So Hedges comes out strongly against that, and the next thing you know he's being accused of spookery by the "indie-alt" press?

Now there are a couple of dots to connect!

Bingo.

[Sounder]

I may be speaking out of turn because I did not read much of this thread, but early on folk likely demanded evidence rather than hearsay or willy-nilly dot connecting.

so brekin and others brought some material to think about. Tangible stuff, -Hedges own words and a good bit of context.

If loose inferences and speculative dot connecting are bad for the goose, they are bad for the gander also.

[brainpanhandler]

brianpanhandler I'm curious. What do you think about Hedges participation below in helping stoke the Bush war machine
with his fictitious NYT's story that you felt deserved to be bumped by a music video?

First of all I wasn't considering what got "bumped" when I endorsed the Consul's post. I really wasn't. But whatever.

I'm not sure what you would be pleased to hear me say and what I want to say has already been said and more or less dismissed out of hand or ignored. Like so many threads around here lately, and maybe my perception that this is worse lately is entirely subjective and wrong, people are just talking past each other.

However I cannot pass up the opportunity to agree with Hugh.

No, Hedges is surfing his mid-life epiphany about what he'd been used for over many career years.
He was used as a cred prop, much like Edward R. Morrow for Pearl Harbor and the Cold War...until Ed became head of USIA, that is.
So Hedges is pissed and disgusted. He's refinding his Christian ethics.

He's found his better self and gone way off The Reservation.

Something like that is probably true. I can't prove it, but there you have it. The burden of proof lies elsewhere.

I'd also endorse this:

Is it inconceivable that Chris Hedges may actually have grown as a person in the ten years since 2002? That the burgeoning collection of obvious betrayals of the Bush Administration, the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the craven and evident manipulation of the ubiquitous terror alerts in those days served as catalysts of change for Mr. Hedges?

Since I too was changed by these things, it certainly seems conceivable to me that others might have been changed by them also, including Mr. Hedges.

But predictably you'll dismiss that as merely apologetics.

I further endorse this:

It's not outright dismissal of the question, which can be applied to anyone, that apparently makes several of us gag at the headline; but an understanding that promiscuous accusations of agentry have been the most common, and one of the most effective of all COINTELPRO tools.

And why from the start I've made it a rule that we not do that to each other. It's a vile, disharmonious tactic.

There's just no way to prove such things from where we sit and so even the best circumstantial evidence, which in this case we don't even have that, serves no better function than a smear campaign.

I don't think there is any great harm to Hedges in discussing it here. Nor do I think it should be taboo to discuss. And generally I think you've done about as well as one might in trying to keep the discussion at least somewhat reality based.

Regardless of what Hedges might have been 10 years ago, he is no one's tool today. That I find incredible. I'm not closed minded about it but I would be stunned to discover that 2012 Hedges is a witting tool of the empire.

[Nordic]

I may be speaking out of turn because I did not read much of this thread, but early on folk likely demanded evidence rather than hearsay or willy-nilly dot connecting.

so brekin and others brought some material to think about. Tangible stuff, -Hedges own words and a good bit of context.

If loose inferences and speculative dot connecting are bad for the goose, they are bad for the gander also.

So ... Guilty until proven innocent?

Or the other way around?

At some point this will become a matter of personal opinion, like with people who swear Meryl Streep is a terrible actress. How do you argue with that?