Fox News Spews Chicken Poop
To Boost Cheney's Iran War
by Michele Steinberg and Jeffrey Steinberg
The Sept. 12 story on FoxNews.com entitled "U.S. Officials Begin Crafting Iran Bombing Plan," which claims that U.S. diplomacy with Iran is a failure, and Vice President Cheney no longer has any opposition to his plan to bomb Iran, is a load of chicken poop. Like many other of Rupert Murdoch's propaganda pieces urging war—including nuclear strikes against Iran—one has to ask, "has Fox been in the henhouse again? Is that why Fox is covered in chicken poop?"
The two leading scare stories of mid-September about new war plans against Iran and Syria have both come from Murdoch's chicken coop. First there was the above-mentioned lie by one James Rosen, which claims—falsely—that "a recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran have pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack" on Iran. It would be great, if Germany would strongly oppose sanctions against Iran—but it just isn't true, according to several German government sources contacted by EIR.
Then, the assertion that "everyone in town" (i.e. Washington) is working on anti-Iran scenarios, leaving Assistant Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns as the "last man standing" against Cheney's war plan is, likewise, just another load of pure chicken poop. Rupert "Call me Guano" Murdoch, who supports a lot of Cheney's neo-con friends on the welfare system of think-tank payrolls, wishes that Nick Burns was the only opponent left in the administration—especially within the military services—but it just isn't so.
The one accurate statement is that Cheney and his aides are saying that Iran is "not containable diplomatically"—but EIR has been reporting on that for more than a year now, and making the case that that's why Cheney should be removed from office. He is a sociopath, and a criminal, and will launch war against Iran any time he can.
The second big scare story du jour—that Syria has nuclear weapons sites supplied by North Korea—is also a load of Fox-supplied chicken poop.
"Hot" leaks from the New York Times—which is, these days, continuing Judith Miller's tradition as a mouthpiece for Dick Cheney, or whoever the present equivalent of Scooter Libby is—and the Washington Post say that "surveillance photos" of Syrian territory appear to show that there might be North Korean-supplied nuclear weapons installations there. One paper—the Times—says these are Israeli photos, and the other—the Washington (Com)Post—says these are U.S. surveillance photos.
Folks, this is not the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This is chicken poop, replaying 2002 all over again, when U.S., British, and Israeli surveillance photos all showed Iraqi "WMD" sites. And poor Colin Powell was set up to embarrass himself at the United Nations in February 2003, showing these silly photos. When the UN inspectors got to the sites, sacre bleu!—no WMD. The United States invaded anyway.
So, what about the Sept. 12, 2007 story about Syria and the North Korea nukes? The original source for this chicken poop was Murdoch's newest henhouse, the Wall Street Journal, in an Aug. 31 op-ed by American Enterprise Institute loser, John Bolton. Bolton, the infamous "recess appointee" (Bolton could not win confirmation by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate) at the U.S. mission to the UN, tried like hell, but failed, for his entire 18-month term, to get a U.S. war against Iran or Syria. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Bolton, then surrounded by neo-con allies throughout the Bush-Cheney Administration, did manage to peddle the Niger yellowcake hoax that did bamboozle scores of Congressmen and Senators into giving Bush and Cheney the green light to go to war. Bolton's role in the Valerie Plame affair—the leaking of the identity of an undercover CIA officer by Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, and other White House serial national security-violaters—is yet to be unearthed.
There Is a War Plan Against Iran
Lyndon LaRouche dismissed the Sept. 12 Fox News story as nothing but "chicken poop."
There is a plan by Cheney to bomb Iran, LaRouche said, but it has nothing to do with Fox News stories. "The publicity is irrelevant. The article [of Sept. 12] is pure propaganda—and they don't have any support for that story. The reality is, we have gotten to the point, with Cheney and Bush, on Iran, where they might just do it, and don't care about a propaganda effort to justify it to anybody."
What is important, LaRouche added, is the actual buildup of military forces to carry out the attack on Iran. And, in this regard, Washington sources report that the United States once again has three U.S. Navy carrier groups in striking distance of Iran. Furthermore, under the Donald Rumsfeld "revolution in military affairs" scheme, the Strategic Command (STRATCOM) has developed a "Global Strike" plan, for launching long-range bomber attacks against targets anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours. If the Cheney-commissioned and Murdoch-led propaganda campaign for war against Iran has achieved anything, it has further demonized the United States in the eyes of everyone still sane in the Middle East—quite a stunning achievement, given the residual hatred of Washington since the March 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent destabilization of the entire region.
In addition to the planning for a massive bombing campaign against as many as 2,400 "high-value targets," inside Iran, the Bush Administration has been running a clandestine low-intensity covert war, involving ethnic minority assets, including Baluchis, Azeris, and especially Kurds. The Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), a group on the U.S. State Department's list of international terrorist organizations, has been conducting cross-border attacks inside Iran, from bases in U.S.-occupied Iraq. At a recent convention in France, the MEK received $750,000 in aid from Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, former Saudi ambassador to the United States, and a central figure in the ongoing U.S. Justice Department probe into bribery and money laundering by the British defense giant, BAE Systems.
In recent weeks, a virtual state of war has existed along the Iranian border with Iraq's northern Kurdish region. An Iraq-based splinter group of the PKK, another group on the State Department's terrorist list, has been conducting cross-border attacks inside Iran, and in retaliation, Iran has been shelling Kurdish villages inside Iraq, and is now erecting a wall along a stretch of the Iran-Iraq border, according to one U.S. intelligence source. Recently, police in Iraq intercepted a large volume of U.S. military equipment being "sold" to PKK forces, ostensibly by "criminal" gangs operating inside the U.S. military logistics chain, further raising the question of whether the Bush Administration has covertly sanctioned the operations of Iraqi-based terrorist groups inside Iran.
In deeds, the Bush Administration is pushing Iran into a confrontation, through pinprick provocations—while running a Fox-centered disinformation and agitprop campaign aimed at demonizing the Islamic Republic as the actual war-mongers. And despite massive opposition within the U.S. military command to any bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic, no military sources contacted by EIR doubt that, if Bush and Cheney give the orders to bomb, the bombing will happen.
The Real Scoop on Some Nasty Poop
The central role of Anglo-Australian yellow media baron Rupert Murdoch, in putting out a steady stream of war propaganda, was, notably, dealt a nasty blow in early September, when his London Sunday Times was caught red-handed promoting a proven fabricator, who claimed that the Bush-Cheney White House had already decided to go to war against Iran.
On Sept. 2, the Sunday Times ran a provocative story, claiming that opposition to Vice President Dick Cheney's schemes to bomb Iran had all-but-evaporated, and that it was only a matter of time before Washington unleashed a 72-hour air war, to wipe out Iran's military capabilities, its industrial base, and the Islamic Republic regime. The source of the Sunday Times tall tale was an American "counter-terrorism expert," former consultant to the French Defense Ministry, and Sorbonne Ph.D. named Alexis DeBat. The only problem with Murdoch's promotion of rabid neo-con DeBat is that the Nixon Center "director of counterterrorism" was exposed as a con man, who lied about his background with the French Defense Ministry, fabricated his Ph.D., and published a string of bogus "interviews" with prominent political figures from Sen. Barak Obama (D-Ill.), to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, and even former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Congenital liar DeBat was summarily bounced from ABC News, where he had served for several years as a counterterrorism consultant, was forced to resign from his post at the Nixon Center, and to this day still tries to claim that he was "duped" by a Chicago-area freelance journalist, who, he claimed, had passed off the bogus interviews to him.
DeBat's media boosters, Murdoch's Fox TV and the London Sunday Times are so dedicated to spreading chicken poop to give cover to Dick Cheney's Iran war plans, that they will doubtlessly throw DeBat overboard and simply find a replacement wacko. After all, Fox TV has a 24-hour news cycle to fill with yellow journalism, and Murdoch has both the New York Post and the far-more prestigious London Times, along with the newly acquired Wall Street Journal, to fill with agit-poop.
