Author Topic: Baby please don't go  (Read 1351 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Lanya

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3300
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Baby please don't go
« on: February 21, 2008, 12:43:03 AM »

Exclusive: U.S. urges Pakistanis to keep Musharraf, despite election defeat
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/28273.html
Planned Parenthood is America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.

Plane

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 26993
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #1 on: February 21, 2008, 10:42:05 AM »

Exclusive: U.S. urges Pakistanis to keep Musharraf, despite election defeat
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/28273.html

Quote
The officials spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss internal government debates.

Where is my grain of salt?

Amianthus

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 7574
  • Bring on the flames...
    • View Profile
    • Mario's Home Page
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #2 on: February 21, 2008, 10:46:03 AM »
Where is my grain of salt?

Just the typical "whisper campaign" from the Democrats.

The type of thing they don't do, of course.
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. (Benjamin Franklin)

Lanya

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3300
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #3 on: February 21, 2008, 08:41:39 PM »
Doesn't appear to be a whisper campaign. Just straight news.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/19/asia/diplo.php

U.S. scrambles to salvage its Pakistan policy
By Helene Cooper
Published: February 19, 2008
  E-Mail Article
  Listen to Article
  Printer-Friendly
  3-Column Format
  Translate
  Share Article
 
  Text Size

WASHINGTON: The Bush administration was scrambling Tuesday to pick up the pieces of its tattered Pakistan policy in the wake of the trouncing that the party of President George W. Bush's ally, President Pervez Musharraf, received in parliamentary elections.

The United States would still like to see Pakistan's opposition leaders find a way to work with Musharraf in some kind of power-sharing deal, administration officials said, but that notion appears increasingly unlikely given the poor showing of Musharraf's party in the elections against strong showings by the parties of Nawaz Sharif and of the slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

"Musharraf is obviously a poison pill," said Daniel Markey, a former South Asia expert at the State Department under Bush. "He is fading out. The question is: What happens next?"

Senior officials at the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House were privately reaching out to the victorious opposition parties in Pakistan, while at the same time trying hard "not to look like we're jumping on anybody's bandwagon," a senior Bush administration official said.

The administration tried to promote a power-sharing deal last summer between Musharraf and Bhutto, but neither side proved amenable enough and the deal eventually collapsed after Musharraf imposed emergency rule, suspended the Constitution and dismissed the Supreme Court.
Today in Africa & Middle East
Bush ends tour of Africa with a visit to Liberia
How Bush's Africa visit trumps China's foray
Rival parties in Kenya near deal on creating prime minister post

Despite all of that, and the assassination of Bhutto in December, the Bush administration still has not given up entirely on the idea that it can have its ally, Musharraf, in power and still somehow have democracy in Pakistan with an elected Parliament that is willing to share power with the Pakistani strongman.

And even now, administration officials said they had not given up on the hope that there will be some way to construct a coalition that will keep Musharraf in power as president.

"What we will urge is that those moderate forces within Pakistani politics who now have a seat at the table, so to speak, in winning seats in the Parliament, should band together, should work together for a few goals that are in the interest of Pakistan," said Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman. "We are going to continue our work with President Musharraf and whatever that new government may be on goals of our national interest."

Bush has resisted calls within his own administration and from congressional critics to limit his dependence on Musharraf, given the Pakistani leader's decreasing popularity at home.

But administration officials said that Musharraf remained the administration's preferred choice as Pakistani leader, given his record of cooperation with American-led counterterrorism operations.

Up until the day of the elections, U.S. administration officials were hoping that Musharraf's party would eke out enough votes in the parliamentary vote to secure a power-sharing deal with one of the opposition parties.

Husain Haqqani, a former adviser to Bhutto and a professor at Boston University, said the United States should not make the mistake of continuing to put its relations with Musharraf ahead of the wishes of the Pakistani people who have largely repudiated his political party at the polls.

Haqqani said Musharraf was doubly weakened because his own election as president is disputed, based on Musharraf's decision to amend the Constitution and replace the Supreme Court with justices favorable to him.
Planned Parenthood is America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.

Amianthus

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 7574
  • Bring on the flames...
    • View Profile
    • Mario's Home Page
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2008, 08:47:03 PM »
Doesn't appear to be a whisper campaign. Just straight news.

If it's straight news, why aren't they releasing the names of the officials making the statements?
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. (Benjamin Franklin)

Rich

  • Guest
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #5 on: February 21, 2008, 11:16:07 PM »
 
Pakistan Votes - Terror Loses

By Amir Taheri
New York Post | 2/21/2008

SOME of the world's deadliest terrorists vowed to prevent it; powerful military figures plotted to rig its outcome. Yet Pakistan's election went off with minimum violence, producing results whose legitimacy no one can contest.
The biggest winner is the Pakistani people - who, given the chance, manifested their attachment to pluralism and the rule of law. By turning up in millions to vote, they confounded both the terrorists and the shadowy security agencies.

Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies did all they could to disrupt things, killing some 300 candidates, election officers and party activists. Their sinister slogan "From Box to Box" - i.e., anyone who cast a vote into the ballot box could end up in a coffin - was posted or scribbled on many walls. The terrorists also destroyed at least 12 polling stations and stole several dozen ballot boxes.

Still, they failed. And their political allies did no better.

The Unified Assembly for Action (MMA), a coalition of Islamists, saw its share of the vote drop from almost 11 percent in the last general election five years ago to around 3 percent. It lost control of the only one of Pakistan's four provinces that it governed, and all its main leaders lost their seats. In the provincial assembly of Sindh, the MMA won no seats.

A Shiite group, heavily financed by Iran's Islamic Republic, suffered an even bigger rout. If the latest results hold, it will end up with 1 percent of the vote.

The politicians linked with the military and security agencies also lost, if not as heavily. Their chief party, the Pakistan Muslim League, lost almost two-thirds of its seats and control of the national parliament and the three provincial assemblies that it had dominated for years.

The message of this election is clear: The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis reject both military rule and its political twin of Islamism.

Those twins started dominating Pakistani politics in the 1970s, when Gen. Zia ul-Haq overthrew Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in a military coup. Unable to build a political base, the general played the Islamist card - reducing religion to a mere apologia for his corrupt and brutal regime. The Islamists in turn got a share in political power - and in the looting of the national economy.

With Monday's general election, Pakistan returns to where it was in 1977, before Zia's coup. Two mainstream movements, the Pakistan Muslim League (PMLN) of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of the Bhuttos, have returned as chief players in national and provincial politics.


The right-of-center PLMN is likely to form the next provincial government in Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province. The left-of-center PPP will control Sindh and likely lead coalition governments in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province.

There is much talk of the two forming a government of national unity - a grand coalition. Attractive as the idea is, it may be unwise. With the main parties in government together, the allies of the military and the Islamist remnants could cast themselves as the opposition - peddling the message that non-military, non-religious parties can't solve Pakistan's social, economic and political problems.

The best outcome would be for the two mainstream parties, perhaps associated with a bloc of independents, to fill out the entire political spectrum. One party could become the kernel of a coalition government, while the other leads the parliamentary opposition. This model has worked in neighboring India for more than half a century. There's no reason why it shouldn't work in Pakistan.

The PMLN and the PPP have different historical trajectories, visions and programs. These should not be blurred through a power-sharing scheme that may be unsustainable. Better for both, and for Pakistan, if each retains its distinct identity - offering voters a clear choice.

The formation of a people-based government was always a basic condition for winning the war against terror in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The fulfillment of that condition means a strategic turning of the tide against the terrorists - but not guaranteed victory.

For that reason, the election winners would be unwise to waste energy settling personal scores with President Pervez Musharraf. If anything, they owe him a debt of gratitude: He's the first Pakistani military ruler to organize free and fair elections and accept results that don't favor his camp.

Despite a persistent campaign of vilification against him, Musharraf enjoys a capital of trust that can serve what is, in effect, a new system of government based on separation of powers. He has always claimed his hope for Pakistan to adopt the Turkish political model - wherein the armed forces act as ultimate guardians of the Constitution, preventing dictatorship in the name of either nationalism or faith.

The new government must come out with a credible program of social reform and economic development to give people hope - and also rid the security services of rogue elements that pursue personal agendas in the name of Islam.

The outgoing government, needing Islamist support to compensate for its lack of a genuine popular base, largely restricted itself to shadow-boxing against the terrorists, especially near the Afghan border. The new government will have no need of such tactics. It should create a popular front against terror to meet a challenge that threatens its unity.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's friends - notably the United States, the European Union and the moderate Muslim nations - must dig deeper in their pockets to help both economically and militarily.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lanya

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3300
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #6 on: February 22, 2008, 02:40:23 AM »
I see nothing to indicate any political agenda or any whisper campaign.
"Senior administration officials" were believable during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, you scoff at them?
Planned Parenthood is America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.

Amianthus

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 7574
  • Bring on the flames...
    • View Profile
    • Mario's Home Page
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #7 on: February 22, 2008, 07:20:04 AM »
I see nothing to indicate any political agenda or any whisper campaign.
"Senior administration officials" were believable during the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, you scoff at them?

Funny, I remember seeing them on TV making these announcements. Didn't seem too anonymous to me. Who are they? Was there a picture of the officials included with the article?
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. (Benjamin Franklin)

Lanya

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3300
    • View Profile
  • Liked:
  • Likes Given: 0
Re: Baby please don't go
« Reply #8 on: February 22, 2008, 12:07:56 PM »
Published on Friday, August 12, 2005 by the Vermont Guardian
Official Spin, Unnamed Sources, and the Art of Managing Perceptions
Anything but the Truth
by Greg Guma
 
In The Secret Man, Bob Woodward?s new book about his Watergate source Deep Throat, he notes, ?Washington politics and secrets are an entire world of doubt.? Even though Woodward knew that the identity of his source was W. Mark Felt, then associate director of the FBI, what he could never be sure about was why Felt decided to gradually reveal the details of the Nixon administration?s illegal activities.

Three decades later, the Bush administration has made it immeasurably more difficult to be sure about what motivates many sources of information ? both on and off the record ? or trust that what we learn from the media will turn out to be true.

In July, Jeff Ruch, who directs Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, issued a relevant but discouraging assessment to the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs of the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform: ?The federal government is suffering from a severe disinformation syndrome.?

Ruch was referring specifically to recent surveys by his organization and the Union of Concerned Scientists revealing that federal scientists are routinely pressured to amend their findings. One in five scientists contacted said they had been directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information, Ruch testified, and more than half reported cases where "commercial interests? forced the reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions.

But government isn?t alone in confusing public understanding of crucial issues. Media organizations also contribute. A recent example is Newsweek magazine's Aug. 1 cover story on Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts, which aggressively dismissed reports that Roberts is a conservative partisan. Two primary examples cited were the nominee?s role on Bush's legal team in the court fight after the 2000 election, described by Newsweek as ?minimal,? and his membership in the conservative Federalist Society, which was pronounced an irrelevant distortion. Roberts ?is not the hard-line ideologue that true believers on both sides had hoped for,? the publication concluded, and ?seems destined to be confirmed.?

The facts suggest different appraisal, however. According to the Miami Herald, Roberts was a significant ?legal consultant, lawsuit editor and prep coach? for Bush?s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2000, and, as the Washington Post has revealed, he was not just a Federalist Society member, but on the Washington chapter's steering committee in the late 1990s.

More to the point, his roots in the conservative vanguard date back to his days with the Reagan administration, when he provided legal justifications for recasting the way government and the courts approached civil rights, defended attempts to narrow the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, challenged arguments in favor of busing and affirmative action, and even argued that Congress should strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear broad classes of civil-rights cases. Nevertheless, most press reports on Roberts echo Newsweek?s excitement about his ?intellectual rigor and honesty.?

Whether such coverage qualifies as disinformation is debatable, but it does serve as an example of how journalists assist political leaders, albeit sometimes unwittingly, in framing public awareness. As a practice, this is known in both government and public relations circles as ?perception management.?

An evolving tactic

In 1987, the Department of Defense developed a propaganda and psychological warfare glossary that included an official definition of the term. Perception management incorporates tactics that either convey or deny information to influence ?emotions, motives, and objective reasoning,? explained the DoD. For the military, the main targets are supposedly foreign audiences, and the goal is to promote ?actions favorable to the originator's objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.? The Reagan administration preferred a different term, ?public diplomacy,? while the Bush administration calls it ?strategic influence,? but both refer to the same thing.

Organized government efforts to manipulate public perceptions date back at least to the 1950s, when people at more than 800 news and public information organizations carried out assignments for the CIA, according to The New York Times. By the mid-1980s, CIA Director Bill Casey had taken the practice to the next level: a systematic, covert ?public diplomacy? apparatus designed to sell a ?new product? ? counter-insurgency in Central America ? while reinforcing fear of communism, Nicaragua?s Sandinistas, Libya?s Muammar Qaddafi, and other designated enemies. Sometimes this involved ?white propaganda? ? stories and editorials secretly financed by the government ? much like the videos and commentators recently funded by the Bush administration. But other operations went ?black? ? that is, they pushed obviously false story lines.

During the first Bush administration, domestic disinformation was handled through the CIA?s Public Affairs Office. This operation was charged with turning intelligence failures into successes by persuading reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could adversely affect purported national security interests. The Clinton administration?s version, outlined in Directive 68, was known as the International Public Information System (IPI). Again, no distinction was made between what could be done abroad and at home. To defeat enemies and influence minds, information for U.S. audiences was ?deconflicted? through the IPI?s work.

One strategy was to insert psyops (psychological operations) specialists into newsrooms. In February 2000, a Dutch journalist revealed that CNN and the U.S. Army had agreed to do precisely that. The military was proud enough of this ?expanded cooperation? with mainstream media to publicly acknowledge the effort.

As the Iraq War began, word leaked out that a new Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence was gearing up to sway leaders and public sentiment by disseminating sometimes-false stories. Facing censure, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld publicly denounced and supposedly disbanded it. But a few months later, he quietly funded a private consultant to develop another version. The apparent goal was to go beyond traditional information warfare with a new perception management campaign designed to ?win the war of ideas.?

How does perception management work? One important tactic is to influence opinion by presenting theories as if they are facts. For example, ?Bad as things are in Iraq,? began an Associated Press story in April 2004, ?a quick U.S. departure would make them worse ? encourage terrorists, set the stage for civil war, send oil prices spiraling, and ruin U.S. credibility throughout the Middle East.? Only two sources, both obscure Middle East scholars, were directly quoted in the story, plus unnamed ?regional experts.?

Another approach is to massage information, thus promoting the preferred spin. For example, stories that assert that the Iraq insurgency is losing momentum may stress the number of incidents during a specific period, meanwhile ignoring data such as the number of wounded, civilian contractor deaths, and Iraqi military casualties.

Sometimes, however, the only approach that works is to fabricate the news.

Selling the war

The jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for refusing to reveal how she learned the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was outted by columnist Robert Novak two years ago, sparked widespread condemnation from the press. Many journalists expressed deep concerns that their future ability to gain the trust of confidential sources would be undermined. Miller was, after all, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and the author of best-selling books; in short, an eminently reputable journalist who didn?t deserve punishment for protecting sources.

However, Miller?s real importance in the world of unnamed sources leads in a different direction, exposing how perception management techniques have been applied during the Iraq War.

On April 21, 2003, the front page of the Times carried a story by Miller titled, "Aftereffects: Prohibited Weapons; Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." In the lead paragraph, Miller claimed that she had discovered the proof of weapons of mass destruction, a central Bush Administration argument for the war.

Based upon what members of Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha related to Miller, she reported that a mysterious, unnamed scientist had led them to a site where he had buried evidence of an illicit weapons program. Her story included the scientist's charges that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had transferred illegal weapons to Syria, and was cooperating with al-Qaeda. The revelation supported charges from the White House that Iraq was developing such weapons, and had lied about it to the United Nations.

The catch was that her story came entirely from secondary sources and had no independent confirmation. She never met the scientist and her copy was submitted to military officials before it was released. Yet, when Miller appeared on PBS? NewsHour the same day, she said, "Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun,? and turned her one unnamed scientist into several. Other news outlets quickly jumped on her article and statements to argue that the war was justified after all. By the next day, headlines across the country proclaimed "Illegal Material Spotted."

As it turned out, the evidence wasn?t there, and a day later Miller was reporting that there had been a "paradigm shift." Now she said MET Alpha was looking for "building blocks" and "precursors" to those weapons, another effort that ultimately proved fruitless. Next, her unnamed source informed her that the focus had changed to a search for scientists who could prove there had once been a WMD program.

This was only one of many stories produced by Miller that backed up administration arguments, only to be proven wrong or obsolete later. In many cases, she subsequently ?clarified? or backed away from an initial characterization. But just as important as the content, disseminated widely through her appearances on programs like Oprah and Larry King Live, were her associations and actual sources of information.

By her own admission, the majority of stories she wrote about weapons of mass destruction came from Ahmad Chalabi, the exiled leader of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress who hoped to replace Saddam Hussein. "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years," Miller told Baghdad Bureau Chief John Burns, another New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner who became angry with her over an article on Chalabi. ?He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper." Furthermore, MET Alpha used ?Chalabi's intel and document network for its own WMD work,? she admitted.

Equally relevant was Miller?s association with the Middle East Forum, which promoted her as a speaker on "militant Islam? and ?biological warfare." Founded by Daniel Pipes, the forum was in the forefront of the push for an invasion of Iraq before the war. Pipes in turn maintained close relationships with Douglas Feith, an undersecretary at the Department of Defense, and leading neoconservative Richard Perle.

In Woodward?s book on the Iraq War, Plan of Attack, Secretary of State Colin Powell describes Feith as running a ?Gestapo office? determined to find a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. In A Pretext for War, a book on the abuse of U.S. intelligence agencies before and after 9/11, James Bamford describes how Feith and Perle developed a blueprint for the Iraq operation while working for pro-Israeli think tanks.

Their plan, called ?A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,? centered on taking out Saddam and replacing him with a friendly leader. ?Whoever inherits Iraq,? they wrote, ?dominates the entire Levant strategically.? The subsequent steps they recommended included invading Syria and Lebanon.
[.....]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0812-20.htm
Planned Parenthood is America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care.