Japanese Have Washington Post Running Scared Over 9/11 - David Martin

Dear readers...I present to you another gem from David Martin:

Japanese Have Washington Post Running Scared over 9/11

The issue, as framed by the U.S. ruling elite’s hometown house organ is very simple; a top insider in Japan’s new government has lost his marbles. The Washington Post’s apoplexy over the fact that Councilor Yukihisa Fujita isn’t buying the official version of what happened on September 11, 2001, is well reflected in the two headlines it gave to its March 8, 2010 editorial. First we have the print edition:

Poisonous Thinking in Japan

Has a conspiratorial view of 9/11 taken hold in the ruling party?

Then we have the even more hysterical headline in the electronic version:

A Leading Japanese Politician Espouses a 9/11 Fantasy

The two paragraphs below capture the flavor of The Post’s screed. I have provided some educational assistance for the reader by supplying useful links. Only the last of the six links was in The Post’s original online version.

Fujita's ideas about the attack on the World Trade Center, which he shared with us in a recent interview, are too bizarre, half-baked and intellectually bogus to merit serious discussion. He questions whether it was really the work of terrorists; suggests that shadowy forces with advance knowledge of the plot played the stock market to profit from it; peddles the fantastic idea that eight of the 19 hijackers are alive and well; and hints that controlled demolition rather than fire or debris may be a more likely explanation for at least the collapse of the building at 7 World Trade Center, which was adjacent to the twin towers.

As with almost any calamity whose scale and scope assume historic proportions, the events of Sept. 11 have spawned a thriving subculture of conspiracy theorists at home and abroad. The only thing novel about Mr. Fujita is that a man so susceptible to the imaginings of the lunatic fringe happens to occupy a notable position in the governing apparatus of a nation that boasts the world's second-largest economy.


The giveaway as to how frantic The Post is over this matter is that they are editorializing before reporting. That Fujita, who as a graduate of Keio University is about as plugged in to Japan’s ruling “old boy” network as it is possible to be, has abandoned the 9/11 sinking ship was not previously even mentioned in The Post or anywhere else in the mainstream U.S. press, to my knowledge.

Now The Post tells us that they have interviewed him, and here we see them running out of the interview screaming like Chicken Little. So where is the interview itself? Shouldn’t we all raise a hue and cry for The Post to print the whole thing so we can decide for ourselves whether Fujita’s "ideas" (conclusions based upon an examination of the evidence?) really "are too bizarre, half-baked and intellectually bogus to merit serious discussion." The Post can’t claim lack of print space. We’re in the Internet age now. We don’t really need the mainstream media to give us all our opinions pre-chewed and digested.

I’m not holding my breath waiting for The Post to print that interview, no matter how much we might clamor for it. It would be nice if Fujita taped it and publishes it himself.

David Martin
March 8, 2010

The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club; Eliot Spitzer Was Trying To Protect Us!

I wanted to treat you, dear readers, to this gem by Christopher Ketcham:

A Rotten Washington Interlude
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

Anyone who has worked in the free market of ideas instinctively hates Washington, DC. That’s because there is no free market in DC, for ideas or for anything else. It’s a small-minded town on a hypertrophic scale, a Southern town gone Napoleonic, which is to say it’s backward and inbred and beady-eyed and paranoid while ruling over an empire. Hanging around with sources in Washington reminded me of the creeps I used to know as a teenager on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, another kind of Appalachia with money. I remember with special disgust a guy named Sean M., who had a 14-inch penis and would wander about at parties slapping his dick on people’s shoulders – you’d notice the crotch stink first, then the weight of the object. Then the cackle as it was pulled away. Sean, who was fat and bespectacled, went on to consume much cocaine with his parents’ cash card, and he was probably recently running a piece of Bear Stearns with his dick in his mouth.

I lived in DC briefly in the autumn of 2007, working on a story about mass government databases compiled from illegal surveillance of American citizens. I meet a source for the story on one of those unnatural swampy-warm Potomac nights. Veteran DC lawyer, beautiful suit, beautiful briefcase, calm clamminess of slicked hair, has worked all his life for big law firms, looks carved in wax, like he’s never seen the sun or sought a pleasure he couldn’t have. We exchange information. He seems to know the gamut of the players in the parties, making no distinctions of Right and Left, for they are “all friends,” the favorites in the revolving door of intelligence and Defense and State and the industries and institutions that depend on government, the Georgetown Universities, the thinktanks, the weapons companies, the Washington Post, the “places that matter.” During our interview I have the urge to reach across the table and smack the reptile on the face and see what happens.

The people here feel big because the government is big and obviously because DC is the seat of federal power, which persists despite year after year of proven antagonism to everything we imagine and idealize as American – independence of enterprise, honesty of expression, heterodoxy in opinion, rebelliousness in action. The imperial capitol maintains record levels of employment despite what downturns may occur in that zone of nobodies known as the rest of the country, and whichever the wind that blows with the administration, a job at the beltway teat is as certain as the sunrise in the east, though officials may be employed to prove the sun rises elsewhere. A welfare town for white people – that’s DC. As for ideas: the only idea here is that the bigness of the thing shall be perpetuated, the money shall keep flowing from our pockets to somewhere we know not and often cannot know, that change will always come in the guise of the same little men wearing the carnival masks that say Change and Hope (every election year the drivel as constant as the seasons of a circus: wasn’t it Bill Clinton, the clown from Hope, who sought “change” in DC?).

During those two zombie months that I wasted in Washington, I got to drinking at the National Press Club, which was enjoying its own election for president. The guy who slipped me into the bar at the NPC, which is members only, was Wayne Madsen, one of the great unsung investigative reporters of our time, who lives on what sounds like the edge of bankruptcy in a little apartment in Arlington, Va. Madsen was running for the presidency of the club as an insurgent in what is most often a fixed event – there normally is no challenger to the club-ordained pick.

When in DC you find a human like Madsen, someone decent, it’s as reassuring as I imagine finding air on the moon. Madsen likes to get crocked on alcohol, which made us instant friends. He has the look and laugh of a goblin crossed with Falstaff – bulging stomach and bug eyes and a goatee smattered on several chins. He appears to have an insatiable appetite for Guinness stout and ribs and corned beef (though he not long ago sold his car, taking public transit, working off the meat lard). He is out at all hours meeting sources in parks and the backs of hotel bars and in stairwells, most of them aggrieved officers from the NSA and CIA who feed him information that no one else will publish. Madsen himself is a former Naval Intelligence officer and National Security Agency analyst who later spent seven years with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the public interest research group.

What I like most about Madsen, especially in the swamp of self-regarding overdressed queen-journos in DC, is that his blog, the Wayne Madsen Report, knows how to make a joke, and in fact it serves as a running commentary on the hilarious weirdness of the US government. “Even Bush’s Crap is Classified Top Secret,” he reports, relating how the Secret Service scoops up George Bush’s feces during visits to “compromised foreign toilets.” White House “toilet security,” or “TOILSEC,” does not want foreign intelligence culling the shit for clues to the contents of the presidential stomach. (And if you don’t believe it, note that, in an era when the merest medical conditions of top political leaders are state secrets, the Israeli Mossad has conducted “sewage pipe ops” against Syrian President Hafez Assad, and during Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Washington in 1987, the CIA reportedly “placed a special trap under a sewage tank to collect the Soviet leader’s bodily waste for analysis.”)

Madsen likes writing about shit. He reports that Paul Wolfowitz a few years back crapped himself following a rocket attack on his hotel in Iraq. According to Madsen, who cited sources on the scene, Wolfowitz, “in tears,” was “running through the hotel lobby in his underpants with a blanket thrown over his head.” A reporter who spoke to Madsen “saw that the seat of Wolfowitz's underpants was soiled with a very visible stain.” Madsen has also of course broken stories that got picked up by the mainstream, for which he was mostly ignored. It was Madsen who first revealed Wolfowitz’ nepotistic favors to his girlfriend, Shaha Reza, at the World Bank, a scandal which forced Wolfowitz to resign; it was Madsen who first reported that CNN was employing US Army psy-ops personnel at their headquarters in Atlanta; it was Madsen who first detailed the illegal dealings between NSA operatives and the Maryland State Police to set up a domestic spying apparatus.

One NPC member, an ex-reporter for a gateway newspaper, tells me, “When his stuff gets corroborated by the big guys at the Post and the Times – and they do corroborate it – they don’t run with it because they want someone like the head of the CIA to come out and admit it,” says the ex-reporter, who (tellingly) wouldn’t let me use his name. “They want to be handed the story. They certainly don’t want to take a risk. Don’t want to look like they’re crazy. Wayne doesn’t care if he looks like he’s crazy.”

The NPC, which celebrated its centennial in 2008, was founded mostly to have a place where reporters could get blind drunk and make fools of themselves, so Madsen was the ideal president. “I want to be in the office so that I get a call, ‘Mr. President, George Bush is on the phone,” he tells me. Ex-president Gil Klein said recently, “I’d like to tell you [the press club] was founded for some lofty journalistic reason, like protection of the First Amendment, but the fact of the matter is that in 1908 the bars in Washington closed at midnight.” The club was showcasing the vaunted hundred-year anniversary with a documentary film and many parties – Bob Schieffer was expected to tell audiences that the NPC is “a national treasure” – yet the membership no longer boozes much at the bar. The rolls are in decline. The reporters instead mouse at their desks, wait for e-mails, text on cellphones, and go home to ranchettes in McLean and townhouses on the river in Alexandria. The Washington Post apparently has been the chief player in reducing the influence of the National Press Club. It was the Washington Post that first established a separate “press club” outside the auspices of the NPC, for the purpose (I am told by the drunks at the NPC) of circumscribing information, keeping it inside the bloc, keeping it approved, insuring that the babblings and hearsay of the NPC – where journalists once upon a time tackled each other with their leads – would no longer get in the way of a streamlined operation.

So much for the free market of ideas. Madsen lost by a landslide the election for the presidency of the NPC. The incumbent victor was an editor at The Journal Gazette, in Fort Wayne, Ind., where madmen who crap themselves in the pursuit of power will not make the headlines.

Christopher Ketcham writes for Vanity Fair, GQ, Harper’s and many other magazines, and is currently working on a book, “The United States Must End.” You can reach him at cketcham99@mindspring.com.

My thinking on this goes way back to the Watergate break-in...do you believe that Bob Woodward would be able to write a completely-vetted book about George Walker Bush, if he had spilled the beans regarding the real reason behind the Watergate break-in?

I think not.

Also...Michael Rivero dug up the article that ended the tenure of New York State Governor Eliot G. Spitzer. Amazingly, this wasn't given the wide circulation his scandal was. If more people had paid attention to this, rather than the prudish mendacity of the "Client 9" scandal, we may have been able to forestall the financial morass in which WE THE PEOPLE have found ourselves.

Here's a cogent piece of what we all should have been reading:

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

In other words, the Bush Administration actively sought to derail the legislation enacted to PROTECT CONSUMERS FROM PREDATORY LENDING.

That's some legacy, folks.

I also wish to congratulate Janeane Garofalo for her showing on FOX against Brian Kilmeade - please see below.