Bruce and I were considering bidding on the two-year, $20 million contract being offered by Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense to monitor the tone of Iraq news stories filed by U.S. and foreign media.
The proposals, due Sept. 6, ask companies to show how they'll "provide continuous monitoring and near-real time reporting of Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international, and U.S. media," according to the solicitation issued last week
It would be an easy enough job. Every day you could sit around in your pajamas and report that, aside from the New York Post, FOX News Network and nutjobs like Ann Coulter and Christopher Hitchens, pretty much everyone in the U.S. media thinks that President George W. Bush's bloody and expensive Iraq adventure stinks on ice.
This view is backed up by more than 60 percent of the American people, who now regard the Iraq invasion as a mistake. A horrible mistake.
Abroad, there's not even Fox News to rely on. From London to Lahore, reporting on the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, Haditha and Guantanamo Bay has earned both Rumsfeld and Bush reputations as war criminals, sacrificing thousands of human lives in the unprovoked attack and continued occupation of a sovereign nation.
And as for the Arabic press, forget about it. The Defense Department got caught earlier this year secretly paying hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars in a goofy attempt to get Arabic journalists to pen pro-war propaganda. This worked out badly, even fatally, for some of the Iraqi journalists involved, but I must confess I fleetingly considered changing my last name to something like Halal in order to board that particular gravy train.
Simply put, Arabs -- whether they're in the media or not -- don't want us in Iraq. This feeling was exacerbated recently as American jets, piloted by Israelis, dropped tons of American-made bombs on the civilian population of Lebanon.
So this business of monitoring the U.S. and foreign press in an effort to determine whether the coverage is "positive, neutral or negative" in tone would be pretty simple. Nine stories out of 10, you could just use the "negative" stamp and pretty much justify the $20 million they're paying you.
Because nothing at all positive is happening in Iraq, or anywhere else in the Middle East, for that matter. There is nothing positive about unprovoked war, unbridled destruction or human suffering on a mass scale.
The United States has had 2,650 brave soldiers killed and another 20,000 maimed and wounded in Iraq. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered and, in Lebanon, 1,000 men, women and children have paid with their lives for Israel's ill-starred campaign.
For what?
It would take that greatest of fascist propagandists -- Josef Goebbels -- to wring any positive "spin" out of this debacle. He was so good that he had the German people believing their troops were winning in Stalingrad even after Field Marshal Von Paulus surrendered to the Soviet onslaught.
So even though Bruce and I like to make a buck as much as the next guys, we decided to pass on Rumsfeld's contract. Anyone who's concerned about public relations while the blood of innocents flows like a river is a little bit too sick, even for us.
There may be light at the end of the tunnel, though. Polling suggests that the Democrats might well take back of the House of Representatives come November, a development that would fundamentally change the one-party form of government we've suffered under for the past six years.
Our own great congresswoman, Rep. Louise Slaughter, would become chairwoman of the House Rules Committee should the Democrats take control, a position that would allow her to put investigations into the administration lies that led us into Iraq, the outing of a covert CIA agent by Republican officials for partisan political purposes and the placing of phony journalists in the White House press pool under the national spotlight, where they belong.
Nancy Pelosi of California would become house speaker in the event of a Democratic victory, and John Conyers of Michigan would chair the Judiciary Committee. At long last, the people of this country would finally get a full accounting of the high crimes and misdemeanors that have brought us to the edge of the abyss.
The right wing -- in and out of government -- spent more than $100 million of our money to impeach Bill Clinton based on personal peccadilloes that harmed no one outside his immediate family.
Bush's continuing lies -- about al-Qaeda, Iraq, domestic spying and, most recently, the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program -- clearly deserve similar scrutiny. And so long as we labor under the one-party form of government successfully employed by Soviet Russia for decades, the questions will remain unanswered.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | September 5 2006 |