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Monday, October 05, 2009

New York Times Whines: Rethink Afghanistan Film is Not "Balanced"

Short, succinct and devastatingly brutal to the NYT support for Afghanistan debacle ~t

Perhaps more than any other major corporate news outlet, The New York Times played a central role in promoting the Bush administration's fraudulent case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The "reporting" of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon basically served as a front-page fiction laundering factory for Dick Cheney’s fantasy of a “mushroom cloud” threat from Saddam Hussein looming on the immediate horizon, topped off with a celebratory slice of yellowcake. More recently, the paper’s propagandists, William Broad and David Sanger, have aimed their sights on reporting dubious claims about Iran’s nuclear program.

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Anyone who has actually seen the film knows that a string of former top intelligence officials, perhaps most significant among them the former head of the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center, Robert Grenier, are heard meticulously deconstructing the dominant justifications for the continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. What does Grenier know? Oh, he was just the CIA station chief in Islamabad, Pakistan, where he was one of the Agency’s top officials planning the U.S. invasion. Grenier, along with former CIA operative Robert Baer and other former intelligence officials, rebut in detail the claim that the war in Afghanistan is about fighting al Qaeda or making America safer, which Baer says bluntly in the film is “just complete bullshit.” The film also features Graham Fuller, the former CIA station chief in Kabul. (Click here to watch this part of the film)

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The Times snarkily declares that Rethink Afghanistan is "unlikely to win over new supporters" to the anti-war or anti-escalation crowd. Quite the contrary: there are 600 screenings of the film scheduled and MoveOn.org, which has been very sluggish in coming around to criticizing the Afghan war, has just teamed up with Greenwald to promote the film. That in and of itself was no small accomplishment. The timing of Rethink Afghanistan is very important and will serve a utilitarian purpose for those people serious about the facts and not manipulating them, as has been the case on the pages of a certain newspaper we all know.

To watch the film, go to Brave New Film's Rethink Afghanistan website.

1 Comments:

Blogger Tao Dao Man said...

these war mongers have to be exposed before it is too late. the NYT. is a rag. they are complicit in the run up to the attack on iraq. and now they will be beating the drums to escalate the war into the rest of the region. they are not journalists working at the NYT. they are saboteurs of freedom and logic.

October 05, 2009 9:51 PM  

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