Thursday, June 01, 2006

Bush's "expert" on Iran matters

Remember Amir Taheri, the propagandist who put out that fake news story about Iranian Jews being forced to wear identifying insignia? Yesterday, he was invited to brief the President, along with a couple of high-ranking military men. Taheri, of course, is connected to the P.R. firm Benador, which functions as a neocon clearinghouse. This guy is more than just another right-wing hack.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The head of Benador was recently interviewed by "On the Media", a rather tepid and timid media scrutiny program produced out of WNYC in NY.

The company head (a Ms. Benador, forget the first name) wouldn't concede that there are/were no WMD in Iraq, or that the information her firm provided in the past on Iraq was in the slightest bit suspect (much less an outright lie).

You'd think these hacks would be banned altogether from public discourse. But no: they get invited to the White House, which says it all.

Anonymous said...

I forgot: in that same interview, Ms. Benador cited Colin Powell's UN presentation as evidence that Iraq did indeed have WMD.

We're talking about the same speech he himself disavowed and whose every claims was decredited years ago.

Joseph Cannon said...

Thanks much for this, Anon. The lady in question is Eleana Benador, and her husband is, if I ma not mistaken, a renown Picasso expert. I'm going to allow myself another repetition of a point I've already made a couple of times: I cannot understand how someone who specializes in the painter of "Guernica" can sleep with a lady who helped produce the atrocity of Fallujah.

What I wonder is -- does she realyy believe her own bullshit when she cites the Powell speech? In other words, is she given to "Truthiness" -- or just plain outright lying?

Anonymous said...

I think this line of argument, coming from a PR firm, can only be viewed as outright lies -- though the operations of "cognitive dissonsance" are so powerful that even when people who are lying consciously and methdoically start believing they're telling the truth.

That, or this is Wonderland, and and logic is whatever the Queen says it it.

In either case, it's amazing that these people are still part of the public discourse -- much less guests of the White House. Which says it all.

We are in big trouble.

Joy Tomme said...

I don't believe it matters to a Benador whether they are telling the truth, believe their bullshit or are telling lies.

They have an agenda. The agenda, in this case, is presenting Iraq as a country that the US needed to destroy.

It's the same with the Bush administration. Lies, truth, believing what they say or just being cynical isn't the point and does not matter to them. They have an agenda and whatever will promote the agenda is the approach that is taken.

I don't think any of us run-of-the-mill, fairly ordinary folks can understand the far-reaching agenda of the Carlyle Group, Rupert Murdoch and the folks who really run the United States (forget George Bush). It is so not about mational security or illegal immigrants or the stupid war in Iraq. It's about running the world and whatever it takes to do that.

And yes, it looks like the US is doing a piss-poor job of taking over the world...but that doesn't mean that is not the aim of some of the insane people in a position of power.

Ratbang Diary at: http://ratbangdiary.blogspot.com