Bill White. Faces Of Death: The Ron Brown Case And The Torture Lobby

“It would be grossly unfair to accuse all American Jews of giving their chief loyalty to Israel.”, columnist Joe Sobran wrote in a recent edition of his nationally syndicated columns, “But that some Jews do it is beyond question. … They always pretend that what is good for the narrow interest is good for everyone … that what is good for Israel is good for America.”

Though they have recently “simmered down” in their attempts to confront and overcome the ruling class government of President George Bush, the US Israeli lobby has not gone away. Besides the intellectually illegible essays of Charles Krauthammer – the wheel-chair-bound warmonger that Washington pundits have recently begun referring to as Dr Strangelove behind his back – and the garbage hate of its own most extreme elements like David Horowitz, the Lobby has been pounding America with typical propaganda on a few, unoriginal lines that were set for them by the Israeli government weeks ago – more bombs, bomb Iraq, unity with the US central government, defend Israel, attack Islam, Islam is fascism, Islam is Hitler, the Constitution is no good, the Constitution does not protect you, more searches are needed, torture is needed, deportation to Israel is needed, Israel is the only thing that can save you.

And while the ties the handful of grinning swine who manufacture this kind of anti-American, Fifth Columnist and anti-working class propaganda have to the Lobby are well known (see “American Media Uses Disinformation To Guide Policy”https://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/34263-n/) less well known are some of the trend setters in the American press who have either direct ties to Israeli intelligence or who are paid to write material by the government of Israel and its political parties. What follows are three figures who are defining the trend in Israeli Lobby reporting, and who’s suspicious commentaries on past incidents – including the Marc Rich and Ron Brown controversies – open up new questions as to the depth of corruption of the US press.

Old Propagandists Never Die

“Israel's contribution to the American war effort already has begun.,” Zev Chafets, a columnist for Zuckerman’s New York Daily News, wrote in a recent piece, “Israeli security experts also are consulting with various civil defense agencies in the United States. Israel is America's one truly dependable Middle Eastern ally and certainly the most militarily valuable. … Israel is the only country, aside from America itself, whose people are ready to go to war.”

The article was one of twenty Chafets has penned in the last two months dealing with Islam and Israel. Every one, not surprisingly, urges the US to attack the “Islamic Axis” and to defeat “Islamo-fascism”. Particular bile is spat at Islamic lobbying groups inside the United States, like the Council of Islamic-American Relations, “the wolves among us” as Chafets puts it, and at those who think that there was perhaps a reason, other than nihilism, that led the 9-11 hijackers to drive their planes into the United States –“evil needs no reason for its hate” Chafets says.

His propaganda is ridiculous and formulaic – one has trouble believing it would be aimed at the relatively small demographic of Americans who read newspapers, and one would think it could almost single-handedly explain the steadily dropping (though still high, at over 750,000 readers daily) circulation of the Daily News. But one should not be surprised at the nature of Chafets’ writing – after a stint in Israeli Special Forces and extensive work with Israeli intelligence during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Chafets was hired by Israel’s Government Press Office, where he directed Israel’s press and media strategy during Menachim Begin’s reign. Though he eventually returned to live in the United States, where he took up writing novels about Muslim terrorists and Jewish heroes, he didn’t stay out of the world of “news” reporting for long, and was hired last year to write columns telling Americans what to think about his old employers.

Chafets has not been under-spoken in his feelings. In a December 2, 1996 interview with the Sacramento Bee he discussed “wanting to lynch all the Arabs”. Nor is there any question as to what Chafets wants for America. His 1998 novel “The Project” featured a Speaker of the House named Dewey Goldberg who comes to power after “an accident” takes out the President and Vice President. According to reviews of the book, Goldberg lives in mortal fear that America might figure out that a 2% minority had taken control of their government, and is confronted with an Israeli Prime Minister that advises Goldberg to shed his Jewish identity and to support Israel not because he is a Jew, but because he is “an American”. Exactly what we’d expect from an Israeli Prime Minister, right? It’s Chafets’ darn little Israel, always putting America First.

But what is most interesting about Chafets, like all the personalities we review here, is not what he is advocating in the post-9-11 world, but what the remarks he has made on previous scandals. Earlier this year, in a February 15, 2001, column, he wrote that “at least one Bill Clinton operative has been calling journalists with a message: The ex-President didn't really want to pardon Marc Rich. The Israelis or the Mossad or the Jews made him do it. … This is nonsense.” He follows this up by saying, “Rich also received active support from former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres; Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg; Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami; ex-Ambassador to Washington Itamar Rabinovich; former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek; the current mayor, Ehud Olmert, and dozens of other Israeli politicians. … According to ex-Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, another letter writer, such enthusiastic endorsements were the product of gratitude … Sure, Rich has traded favors with the Mossad.”

So let us all get this straight – Marc Rich wasn’t pardoned because of the intervention of the Mossad and the Israeli government, despite the fact that the Mossad and the Israeli government intervened to have him pardoned.

Thus we see the logic of the cover-up. But it begs the question – if Chafets can claim, with a straight-face, a lie that he then contradicts in the exact same column, and not be called on it, what other lies could he and his fellow commentators have told the American public? And, knowing that he only writes for Israel, when he chooses to write, why does he or men like him chosen to comment on certain incidents over another? It would seem that knowing that a man only writes in the interests of Israel is a good way of finding out what Israel is interested in even when we can’t tell what exactly it is that the nation is up to.

Which leads us to our next case in point, where we examine the minor writer-columnist Byron York, who’s recent piece in National Review advocating torture and a police state would be an unremarkable splash in the churning waves of the torture-lobby’s hatred, if it weren’t for the fact that his most notable previous column was a piece claiming that Israel had absolutely nothing to do with the plane crash of US Commerce Secretary and former DNC Chair Ron Brown.

Of Course Ron Brown Was Not “Assassinated” – It Was A “Targeted Killing”

In 1991 a contributor to the American Spectator paid the magazine $5,000 to print a series of articles smearing Anita Hill with deliberate libels in order to undermine her testimony against Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas. According to a recent article in the Atlantic magazine,

“[Reporter David] Brock happily accepted the assignment. The article he produced, ‘The Real Anita Hill,’ was a wide-ranging attack on Hill's credibility … (Later Brock would have an equally famous change of heart and confess to using grossly unethical methods in subsequent stories about Hill, adding further confusion to the question of her credibility.)”

It wasn’t the only time. During its thirty-odd year existence, until its recent sale, the American Spectator became famous in Washington for its mercenary journalism. So when reporter Byron York, in the February 1998 edition of American Spectator, published the article “Ron Brown’s Body”, the question of corruption surfaced almost immediately. Real conservatives weren’t interested so much in what York was saying – it was a litany of transparent lies and ad hominem attacks on reporters, government officials, and conservatives who had asked some difficult questions – but as to why. Who had paid for the article? And why had they paid him to state “facts” that everyone, particularly the Spectator’s conservative audience, would know were untrue?

The details of the Brown case are well-known: A plane carrying Brown and 34 other passengers, including 14 US business executives and at least two US military personnel, crashed into a mountainside at a strange angle (not head-on) after apparently being misdirected by “mal-functioning” ground beacons. Two passengers, both US Army personnel, survived the crash, but died mysteriously while being transported to a Croatian hospital. None of this would be conclusive, if it weren’t for the fact that a perfectly round .45-inch hole was found in Ron Brown’s head (that being a .45 caliber bullet hole), and that the government worked overtime to deny that this hole in the Commerce Secretary’s head existed, despite the release of photographs to public, the testimony of four US military officers, and a December 3, 1997 expose in the Pittsburg Tribune-Review to the contrary.

As the case developed, several key witnesses in the investigation of the death were murdered, slandered, or removed from positions of authority. One who died was Oklahoma businessman Ron Miller, who in 1997 produced evidence that Ron Brown, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, had been involved with Eugene and Nora Lum, two Democratic Party fund-raisers who had been accused of laundering money between the Chinese government and the Democrats through a number of Hawaiian banks. Another who lost his job was Lieutenant Colonel Steve Cogswell, a veteran forensic pathologist who made the mistake of telling the press the Pentagon had behaved wrongly in not ordering an autopsy on Brown’s body. Chief Petty Officer Katleen Janoski, head of the photography unit at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, was dismissed for stating publicly that the hole in Brown’s head was a bullet hole. Other military personnel – like Lt Col David Hause and Air Force Major Thomas Parsons – who came forward tosubstantiate the allegations were also persecuted. It was clear within months of the incident that the entire government complex was engaged in a full scale coverup. But why? Such a deliberate attempt to conceal a murder hadn’t been seen since the days of the USS Liberty.

The most severe treatment of any of the whistle-blowers, however, was reserved for Chris Ruddy, the investigative reporter who penned the Pittsburgh-Tribune’s essay. And the man chosen to mete out the punishment was Byron York, who was fresh off of an assignment claiming that Vincent Foster really had committed suicide, and that rumors that he had been murdered were totally fabricated. York’s piece in the Spectator was little more than a slander-fest. Left unanswered the most important question – who had paid York to pen it?

So three years later we find York again, this time working as part of a pro-Israeli media campaign, writing the following piece in National Review:

“If the government believes that [Zacarias] Moussaoui [an accussed “terrorist”] does indeed have valuable information, another option would be to send him to some nation that is friendly to the United States but unfriendly to terrorists. … [That is] the conventional option. The unconventional choice is to take terrorist cases out of the civilian justice system altogether. The government could create some sort of new — and semi-secret — judicial body to handle cases like Moussaoui's.

“These days a number of experts are discussing a case from World War II in which eight Germans were captured after entering the United States with plans to commit terrorist acts. They were tried by a special military commission set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and six of them were executed in short order. The president still has such extensive, if vaguely defined, powers to hold and try suspects for national security reasons.”

Though it is interesting that he would join in the terror-security state line, that wouldn’t be evidence that he is working for directly Israel. It wouldn’t be until we take York’s words in the context of the case of Michael Long and the White House Writer’s Group.

Paying For It

The White House Writer’s Group is a Washington, DC propaganda (aka “public relations”) firm that was founded in 1993 by a coalition of White House speechwriters that had spent the past decade serving Ronald Reagan and his heir George Bush the First. Several of them, politically, are very close to the Dole and McCain wings of the Republican Party – the wings that were the primary Republican forces in driving the US into the attacks on Kosovo. Since then, they have developed a cadre of clients linked to Republican, Conservative, Israeli and Likud political causes. Though they don’t publish their client list on their website, they openly admit what they do – they place “commentary” and “opinion” pieces in newspapers that are tailored to meet their clients needs. In their words:

“You have probably seen our work for many Fortune 500 companies in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other major publications. Chances are you have also seen our work on prime-time television news and heard it on drive-time radio. … The Writers Group … develops strategies for business coalitions and public interest groups.”

For “public interest groups” read “the Israeli lobby” – because the Israeli lobby of course never wants anything that is not in the interest of the American public.

Given the history of this firm, one can imagine the conclusions one could draw from the following piece by White House Writer’s Group Director Michael Long, published in a recent issue of Jewish WorldReview, with the magazine’s endorsing comment of “SUPERB!”. Entitled “The Moral Case For Torture”, it read:

“The word floating around Washington these days is ‘torture’, as in, well, use your imagination. … Make no mistake, we are talking about inflicting pain on an individual in order to get him to tell us information-pain not as an instrument of punishment or retribution, but pain as a tool to elicit information that will save lives; pain as the vehicle to force a choice: talk, or suffer more. The question is, should we do such a thing?

“September 11 has given many a new sense of moral clarity; in particular, … of the dubious nobility of preserving every civil right for those hell-bent on destroying them for the rest of us. The national morality is no longer defined as a bottomless well of gentility; many now appreciate that such is the road to anarchy. Therefore, in limited and particular circumstances, torture must be an acceptable option.”

Thank you, Herr Long. But even more interesting, one sees Long refer to the same case as York, stating:

“By torturing Mr. Moussaoui for the truth, we would be treating a torturer with torture itself, but only in pursuit of information to save lives he himself holds at stake. It's a slippery moral slope, but never has America been on firmer moral ground than in the days after 9/11.”

Not surprisingly, the White House Writer’s Group admits that this newspaper piece was a “paid work”. On their website, they list the piece clearly in Mr Long’s bio under “work samples”: http://www.whwg.com/Firm/WritersBio.cfm?StaffId=20 .

So who is the client that is paying to undermine the US Constitution and the US Eighth Amendment. It didn’t take Pravda asking too many questions of the Washington Elite before one insider gave us the answer – the article was bought and paid for by Israel, who is launching, through its lobby in the US and through paid consulting firms, a full scale campaign to destroy the Eighth Amendment and persuade the US government to hand over to it “terror” suspects for torture. (see “When All Else Fails –Torture”, https://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/30154-n/, for more info on this campaign). Israel says it is the “expert” on “dealing with terrorism” – but American pundits should ask themselves this: If Israel is so good at dealing with terrorism, why is it the most terrorized country in the world?

Taken in this light, York’s comments, both now, and on the old Ron Brown and Vince Foster cases, become very suspicious. Who paid York to write that Ron Brown was killed? Was it is the same force paying him to right in advocacy of torture now? Or is he just a mercenary, jumping from client to client, hollow and devoid of all opinions and loyalties of his own?

Conclusions

None of this information on the Israeli subversion of the US press should be all that surprising. After all, wasn’t it revealed in the David Irving trial http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org or http://www.fpp.co.uk) that Israel had paid US authors in the book and newspaper publishing world to change their material to reflect the Israeli propaganda line -- such when Israel paid Deborah Lipstedt to libel David Irving in her book “Denying the Holocaust”, and then gave her $6 million dollars for her “defense” against Irving, which she then used to feature the best “expert witnesses” who’s testimony money can buy?

The question is not, though, whether or why Israel subverts the United States, but what reaction will this subversion eventually create? How long will the American people allow their political system, and their Constitution, to be corroded and eroded by the nihilistic hate of this foreign nation? With every other country in the world seeing America as a laughing stock for the slavish way its politicians toady after the Israelis and their US supporters, and with America’s international reputation having been destroyed by this corruption, how can the American people continue to tolerate this Fifth Column within?

A country can only survive when its government derives its support from the aspirations of its working people. A alien or alienated government can never survive the long run, and while the totalitarian instincts of Israel’s supporters may, for the moment, match the authoritarian instinct of Bush’s “right-wing” coalition, their interests have already proven divergent. As their distance from each other grows, so do their distance from the American people. Ultimately they will both find that their distance from the American people has grown too far, and that change is a-blowin’ in the wind.