THE CNN TAPES:
.
"SECRET
ARMY....ONE STEP AWAY
FROM
SECRET POLICE."
"They have gagged us. They
have deceived us and they have misled us and every reporter in this room
should know that. This is a corporate whitewash. This is a cave to the
military establishment, to the secret army which is one step away from
the secret police."
Jack Smith
Fired CNN Senior Producer
MER - Washington - 7/13/98:
A major new chill of the establishment
media is the bottom-line result of the recent CNN/Pentagon confrontation.
It was a crushing military victory; a disastrous media debacle. And there
should be no doubt that even the most senior producers and reporters will
now hesitate still further to report major stories that may stir up the
wrath of important lobbying groups and the military/intelligence/corporate
complex.
This fear and intimidation situation
has for years badly affected American journalists, as well as politicians,
when it comes to matters relating to Israel and the Middle East. The tactics
of intimidation, blackmail, and blackball have been applied by the
multi-tentacled Israeli/Jewish lobby with noticeable and increasing impact
for quite some time now. And the result has been a badly weakened and frightened
media in reporting about things that touch on Israel or overall U.S./Israeli
interests throughout the Mid-East region.
In recent years some of the Arab client-regime
states, with Saudi Arabia in the lead, have begun to use similar tactics;
but so far they have been far less effective and that whole story has other
dimensions to it which need to be dealt with separately.
Everyone in Washington knows that a
politician who speaks up truthfully about Israel is going to have
his political career targeted, and probably successfully. It wasn't that
long ago that two powerful Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee,
Senator Fulbright and then Senator Percy, both were successfully targeted
by "the lobby"; with many much less noticeable persons suffering similar
fates.
The situation is more complex when
it comes to the media. Suffice it to say for the moment that many significant
stories never even get published in any form due to a combination of press
ownership and Israeli lobby tactics.
The quote above is Jack Smith warning
his CNN colleagues and comes from a previously secret tape-recording of
a CNN conference call between Atlanta and Washington on 2 July, the day
Producers April Oliver and Jack Smith were fired.
The U.S. is a very sophisticated society
where control and repression are far more subtle and nuanced than in other
parts of the world. But Jack Smith's courageous warning should not go unheeded.
What does this all mean? Among many
other things, don't expect CNN or any other establishment network to speak
up in truthful and hard-hitting ways about today's "Peace Process", what
really sparked the Gulf War a few years ago, or for that matter about the
many past scandals in the Middle East including Israel's nuclear weapons
testing, what might have been the assassination rather than heart attack
of Gamal Abdel Nasser, or super-secret very clandestine U.S. military intervention
in the 1967 war.
