>From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
>An impressive account of how, among other things, the liberal media are
>going into the tank on this. --CGE
>
Yep. I don't think I've seen one balanced view in the US media, though the LA Times as usual is the best on Russia (they were the only major US outlet to cover the Chechen hostage industry in some degree of detail, among other things).
I liked this Kraus piece:
Putin the New Saddam?
By Eric Kraus Emboldened by their historic propaganda success -- the creation ex nihilo of a justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq completely unsanctioned by international law -- members of the dangerous Washington faction with deep links to the security services and the military-industrial complex, the dread Bushoviki, have identified a new "terrorist threat": President Vladimir Putin.
The means they are now deploying are strikingly similar: planted "intelligence," manipulation of public opinion by tame journalists and "nonprofit foundations," as well as the insidious repetition of evident lies on the assumption that at least something will stick.
In a recent op-ed piece in the increasingly reactionary Washington Post, Bruce Jackson, president of the innocuous sounding Project on Transitional Democracies, accuses Putin not just of re-establishing a tsarist state, but of the supreme crime of opposing U.S. political and economic interests in Russia's historic sphere of influence: the CIS. After long service in the weapons trade (Lockheed, Martin), Jackson is now a hatchet-man for the Bush administration. A member of the far-right Project of the New American Century, he serves with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld. Jackson was instrumental in rounding up support for the Iraq war with a stealth attack, corralling East European presidents into signing the notorious letter of the "Vilnius 10."
All is fair in love and (propaganda) war. In a crass insult to the world's Jews, Jackson deploys one of the most cynical foreign policy ploys of the Bushoviki: the callous exploitation of anti-Semitism, demeaning the sufferings of the Jewish people by reducing the term "anti-Semitism" to an epithet for any regime inimical to U.S. interests.
Jackson notes that three of the business magnates who came to a sticky end are Jewish, but neglects to mention that so were six of the original seven oligarchs, as well as 90 percent of those who currently qualify for the oligarch title. Given the ratios, the real surprise would have been if the fallen angels had been, say, Orthodox Hindus.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2003/11/04/006.html
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