BELOW is a 1998 article by a former AP news executive on the same
themes and issues that non-compromised and non-pussy journalists have
been struggling with for 20 years.

It is actually very applicable to TODAY and may even make an outline
for some of you that was never clear before!  I hope so!!!!


The Consortium

 http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost20.html


GOP & KAL-007:

 'The Key Is to Lie First'

By Robert Parry

It's not entirely clear when the Republican Party made disinformation a
political weapon of choice.

Some trace the pattern back to the late 1940s when Joe McCarthy and
Richard Nixon used an exaggerated Red Scare to throw the Truman
administration on the defensive and clear the way for the GOP's Cold
War dominance of the White House.

Others argue, however, that Republican lying is nothing special; that
it's just the nature of politics; that it's always been that way; that
the Democrats -- or the Greens and the Libertarians, for that matter --
are no better.

But I believe there are shades of gray in politics, that a disingenuous
"spin" or a defensive equivocation are not the same as an outright
falsehood intended to defame an enemy or to inflame the public. It
seems to me that the modern Republican Party is unusual in that it not
only steps across the line from time to time, but has relocated on the
wrong side. Distortion and character assassination have become almost a
political way of life.

My personal experience with this disturbing trend started in December
1980, when I worked for The Associated Press and was part of the AP's
Special Assignment Team. In my earlier reporting career -- covering
state politics in Rhode Island and congressional politics in Washington
-- I had seen lots of the lighter forms of lying from both parties.
Indeed, most of my early investigative stories were about Democratic
misdeeds and damage control.

But in covering the emerging U.S. policy toward Central America in late
1980, I encountered a systematic strategy of lying. The incoming Reagan
administration apparently saw "disinformation" as just one more
ideological weapon in the Cold War arsenal, with the ends justifying
the means.

The victorious Republicans didn't blink, for instance, in protecting
political murderers in El Salvador, even when the victims were four
American churchwomen who were raped and butchered by a right-wing
military.

Coming as he did from movies, President Reagan seemed to have only a
casual relationship with the truth anyway. But his persistent acts of
deception over his eight years in the White House cannot be so glibly
explained or excused. In his handling of foreign policy, in particular,
Reagan routinely misled the American people.

The KAL Deception

One of the baldest -- and now admitted -- lies was the case of Korean
Air Lines flight 007. On the night of Aug. 30, 1983, the KAL 747 jumbo
jet strayed hundreds of miles off-course and penetrated some of the
Soviet Union's most sensitive air space, by flying over military
facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.

Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15
fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the
KAL pilots apparently did not see the repeated warnings. Amid confusion
about the plane's identity -- a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity
hours earlier -- Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He
did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on
board.
The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S.
intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had
resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on
July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down an
Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an
act which Reagan explained as an "understandable accident").

But in 1983, the truth about KAL-007 didn't fit Washington's propaganda
needs. The Reagan administration wanted to portray the Soviets as
wanton murderers, so it brushed aside the judgment of the intelligence
analysts. The administration then chose to release only snippets of the
taped intercepts packaged in a way to suggest that the slaughter was
intentional.

"The Reagan administration's spin machine began cranking up," wrote
Alvin A. Snyder, then-director of the U.S. Information Agency's
television and film division, in his 1995 book, Warriors of
Disinformation.
USIA director Charles Z. Wick "ordered his top agency aides to form a
special task force to devise ways of playing the story overseas. The
objective, quite simply, was to heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union
as possible," Snyder recalled.

In a boastful but frank description of the successful disinformation
campaign, Snyder noted that "the American media swallowed the U.S.
government line without reservation. Said the venerable Ted Koppel on
the ABC News 'Nightline' program: 'This has been one of those occasions
when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the
U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting
networks.'"

Of course, if the journalists hadn't gone along, they could have
expected to be flogged for disloyalty. So, most Washington reporters
ran with the pack. Newsweek published a cover line: "Murder in the
Sky," exactly the "theme" that the White House wanted conveyed to the
public.

Mistranslation

At the AP, I made a small contribution to questioning the official
story. I felt the released intercepts were suspicious. So I took the
English language translation, as well as the original Russian, to
Russian language experts, including one who taught Pentagon personnel
how to translate Russian military transmissions.

The Russian language experts noted one important error in the English
translation released by the State Department. In the context of the
Soviet pilot trying to communicate with the KAL plane, the
administration translated the Russian word "zapros," or inquiry, as
"IFF" for "identify: friend or foe." The AP's experts, however, said
"zapros" could mean any kind of inquiry, including open radio
transmissions or physical warnings.
The significance of the mistranslation was central to the
administration's case. U.S. officials had extrapolated from "IFF" to
advance the "murder in the sky" argument. Since an IFF transmission can
only be received by Soviet military aircraft, that was further proof
that the Russians made no attempt to warn the civilian airliner.

Still, the mistranslation was only one of the ways the tapes were
doctored, as Snyder discovered when the intercepts were delivered to
his office for transfer into a video presentation that was to be made
at the United Nations.

"The tape was supposed to run 50 minutes," Snyder observed. "But the
tape segment we [at USIA] had ran only eight minutes and 32 seconds.
... 'Do I detect the fine hand of [Nixon's secretary] Rosemary Woods
here?' I asked sarcastically.'"

But Snyder had a job to do: producing the video that his superiors
wanted. "The perception we wanted to convey was that the Soviet Union
had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act," Snyder noted.
Only a decade later, when Snyder saw the complete transcripts --
including the portions that the Reagan administration had hidden --
would he fully realize how many of the central elements of the U.S.
presentation were false.

The Soviet pilot apparently did believe he was pursuing a U.S. spy
plane, according to the intercepts, and he was having trouble in the
dark identifying the plane. At the instructions of Soviet ground
controllers, the pilot had circled the KAL airliner and tilted his
wings to force the aircraft down. The pilot said he fired warning
shots, too. "This comment was also not on the tape we were provided,"
Snyder stated.

It was clear to Snyder that in the pursuit of its Cold War aims, the
Reagan administration had presented false accusations to the United
Nations, as well as to the people of the United States and the world.
To these Republicans, the ends of smearing the Soviets had justified
the means of falsifying the historical record.

In his book, Snyder acknowledged his role in the deception and drew an
ironic lesson from the incident. The senior USIA official wrote, "The
moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when
it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first."

'Public Diplomacy'

Another key to the propagandists' success has been to soften up the
Washington news media, to ensure that journalists were ready to accept
whatever lies were told. To that end, Reagan assigned aggressive
"public diplomacy" teams to intimidate and discredit the few Washington
journalists who asked pointed questions and tried to get at the truth.
[For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

In this regard, another interesting disclosure in Snyder's book is the
quasi-official USIA role played by Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine.
Irvine is commonly described as a "media watchdog" and is addressed
personably as "Reed" when he appears on Koppel's "Nightline." According
to Snyder, however, Irvine also was an adviser to the Reagan
administration's propaganda apparatus.

During Reagan's second term, Irvine -- along with conservative
fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and Joe McCarthy's legendary counsel Roy
Cohn -- vetted the selection of a new Voice of America director, Snyder
reported. When the leading candidate, former ABC News president William
Sheehan, refused to answer the group's questions about his personal
vote in the presidential election, Sheehan was blackballed from getting
the job.

Irvine's unpublicized collaboration with Reagan's propaganda machinery
also surfaced during the Iran-contra hearings in 1987. A White House
document, dated May 20, 1983, described how USIA director Wick held a
private White House fund-raiser which generated $400,000 for Irvine's
organization and other conservative groups.

While working behind the scenes with USIA and receiving secret
subsidies arranged by the government, Irvine carried out vituperative
attacks on skeptical journalists. I was one of the reporters who was a
frequent target of AIM.

Bringing It Home

But the end of the Cold War did not end the Republicans' reliance on
propaganda. They seem to have just taken the lessons domestic. Many of
the same individuals who thrived during the Reagan-Bush years, such as
Irvine, are employing similar disinformation tactics against the
Clinton administration.

It is as if President Clinton has replaced the former Soviet Union as
the target for the Right's "ends-justify-the-means" deceptions. Instead
of lies about KAL-007 -- or "yellow rain" chemical warfare or the KGB
role in the pope's shooting or Nicaraguan Sandinista "anti-Semitism" or
a host of other propaganda "themes" -- the disinformationists now are
linking Clinton to a variety of crimes: Vincent Foster's "murder," drug
trafficking out of the Mena, Ark., "death squad" operations in
Arkansas, etc.

Indeed, in early May, congressional Republicans mounted one remarkable
disinformation operation that echoed the KAL-007 story from 15 years
earlier. Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., released selective excerpts from
private prison conversations that Clinton pal Webster Hubbell had with
family, friends and lawyers.

The handpicked snippets suggested that Hubbell was under White House
pressure to lie and was covering up for criminal over-billing by
Hillary Clinton when she worked at the Rose Law Firm. The Washington
media had a field day, with front-page stories that accepted Burton's
spin on the tapes.

But, just as the Reagan administration had done in the KAL-007 case,
Burton had withheld exculpatory statements from the released excerpts.
For instance, Burton chose to leave out Hubbell's declaration in the
same conversation that Mrs. Clinton had "no idea" about illegal
over-billing schemes and that he was not receiving hush money.

A red-faced news media ran clarifications. But the Washington press
corps still seems unwilling to draw lessons from the past. Special
prosecutor Kenneth Starr and other Republicans might insist that their
interest now is a principled pursuit of "the whole truth" about the
"Clinton scandals." But the party's 50-year record -- from Nixon and
McCarthy to Reagan and Bush -- leave many with an understandable sense
of skepticism.

In the situational ethics of GOP politics, Snyder's advice still rings
loudly: "The key is to lie first."
 
Copyright (c) 1998