PAYING FOR POLICY

"The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day."
~ Michael Deaver.

Well, well, well . . . it looks like Hevallo wrote something he shouldn't have written--something like the truth.

Earlier today, Hevallo wrote a post in which he put forth the proposition that ExxonMobil may be paying the AEI to change foreign policy vis-a-vis Iraq. Naturally, such a foreign policy change would also be directed against South Kurdistan. To support his proposition, he includes a link to a new screed from the virulent anti-Kurdish AEI resident scholar, Michael Rubin. By the way, this new screed was presented as testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Don't remember Rubin? Rubin's the guy who pretends to have no clue as to the bloody repression the Ankara regime has inflicted on Kurds since 1923.

Hevallo points out that it was just at the beginning of this year that ExxonMobil was found to have paid a number of ideology factories to lie to the public about the state of global warming. Prominent among those ideology factories was Michael Rubin's AEI. See Hevallo's post for the link.

It's not out of the ordinary for big corporations to pay to have propaganda deposited in the American mainstream media. Philip Morris, the huge tobacco corporation, gave $100,000 to the AEI in 1997 and it was in the same year that the Washington Post published a report on how Philip Morris had tried to "systematically woo[ed] scientists who might help the company counter the growing consensus on the health risks of secondhand tobacco smoke and 'keep the controversy alive.'" According to the WaPo, Philip Morris was up to this particular propaganda trick way back in 1988.

Basically, ExxonMobil attempted the same thing with AEI over climate change. Since AEI accepted the bribe, we might as well conclude that it's been in the business of propagandizing for the corporate world for some time.

Is this a case of mere coincidence, synchronicity, or of the best laid plans?

It's also a fact that Rubin was one of the neoconservative apparatchiks who worked closely with the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, alongside such luminaries as Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and, of course, Donald Rumsfeld. And as Hevallo correctly points out, the disgraced Wolfowitz is back at the AEI, after being forced to leave the World Bank for having the nerve to ice his cupcake (Shaha Ali Riza)--as I heard Greg Palast once put it--while lecturing the rest of the world about corruption.

Further illuminating information about the nature of Rubin-as-apparatchik can be gleaned from a 2002 report in the UK's Guardian. According to the research, Rubin was a busy little bee in the run-up to the Iraq war:

Michael Rubin, a specialist on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, who recently arrived from yet another thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assists Mr Perle and Mr Wurmser at AEI. Mr Rubin also belongs to the Middle East Forum.

[ . . . ]

The Washington Institute, for example, takes the credit for placing up to 90 articles written by its members - mainly "op-ed" pieces - in newspapers during the last year.

Fourteen of those appeared in the Los Angeles Times, nine in New Republic, eight in the Wall Street Journal, eight in the Jerusalem Post, seven in the National Review Online, six in the Daily Telegraph, six in the Washington Post, four in the New York Times and four in the Baltimore Sun. Of the total, 50 were written by Michael Rubin.

Anyone who has tried offering op-ed articles to a major newspaper will appreciate the scale of this achievement.

I can feel the pain, man.

If anyone thinks that this kind of thing is unusual, an aberration, think again. It's not just that big corporations donate to ideology factories; they also hire PR firms, or lobby firms, to plant biased information in the media. This is done in order to gain public support for foreign policy shifts that the corporatocracy is paying organizations like AEI to swing for them in Congress. To get that side of the story, read the teaser from Harper's Ken Silverstein on his undercover investigative work on the subject, or the hypocritical criticism he received from the media lapdogs who so eagerly publish the corporatocracy's propaganda. Alternatively, you can listen to an interview with him in which he describes how the lobby firms he scammed admitted that they had planted stories in the American media many times.

But the point about Hevallo's post is that US foreign policy is being encouraged in the direction of Turkey against the Kurds, and that Rubin has a heavy hand in the business, very possibly all bought and paid for by ExxonMobil. Rubin, the AEI, and ExxonMobil must have been laying these plans for some time because last November a small item was carried in Hürriyet which pretty much outlined Rubin's pimping of the establishment's foreign policy that he's pitching to Congress now. The Hürriyet article was brought to us by the hevals at KurdishInfo:

In his fax to me, Rubin explained that he had given this interview by email. He said: "I never said such things. In fact, I said the complete opposite. Here is precisely what I said concerning Turkey and Iraq's other neighboring countries: Whenever I go to Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurds tell me that they are our best allies, and that this friendship needs to be reciprocal. I am sorry, but this is wrong on many levels.

[ . . . ]

The Iraqi Kurds can believe what they want about Turkey, but the fact remains that for as long as Iraqi Kurdistan is a home to terrorists, Washington will always be on the side of Ankara, and not Erbil or Suleymaniye.

The fact remains that the US, and particularly the neoconservative faction, has supported the real terrorists in Turkey for decades and has supplied them with billions of dollars in weapons, which the terrorist regime used on Kurdish civilians, murdering tens of thousands and forcibly displacing millions.

There's more on Rubin, Kurds, and the plague of neoconservatism from March. As Rubin once said in a rebuttal to a Vanity Fair press release on an article about neocon whitewashing of their role in forming the failing policy of the Iraq war:

I absolutely stand by what I said. Too many people in Washington treat foreign policy as a game.

I'm sure he means it too, along with the implication that he, himself, does not treat foreign policy as a game. For Rubin, and those like him, foreign policy is a business for sale to the highest bidder.

Hevallo's been making the point, too, that the US is using TSK as a means of forcing an unjust and rapacious oil law down the throats of Iraqis--Kurds included. Now with Hevallo's post on ExxonMobil's purchase of propaganda from the AEI, and AEI's Rubin providing biased testimony to the US Congress on the situation in Iraq, I think it's very clear that Hevallo is on the right track.

In fact, I think ExxonMobil thinks so, too, and that's why their lawyers are perusing Hevallo's blog, much in the same way that Lockheed Martin had it's propaganda firm, Public Strategies, Inc., peruse Rastî. I'm waiting to hear that the Genelkurmay Başkanlığı has gotten around to take a gander at Hevallo's work. When that happens, it'll be time for a congratulatory drink or two. After all, there are bastards and then there are bastards.

Know what I mean?

In the meantime, Hevallo should be given a round of applause for having garnered the attention of the first category of bastards.

Dest xweş, Heval!