Jeremy Scahill’s True Colors Bleeding Through (or “Poo On Fire”)

by Scott Creighton

(***UPDATE*** True to my word, the pictorial I call “Ode to Liberal Fraud” is now posted at the end of this article. Years in the making (ok… about 10 minutes) and at a cost of thousands of dollars (ok… it didn’t cost anything), the final work is completed at great personal risk (ok… I got poo on my hand) … art critics, be kind… I’m so vulnerable.)

Jeremy Scahill’s role as propagandist for the “left” is becoming clearer by the day.

In a short little offering of pro-war campaign copy he cobbled together for The Nation magazine, ”anti-Empire” reporter Jeremy Scahill is able to defend the use of drones, reduce the number of civilians they have killed, and help promote the falsehood about the Pakistan Taliban attacking us in New York (and therefore generate support for the Clinton/Obama desire to ”surge” into Pakistan) … all in one shot, in just a few paragraphs.  Karl Rove, eat your heart out.

Now I am not saying it isn’t ham-handed and obvious propaganda, but Scahill gets the job done quickly, in few words, so he can get back to pimping his book tour or picking out his new Green Zone dwelling, where-ever that may be.

You know, I might not have been completely convinced that Scahill was a globalist’s tool until I read this little gem. But now, there is no question. And he is still a douche bag.

Scahill’s article addresses an MSNBC Dylan Ratigan segment in which they are pretending to have on two people with “opposing” viewpoints.  But like much of the fake “left/right” paradigm, the “opposing” viewpoints offered are simply different shades of the same nebulous grey.

Let’s first flush out the “pro-war” commonality Dylan’s two guests share: Support the Clinton administration’s decision to step up the war in Pakistan based on the false pretense that the Pakistani Taliban attacked us in Times Square with the SUV Sparkler of Doom.

You see, the undercurrent here is that if BOTH of these two “opposing” viewpoints share the same basic unspoken agreement, then it must be taken as a given, right? Then, along comes a “respectable” journalist with proven antiwar credentials writing for the Nation magazine making the exact same assumption and all of MSNBC’s progressive left viewers have to accept this as a consensus opinion, right?  “Shit. If all these people just expect us to understand that the Pakistani Taliban attacked us in Times Square, then it MUST be true.”

“With MOUNTING evidence of the connection between the failed Times Square bombing and the Pakistani Taliban, new questions AND FEARS arising about the groups TERROR reach…”  “Progressive” Dylan Ratigan

(psst… hey Dylan… if you got a moment before you head off to meet Glenn Beck at the club for single malts, would you mind sharing some of that “mounting evidence” with the rest of us? thanks…)

The next thing you know, you have a bunch of liberal’s in their daily interactions parroting the same conclusion based on absolutely nothing. To them it’s just a “given”. They don’t know why. You ask them for the proof and there simply is none, except that stupid condescending smirk… “Everyone KNOWS that…”

Now you might think that would be enough; after all, Jeremy has helped convince tens of thousands of liberals that we have to invade Pakistan to protect the hotdog venders from a certain sparkling death… but you would be wrong.  Why should he stop there when he has other clients who can pay for his services?

The next issue to deal with is all the bad press that this fake attack has generated about the DRONE WARS in Pakistan.  Those drone makers are big money in D.C. right now (the biggest underwriters of congressional trips from 2000-2005 alone). Can’t have them suffering any political backlash as a result of the fake war on terror, now can we?

This is basically the whole point of the phony “debate” on the Dylan Ratigan GE War Contractor’s Propaganda Hour… you have one administration propagandist come out and say “the report is that Pakistani Taliban are mad about all the civilians killed by these drones” and then the other propagandist states “the drones have killed no innocent people at all”. 

Then along come Jeremy Scahill to give us “the real numbers” and add a level head to it all.

The two were discussing the alleged failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and potential connections to the Taliban in Pakistan. In the discussion, Lt. Col. Shaffer raised the issue of US drone strikes against Pakistan, which Shahzad reportedly has said were part of his motivation for the attempted bombing. “The Taliban are more motivated than ever to come at us,” said Shaffer, saying that “the Predator program is having the same effect in Afghanistan two years ago in killing innocents” that it is now having in Pakistan.

Professor Fair, who has also worked for the RAND Corporation and as a political officer to the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, acted dumbfounded at the idea that the US drone strikes kill any civilians. “I take extreme exception top the way my colleague characterized the drones,” Fair said. “Actually the drones are not killing innocent civilians. Many of those reports are coming from deeply unreliable and dubious Pakistani press reports, which no one takes credibly on any other issue except for some reason on this issue. There’ve actually been a number of surveys on the ground, in FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas]. The residents of FATA generally welcome the drone strikes because they know actually who’s being killed. They’re very much aware and who’s being killed and who’s not.”  “Progressive” Jeremy Scahill

(notice that the “potential connections to the Taliban” aren’t “alleged”… even though everything these people are talking about is coming from what Eric Holder (globalist and shill for the Obama/Clinton administration) SAYS Shahzad “confessed”… )

Now, watch what Jeremy does to make a living here…

Some estimates, most of which are indeed Pakistani sources, suggest that the vast majority of Pakistanis killed are civilians. In an Op-Ed [1] for The New York Times last year, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, called for a moratorium on the strikes, saying they had “killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent.” They relied on “Pakistani sources,”… “antiwar” Jeremy Scahill

The first thing he does once he’s finished helping promote the “boots on the ground in Pakistan” Tony Shaffer position, is to basically concur with the RAND Corporation mouthpiece… that the Pakistani sources are probably incorrect. So what does he do to prove his point? He offers up THE RELIABLE STUDY from Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation as evidence that she is just plain wrong.

Bergen and Tiedemann concluded that “the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent.” They concluded that under President Obama Under President Obama, who has used the drones with much greater frequency than Bush, “about a quarter [of drone-inflicted deaths] appear to have been civilians.”  “Propagandist” Jeremy Scahill

So the “real” numbers according to Scahill are actually getting better now that President Nobel Prize HOPY CHANGY is in office and dropping more bombs on more wedding parties and funerals in Pakistan than Bush ever thought he could get away with. This of course is based on the study from a pro-war globalist think-tank called the New America Foundation.

New America emphasizes work that is responsive to the changing conditions and problems of our 21st Century information-age economy — an era shaped by transforming innovation and wealth creation, but also by shortened job tenures, longer life spans, mobile capital, financial imbalances and rising inequality. New America Foundation

This is a group whose only problem with Elena Kagan is the fact that she banned military recruiters from the campus of Harvard. I shit you not…

The question was, and is, whether banning the military from campus constitutes the right response. I think it was stupid then and stupid now. New America Foundation

Now, if you want the full, spooky, al Qaeda CIA breakdown, Jeremy Scahill’s source of choice can provide that as well. Of course, you know what they are going to say…

JOHN KRINGEN
CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence
“We, like you, continue to assess that Osama bin Laden is alive. We continue to assess that he’s probably in the tribal areas of Pakistan.”
July 11, 2007

MICHAEL HAYDEN
CIA Director
“What about bin Laden? Why haven’t we killed or captured him? Anyone familiar with the Afghan-Pakistan border area knows how rugged and inaccessible it is.”
Nov. 13, 2008

LEON PANETTA
CIA Director
Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri are hiding “either in the northern tribal areas [of Pakistan] or in North Waziristan or somewhere in that vicinity.”
March 17, 2010

And as far as Arizona is concerned, these guys have all the right globalist stuff too…

For Obama, Arizona provides a chance to deliver on several promises and accomplish various objectives… Now they can argue that comprehensive immigration reform is not only desirable but constitutes the only antidote to other states’ S.B. 1070s… nothing could be more important to that than legalizing Mexicans already in the U.S., as well as those who will inevitably enter over the next decade…  More importantly, the Bush precedent is worth remembering: Obama’s predecessor truly wanted immigration reform. But he waited so long to push for it that when he did he was too weak to achieve it.  New America Foundation

Yes, according to Jeremy Scahill’s source, we should learn from the Bush regime that it’s difficult to pass a neoliberal globalist bill off on the people who by far and away don’t want it. Difficult indeed. So Obama should strike while the iron is hot and get that Bush Immigration/REAL ID Act passed just as soon as possible…

Pretty cool source for a liberal like Jeremy Scahill to quote, huh?

Which brings us back to the issue at hand… Jeremy’s little propaganda piece.

Nobody wants more wars. In fact most of Jeremy’s audience were calling for less just a few short years ago (didn’t we hire a bunch of Democrats in 2006 on the promise they would end the occupation? Didn’t Obama famously state in his campaign that he would end the Imperialist mindset that gets us into these things in the first place?). Hell, the idea is so popular now that even Fox News has their little fake populist, Glenn Beck, running around claiming he wants to scale back our Imperialist wars of aggression. 

Now you know an issue has serious Focus Group polling power when Fox News takes that stance.

But lo-and-behold, there is the “progressive” liberal Truth Teller out there selling us a new invasion based on lies and the whitewashing of the killer Drones Industry based on a propagandist globalist think-tank like the New America Foundation.

The worm certainly has turned, hasn’t it? I wonder how much a Jeremy Scahill costs these days?

Thank you Jeremy Scahill.

Thank you for setting me straight. 

I will take a photo of me burning my copy of “Blackwater” just as soon as I get my camera out of the pawn shop (or maybe I will burn it and use the scanner?).  You can feel free to send me $17 I spent on your book… you or that other psyop shill, Amy Goodman… How’s she doing selling that Carbon Trading Global Warming (opps… lets call it “Climate Change” instead) scam, by the way?

You enjoy your Green Zone lifestyle you bought by selling us out. Your latest little propaganda blurb has given us all a better insight into your true colors.

For that, I am grateful.

***UPDATE*** I present to the art world, “Ode to a Liberal Fraud“

(the Poo makes it art…ok I’m a profoundly troubled man… is this a cry for help?)