In my last update I covered the recent multi-agenda driven, censored and sanitized media coverage of the Gulen movement. He seems to be back in the news (mainly Turkish media) again with the Flotilla Incident, and again, with unconnected dots, and unmentioned points and facts. Interestingly, the Turkish mainstream media coverage appears to be less sanitized.

Let’s start with a recent piece published by the Wall Street Journal, written by someone we happen to know and like, Joe Lauria. Joe is one of the few, if not only, journalists who was granted access to Gulen for a direct interview (of course via translator(s) since Gulen doesn’t speak a single word of English, and let’s not forget his literacy level does not exceed the 5^th grade!). As you‘ll see below, the fluff article reads like one of Gulen’s bios available on thousands of websites. Knowing Lauria, and his style, it’s not difficult to guess why: WSJ didn’t have enough space? WSJ wanted to limit the piece to a few fluff points related to the current headlines on Flotilla? WSJ doesn’t consider Gulen’s ties to CIA’s Graham Fuller, or Israel’s Abramowitz note or news worthy?…Well, okay, you get my point, right?! I don’t have any ‘real’ inside information on what went on with the WSJ and it’s editors, but I think my guess is as good as any of my informed savvy readers Here is the article and a few excerpts:

SAYLORSBURG, Pa.—Imam Fethullah Gülen, a controversial and reclusive U.S. resident who is considered Turkey’s most influential religious leader, criticized a Turkish-led flotilla for trying to deliver aid without Israel’s consent.

…

Mr. Gülen said organizers’ failure to seek accord with Israel before attempting to deliver aid “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters.”

Mr. Gülen’s views and influence within Turkey are under growing scrutiny now, as factions within the country battle to remold a democracy that is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The struggle, as many observers characterize it, pits the country’s old-guard secularist and military establishment against Islamist-leaning government workers and ruling politicians who say they seek a more democratic and religiously tolerant Turkey. Mr. Gülen inspires a swath of the latter camp, though the extent of his reach remains hotly disputed.

…

Mr. Gülen has long cut a baffling figure, as critics and adherents have sparred over the nature of his influence in Turkey and the extent of his reach. Leading a visitor on Wednesday past his front corridor—adorned with a map of Turkey, a verse from the Quran and a photograph of a Turkish F-16 jet over the Bosphorus—he portrayed himself an apolitical teacher. “I do not consider myself someone who has followers,” he said.

…

Okay, the rest is history; literally his bio. As you can see, not a word on the real stuff.

On the other hand, the Turkish press was not as audacious, and they couldn’t resist mentioning a few noteworthy points such as:

How Gulen has had the backing of the US-Israel Lobby

Lauria’s interview included the ‘Ergenekon’ topic & Sibel Edmonds’ infamous case

Then, there is this incredibly confused article at Asia Times on Gulen and AKP based on the Flotilla. I read the piece three times, trying to understand what it was trying to convey: simply a focus-less, aimless, pointless, jumble of facts, semi-facts and confused lines. You know I’m a big fan of Asia Times, do imagine my surprise…

Here is a rather bad opening, intended to be attention-grabbing and dramatic, but ending up as a cheesy attempt with worse to follow:

We’ve been had, boys and girls: the international community, the world press, Israeli intelligence, the United Nations, the lot of us. The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim.

…

Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania

in the United States, was silent as a jinn in a bottle about politics until last Friday, when he told the Wall Street Journal that the Free Gaza flotilla’s attempt to run the Israeli blockage of Gaza “is a sign of defying authority, and will not lead to fruitful matters”.

…

For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relationship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

…

The star of the comedy, at least for the Turkish media, is Gulen. The 78-year-old imam has lived in self-imposed exile for two decades, due to charges by Turkish prosecutors that he led a conspiracy to subvert the secular state. He presides over Turkey’s largest religious movement, commanding the loyalty of two-thirds of the Turkish police, according to some reports. His movement – a transnational civic society movement inspired by Gulen’s teachings – also controls a network of elite schools that educate a tenth of the high school students in the Turkic world from Baku to Kyrgyzstan. And it reportedly controls businesses with tens of billions of dollars in assets.

His movement has been expelled from the Russian Federation and his followers arrested in Uzbekistan by local authorities who believe his goal is a pan-Turkic union from the Bosporus to China’s western Xinjiang province (“East Turkestan” to Gulen’s movement).

…

I am not going to waste more space for this piece, but please take a look at it and tell me what this hodgepodge is trying to convey; a convoluted, self-interpreted, and highly confused snap shot of Turkish Ottoman History, AKP, Gulen Movement, Flotilla, US Foreign Policy, all in one garbled article…and since I included the awfully cheesy intro, I must finish with this equally corny finale:

Gulen, in short, is a shaman, a relic of pre-history preserved in the cultural amber of eastern Anatolia. Kemalism was sterile, brutal, secular and rational; the “moderate Islam” of Gulen is magical, a mystic’s vision of Ottoman restoration and a pan-Turkic caliphate.

The Erdogan government crafted the Mavi Marmara affair as a piece of theater, preparing the deus ex machina (god from the machine) entrance of Gulen himself, more Pagliaccio than Apollo, to be sure. The trouble is that the Turkish Islamists live in a world of magical realism in which theater and reality, human and jinn, desire and achievement blend into a mystical blur. Gulen explains in his The Essentials of the Islamic Faith that Allah created the jinn out of fire. And that is what the apologists for Turkish Islamism are playing with.

…

No one is mentioning why Gulen has been strongly backed by Israel, or, why he is such a loyal defender and supporter of Israel, especially the US-Israel lobby. No one is daring to mention one of his top backers in the US, another butler of Israel, Mort Abramowitz, or and how Abramowitz vouched for Gulen during his deportation hearing. No one is talking about Gulen’s other CIA bodyguard, Graham Fuller. No ‘real’ questions on Gulen’s ‘real’ sources of multibillion dollar funding…No emphasis on Gulen’s real role for the real US decision-makers’ use, and their strategy for Central Asia since 1997…

Some of these reporters have their hands tied by their MSM editors. Some of the semi- independent journalists have fallen for the creators of the smoke and mirrors. And others are simply guided by ignorance and utter dumbness emboldened by their arrogance. Well, they are just the latest being sold and fed garbage when it comes to Gulen.

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Transforming Afghanistan into a Central Asian Saudi Arabia
 

It seems that Afghanistan is a never ending font of surprises. For decades U.S. officials took the position that Afghanistan held nothing of value for the United States, especially in the form of vital strategic resources. That assumption was a major reason for America’s consistently dismissive attitude towards Afghanistan up until the Soviet invasion of 1979 and why the U.S. was content to turn the country over to Pakistan and Saudi Arabian interests following the Soviet departure. Then on June 13, 2010 the New York Times in a front-page story reported how a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists had suddenly discovered a vast treasure of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth worth nearly $1 trillion dollars.

But the story of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth isn’t a new one nor did the Pentagon just “discover” it. According to a Reuters report of March 16, 2009, over a year ago, Afghanistan’s minister of mines Mohammed Ibrahim Adel cited U.S. Geological Survey Data in declaring that “In the field of minerals, Afghanistan is the richest country in the region, much more, hundreds of times more.”

Even the New York Times’ story admits that the survey information, on which the Pentagon assessment was based, came from data collected by Soviet mining experts nearly 30 years ago. American geologists became aware of it in 2004, but the data languished until 2009.

But the most revealing quote in the Pentagon report wasn’t so much that Afghanistan did indeed contain a vast wealth of minerals or even that the U.S. had carelessly overlooked a vast source of wealth for an impoverished nation. No. The key to understanding the report was framed by the reference that “Afghanistan could become the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’” and Saudi Arabia is where the real story behind the headlines begins. 

This is not the first time that Saudi Arabia has been used to as a model for Afghanistan’s future. One might go so far as to say today’s Afghanistan and its Taliban scourge already bears the stamp of being made in Saudi Arabia.

According to author, Gerald Posner in his book, Secrets of the Kingdom, the anti-Soviet Afghan war was as much a godsend for the Saudi Royal family as it was for the Afghan Islamists. “Some prominent Saudi officials, like Prince Bandar, as well as his father, defense minister Prince Sultan, saw the Soviet aggression as a chance to form a closer bond with Washington. It was a rare chance, they argued to other Saudi ministers, to replace Israel as America’s strategic partner in the Middle East. And as far as the Americans were concerned, the Saudis had suddenly become a cash cow.”

The term “Taliban” and the movement itself were unheard of in Afghanistan until 1994. Prior to the Soviet invasion, the Taliban mentality and the madrassa structure did not exist. As an invention of Pakistan’s military intelligence with outside help, the Taliban were not recruited from inside Afghanistan but from Pakistani madrassas. This process was funded, not by Afghans, but by the Saudis and other Arab countries who continue to seek the long term goal of a political and religious transformation of South Asia combined with the dissolution of Afghanistan as a nation state.

The Taliban version of Deobandi Islam practiced in Pakistan and the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia were both alien to Afghan practice. Suicide bombings did not exist in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation nor even when the Taliban took control in 1996. The Afghan people never willingly embraced extremist Islam. These ideas were forced upon them under circumstances beyond their control.

From the very beginning, the United States really had no conception of what to do in Afghanistan except to follow the lead of the Saudis, with some American diplomats benignly visualizing that a Taliban victory would simply turn Afghanistan into a miniature Saudi Arabia. In his book, Taliban, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid quotes one diplomat as saying, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

The Obama administration has nothing good to report to the American people on Afghanistan. New revelations of the hopelessness of government corruption arrive daily. Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai is in open confrontation with Washington on dozens of issues. Not only is reconstruction dead and the war failing, but so far, General McChrystal’s application of Counter Insurgency (COIN) has failed miserably. The heralded U.S. assault on Marja and the establishment of government control has come to a dead stop. According to the Washington Post, the failure at Marja has now caused the summer assault on Kandahar to be postponed indefinitely and threatens the Obama administration’s plans for a July 2011 drawdown of U.S. troops.  

So, without a legitimate rationale for staying in Afghanistan and no conceivable way of justifying countless more billions of dollars or American lives – Washington has finally admitted that the country is not only important, but is vital to the future of America’s strategic mineral interests. But even now as the Obama administration dredges up a new reason for staying in Afghanistan past the 2011 deadline, it appears that the old motivation of transforming Afghanistan into a Central Asian Saudi Arabia remains the real motivation underlying America’s war.

# # # #

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011. 

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The Boiling Frogs Presents Peter Phillips

Peter Phillips describes Project Censored, its mission, operational style and funding, then talks about what he has coined as ‘Truth Emergency,’ and provides examples such as the intentional misreporting of the number of civilian deaths in the Iraq war, and government insider media groups such as the Rendon Group. Mr. Phillips talks about the findings of his project’s studies and research of some of the more visible left-leaning alternative media with propaganda patterns similar to the mainstream outlets, especially on issues such as Israel, 9/11, and elections, and discusses the notions of objectivity, partisanship, and conspiracy when it comes to the media today, and more!

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and former Director of Project Censored. He teaches classes in Media Censorship, Investigative Sociology, Sociology of Power, Political Sociology, and Sociology of Media. He has published eleven editions of Censored: Media Democracy in Acton from Seven Stories Press. Phillips earned a B.A. degree in Social Science in 1970 from Santa Clara University, and an M.A. degree in Social Science from California State University at Sacramento in 1974. He earned a second M.A. in Sociology in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1994.

Here is our guest Peter Phillips unplugged!

Interview with Peter Phillips [ 1:00:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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