The Daily Grasshopper

Longtime "Grasshopper" readers know that Friday is usually the day I don't write, but I just got finished reading the news and had to share a couple of items with you. As for my contention that the real looting of Iraq is going to be done from the safety of the climate-controlled executive suites of companies like ExxonMobil and Halliburton, why don't I let the headline speak for itself?

"Halliburton unit could make $7b"

Yes, that's a "b," as in "billions." That's on the front page of today's Boston Globe. The contract is for putting out oil well fires, and was granted to Vice President Dick Cheney's former employer in a "no-bid" arrangement. In other words, the Pentagon handed the deal to Halliburton. Nice racket, eh?

The New York Times story, on page B12 of the "A Nation at War" section, reports the same facts in a story called "Details Given On Contract Halliburton Was Awarded":

"The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years, according to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was released today.

The contract also allows Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to earn as much as 7 percent profit. That could amount to $490 million...

Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 until 2000. When he left the company to run for vice president, Mr. Cheney received over $30 million in compensation, Mr. Waxman said.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Kellogg Brown & Root has won significant additional business from the federal government and the Pentagon. It has built cells for detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and is the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation and fuel transportation."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/business/11REBU.html

Neither the Globe nor the Times, however, reports a very significant detail: that Cheney is still receiving many thousands of dollars in deferred salary each year from Halliburton. To read about Cheney's special arrangement with the Pentagon's favorite contractor, check out this story from Tuesday's Houston Chronicle:

"The lawmakers pointed out that Cheney, who received $33 million in stock and stock rights upon leaving Halliburton, still collects $180,000 a year in annual deferred compensation."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/1858600

The real reason I decided to write an edition of the "Grasshopper" today was not to beat the near-dead "this war sure seems to be benefitting Dick Cheney's friends" horse, however. My purpose in writing these essays is to get people to consider the possibility that the corporate-owned mainstream media in this country aren't giving you all the news. There are a couple stories in today's paper that give us tremendous insight into how news is slanted to get us all thinking the proper thoughts, whether that means supporting (or at the very least, not questioning) an illegal war, or buying into "free trade" theory, or dismissing the growing number of protesters in this country as "anti-American."

The first story comes to us from the pages of the nation's business paper. The Wall Street Journal has a story on the front page of the "Marketplace" section today that describes how CNN executives sanitize their news of the war for Americans. Don't believe it? I'm going to reproduce a few choice paragraphs for you:

"The daily 9:30 a.m. EDT conference call among the top executives of CNN International in London, Hong Kong and Atlanta couldn't have been better timed on Wednesday. Dramatic pictures of a rope being slung over the head of a statue of Saddam Hussein were pouring in.

But Chris Cramer, the president of CNNI Networks, was also keen on another image that had just come in via the Al-Arabiya television network. 'This is what I wanted to get on the screen,' he said in Atlanta as shots of Iraqi hospital casualties appeared in a quarter of the CNNI screen through splitscreen technology. 'It's important that we get the comparison and contrast.'

The split screen on CNNI - which is comprised of several services reaching more than 170 million households in more than 200 countries - didn't make it onto CNN's U.S. network. The domestic service stuck, instead, to a full-screen shot of the street scene in Baghdad. But then, non-U.S. viewers of CNN have seen scant reportage in the past week of two stories that have captivated U.S. viewers: the rescue of prisoner Jessica Lynch and the death of NBC reporter David Bloom...

Along with a greater emphasis on the casualties of war on CNN International (including frequent interviews with aid agencies on the 'dire situation' at Iraqi hospitals), there is also more coverage of how Arab nations view both the war in Iraq and broader Middle East issues - particularly the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In the past few weeks, CNNI usually covered live from start to finish the news conferences held by the likes of the Iraqi information minister, while the U.S. CNN showed only excerpts."

So while we in the U.S. are being regaled with the heroics of "Saving Private Lynch," the rest of the world gets to see graphic pictures of some of the other things our "troops" are doing when they're not rescuing their colleagues. And it's not a pretty picture. Would the majority of Americans still support this war if they weren't being so scrupulously guarded from its realities by giant "news" corporations? Should we be concerned that executives at CNN think our sensibilities are so delicate that we have to be shielded from some of the unpleasant side effects of our government's invasion of Iraq?

For the past few days, I've been writing about what appears, in my opinion, to have been a deliberate attack by the U.S. military on journalists in Baghdad - precisely because they were showing images of the U.S./U.K. slaughter. Whether or not you agree that the Pentagon would take such measures to silence its critics (check out Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's statement: http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-journalists.html), I'd urge you to consider the following passages from an article in today's Times entitled "News Organizations Remove Some Reporters From Units":

"As much of the story line of the Iraq war shifts from military action in the field to the events in Baghdad, news organizations began removing reporters yesterday from the American military units with which they have been traveling.

At least 20 of the more than 500 so-called embedded reporters have left their current postings in recent days, many of them reassigned to begin reporting independent of military oversight.

The moves by the news organizations, including CNN, ABC, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, are being officially opposed by the Pentagon division responsible for the program that placed reporters with military units.

'We would really rather they not do this,' said Maj. Tim Blair, the Army officer in charge of the program, citing safety considerations. But executives at news organizations said that they needed to be able to report more freely from Baghdad...

An executive with one of the television news organizations said the Pentagon's opposition to reporters leaving their units also had to do with a desire to continue to have some control over what was being reported. 'The Pentagon would rather have us present just their side,' the executive said. 'But it's important that we start having freedom from restrictions on reporting.'

As a condition of being allowed to travel with the military units, all the news organizations agreed to a list of restrictions, which included not revealing the locations and battle plans of the units."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/international/worldspecial/11JOUR.html

What do you suppose those "restrictions on reporting" are all about? Are they anything like the self-imposed restrictions that CNN is under to keep the horrific effects of the U.S./U.K. attack off American TV screens? And how about the "executive with one of the television news organizations" conceding that the Pentagon "would rather have us present just their side"? Now that most of the heavy fighting has died down (or so they think), the corporate media's correspondents are going to "start having freedom" - am I the only one who sees a problem here?

These revelations take on a tragi-comic tone when viewed in light of the story on the front of "A Nation at War" describing the upcoming U.S./U.K. propaganda effort in Iraq. It's called "A Media Campaign Is Intended to "Speed End of War." Here are the funny parts:

"Initially at least, the programming they will be receiving is not exactly what American network schedulers might recommend to entertain the Iraqi public.

Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said today that the nightly fare would include interviews with scholars, while other officials said they expected broadcasts of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's periodic briefings with the Pentagon press corps."

Yes, always remember that TV's job is to "entertain the... public," whether they're Iraqis or Americans. Don't go interviewing any scholars or Pentagon officials, lest the public start thinking that they should be informed about their government's actions. Better to divert them with "reality TV" and sports - if you want to keep them "entertained."

"CNN, already available to those few Iraqis with satellite dishes, has declined to participate. 'We didn't think that as an independent, global news organization it was appropriate to participate in a United States government video transmission,' the network said in statement."

How about that? CNN has basically been the Pentagon's mouthpiece for the entire year leading up to this war, and now they're too good to play the role of propagandist in Iraq?

And finally, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, said his organization believes participation is an "appropriately patriotic gesture." Here's what else he said:

"We are certainly proud for people to see our journalistic work in a country that hasn't had a free press."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/11/international/worldspecial/11CAPI.html

Mr. Heyward, please be more specific: which country are you talking about?

PK
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