Cosmos Left

July 6, 2004--COSMOS LEFT recently received the following submission from a like-minded reader named Anthony Wade, who has obviously had enough of Bill O'Reilly's spin and lies. Mr. Wade does a good job dissecting O'Reilly's dishonest spin of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," particularly regarding the Sept. 11 commission's report on the special charter flights that whisked members of the bin Laden family and other Saudis out of the country in the days following the terrorist attacks.

If COSMOS LEFT is inspiring others to take their shot at Bill O'Reilly, then the effort has been worthwhile. Let a thousand "Oh Really O'Reillys" bloom!

Oh Really Bill?

By Anthony Wade

July 5, 2004--As the political crisis facing US imperialism widens, Bill O'Reilly is having a hard time concealing his unprincipled and deceitful "journalistic" methods. As described in a June 30 Washington Post article by Howard Kurtz, "O'Reilly's 'No-spin' Control Prompts Guest to Cry Foul," when 9/11commission chairman Thomas Kean's words didn't fit O'Reilly's spin, the Factor host simply stopped the taping, killed the sound, deleted his guests' angry objections, and retaped the segment.

This is beyond spin. These are the deceitful and unprincipled methods of a demagogue.

O'Reilly had opened the show by blasting the New York Times for "their misleading headlines, basically saying there was no link between Iraq and al-Qaeda." Then he played a tape of Kean saying this: "There is no evidence that we can find whatsoever that Iraq or Saddam Hussein participated in anyway in attacks on the United States -- in other words, on 9/11. What we do say, however, is there were contacts between Iraq and Saddam Hussein, excuse me, al-Qaeda."

According to Kurtz, Georgetown law professor David Cole, one of the guests, had been impressed that O'Reilly was showing "a balanced sound bite" from Kean.

There was just one problem. It was apparently too balanced for Bill O'Reilly, who angrily stopped the sound bite because it was the wrong one. O'Reilly then retaped his commentary, paraphrasing the Kean point that suited his spin and omitting the other:

"Governor Thomas Kean says definitely there was a connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. And he's the 9/11 investigative chief, but that's not enough for the Times."

Well, it was too much for Cole, who confronted O'Reilly about his slick editing during the interview. O'Reilly then "exploded," called Cole a son of a bitch, and announced he'd never be back in the No-Spin Zone. O'Reilly's producers also edited out this highlight, denying his viewers another chance to see the real Bill O'Reilly.

Cole, described by Kurtz as "an activist attorney who has challenged the USA Patriot Act in court," agreed: "I was sort of astonished he would do it so brazenly in front of his guests. Here he is castigating the New York Times for misleading its readers, and he was misleading his viewers. I wish the show had been live because I'd love for his viewers to see what he was up to."

And what was O'Reilly's reaction to Cole? According to Kurtz, "O'Reilly says a left-wing academic is using a minor staff mistake to try to discredit the program." Another mistake. When he's not covering up his deceit with a "mistake," he's claiming he was only fooling around, as when he called Eric Alterman a confidante of Fidel Castro," for which he may be sued. And stop blaming your staff, you miserable coward. YOU are discredit to the program.

"We're trying to be fair," O'Reilly said. "We're trying to give the other point of view so people can see who has the stronger argument. It's really depressing that the discourse has sunk to this level."

Right. Just like you gave Jeremy Glick the chance to express his point of view so people could see if he had the stronger argument--by cutting off his mike and threatening off camera to smash his head into fucking pieces. Jeremy Glick, whose father died in the WTC.

No, you're not a McCarthyite, Bill O'Reilly. Calling Cole a "left-wing academic" is the act of a reasonable pragmatic in the middle of the political spectrum. Name-calling. Nothing about the merits of the issue.

"We make mistakes because we bring in people who are trying to cause trouble," O'Reilly said of Cole's value as a guest. "I thought he was a rational person."

Apparently, one meets O'Reilly's criteria for troublemaking and irrationality by daring to object when he censors m aterial as his guests are listening.

O'Reilly whined that this is all part of "a pretty well organized campaign" on the part of the "left" to scrutinize his programs. As an example he pointed to former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta's recent Factor appearance. Kurtz reports that Podesta called O'Reilly out for comparing "Bill Moyers to Mao Zedong. You say that's a joke. You compare Al Franken to Joseph Goebbels, you know, the Nazi propagandist."

O'Reilly replied to Podesta: "That was Michael Moore, by the way. I said that Michael Moore is a propagandist and so is Joseph Goebbels. And then I explained what propaganda is."

THIS is w hat you said on your J une 10 radio broadcast:

"Joseph Goebbels was the Minister of Propaganda for the Nazi regime and whose famous quote was, 'If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. All right? 'If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. [We heard you. We heard you. It's all been recorded. It's amazing his staff has not advised him to ease up on the Goebbels analogy. But that just shows they're as clueless as O'Reilly is.]

"And that's what Stuart Smalley [O'Reilly calls Franken by the latter's Saturday Night Live character in a pitiful attempt to demean his adversary], and Michael Moore and all of these guys do. They just run around."

Try not to be overwhelmed by O'Reilly's intellectual prowess here.

Webster's defines "propaganda" as acts and ideas disseminated to build up one's cause and tear down another's. By that definition, Moore's a propagandist; O'Reilly's a propagandist; COSMOS LEFT is a propagandist; Lenin and Trotsky were propagandists; and Goebbels was a Nazi propagandist. The key question is: propagandizing for whom? Propagandizing for which side? For which class? Propagandizing for the capitalists or the workers? Or, as the old labor song put it: which side are you on?

But let's listen to O'Reilly enlighten us on the meaning of "propaganda." He did so by equating those Hollywood stars attending the premiere of "Fahrenheit 9/11" with Goebbels' willing followers:

"So who turns out for the screening of this movie last night? You ready? Now, here are the celebrities that turn out. HERE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO WOULD TURN OUT TO SEE JOSEF GOEBBELS CONVINCE YOU THAT POLAND INVADED THE THIRD REICH. It's the same thing, by the way. Propaganda is propaganda. Okay?"

No, it's not okay. Propaganda is not propaganda. Moore is not Goebbels. Those Hollywood celebs are not Goebbels' gullible followers. However, one could posit with far more validity that O'Reilly's Kool-Aid fans are the ones aping the believers of Joseph Goebbels, in that they ARE THE PEOPLE WHO WOULD TURN OUT TO SEE BILL O'REILLY CONVINCE THEM THAT IRAQ INVADED THE UNITED STATES.

And Moore is not Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, as O'Reilly claimed on his J une 10 television show:

"No, no, no, but I think it's [Hollywood's effort to defeat Bush] more organized than ever before and I think they have more access to the media than ever before because the celebrity media, as I said, is so profitable and pervasive. SO NOW IT BECOMES A LENI RIEFENSTAHL THIRD REICH PROPAGANDA PROPOSITION where what they say and do is put in everybody's face."

This is O'Reilly taking the phrase, "the pot calling the kettle black" to new heights of absurdity. The "celebrity media" that is "so profitable and pervasive" is precisely Fox News and Bill O'Reilly, who for more than two years echoed Bush's lie that Hussein's link to Sept. 11 justified the US invasion of Iraq. The fact that two thirds of Americans believed this lie is directly the result of Fox News and O'Reilly has been confirmed by polls showing most people who believed in that link rely mostly on Fox News for their information.

SO FOX AND O'REILLY HAVE BECOME A LENI RIEFENSTAHL THIRD REICH PROPAGANDA PROPOSITION, "where what they say and do is put in everybody's face."

O'Reilly's unraveling because he senses that he's losing "the folks." The left-wing bombthrowers and propagandists are increasingly getting a hearing, as the record-breaking success of "Fahrenheit 9/11" shows. Bush's approval numbers have plummeted; so has support for the Iraq war. A majority of Americans think the war was a mistake and not worth fighting; more than a third support an immediate and unconditional withdrawal. O'Reilly whines that Americans are confused, soft, and divided because they're listening to the bombthrowers. He's stamping his feet. He's throwing a tantrum. He's cutting the sound bite. He's censoring. He's reediting the show.

But no amount of his antics will alter what's taking place. The lies that he and the rest of the elite media told on behalf of George Bush regarding Sept. 11 and Iraq are being exposed. People are wising up. The tide is turning. The rulers and their mouthpieces are getting testy. Their divisions are widening, as the anger among working people that lurks beneath the surface of the two-party shell game grows.

O'Reilly is worried that the "left" is organizing to monitor his television and radio shows. Enemies are everywhere: John Podesta, Al Franken, Professor David Cole, Eric Alterman, Michael Moore.

Which proves that you don't have to be a Marxist to expose O'Reilly. But it sure helps.

June 15-25, 2004--Not that long ago, Bill O'Reilly was comparing Washington's "liberation" of Iraq with Jesus Christ driving the moneylenders from the Temple. A less than precise comparison when one considers that Christ lacked 500-lb. bombs, missiles, tanks, AC-130s and Apache helicopter gunships. But given some of the revelations about the US atrocities at Abu Ghraib, O'Reilly may want to rethink that formulation on another level.

According to statements obtained by the Washington Post, Al-Sheik was arrested last October and soon found himself in the "hard site," the prison's two-story building that housed about 200 detainees. US soldiers put a bag over his head, stripped him naked, and started taunting him.

"Do you pray to Allah?" Yes, Al-Sheik answered.

"Fuck you. And fuck him," replied one of Bush and O'Reilly's Christian warriors. "You are not getting out of here healthy, you are getting out of here handicapped. Are you married?"

Yes, answered Al-Sheik. "If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed."

Another Christian soldier chimed in, "But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed because I would rape her."

Al-Sheik said the Americans told him that if he cooperated he would be released in time for Ramadan, the Muslim holiday. Al-Sheik says that he did, but he still wasn't released. Instead, one Christian soldier repeatedly struck his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam.

"Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive."

Then Bush's troops handcuffed Al-Sheik to a bed. "Do you believe in anything?" a soldier asked him. "I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.'"

JUNE 17, 2004:

Onward, Christian soldiers. Private Lynndie England, the grinning dominatrix with the dog leash, is a devout churchgoer. No doubt her comrades in torture were God-fearing folk as well. The sexual repression that roils Baptists and Christian fundamentalists in the rural communities that spawned England and Company surely contributed to the sadistic violence at Abu Ghraib.

The ultraright and fascistic elements of these fundamentalist layers reveled in the graphic sadism that filled Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Tens of millions of Christian rightists who took their children to see Gibson's quasipornographic depiction of Christ's crucifixion believed it was their religious duty to do so. Small wonder some grow up to be Lynndie England.

But Bill O'Reilly was one staunch Catholic who claimed not to revel in "The Passion's" violence. No, that was his one problem with the film--it was a little too violent for his taste. Not that he didn't recommend the film, you wouldn't want to get that idea. He just said it wasn't for everyone because of the violence. So remember, despite the fact that O'Reilly was talking up the film for several months before its release, even though he praised Gibson to the high heavens and falsely accused the film's critics of demanding its censorship, even though he blasted the film's critics and erroneously claimed it wasn't anti-Semitic, even though he hailed the movie's box office success as proof that traditionalists had dealt a blow to secularism, remember that Bill O'Reilly did not push "The Passion of the Christ."

No, Bill's got too weak a stomach for such violence. That's why he won't show the sickening images of Bush's warriors carrying out their orders. That's why he won't inform his viewers about the sordid details regarding the sexual and religious humiliation inflicted on the Iraqi prisoners by Bush's Christian soldiers.

We're being facetious here of course. All empirical evidence--the hatred and venom spewed forth nightly on The Factor--points to the inescapable conclusion that O'Reilly himself is a vicious, vindictive sadist just aching to mete out his brand of authoritarian justice to the wayward and unruly ones in our midst.

JUNE 25, 2004:

O'Reilly doesn't want to publicize the Abu Ghraib atrocities for political reasons. He's well aware of the political damage they have inflicted on US imperialism. And that's all O'Reilly cares about. He doesn't give a damn about those Iraqis who were violated by Bush's Christian warriors. He hasn't shown a scintilla of humanity for the suffering and humiliation they endured. O'Reilly's assumption was that those detainees were dangerous, the worst of the worse, or just plain up to no good--a false assumption according to the Red Cross and one of own O'Reilly's guests, Seymour Hersh. But O'Reilly doesn't let the facts get in the way of his ideological agenda--whipping up hatred and national chauvinism among US workers toward workers of other countries.

Every night O'Reilly whines about the daily coverage given Abu Ghraib by the major capitalist media, particularly the New York Times. O'Reilly's dispute with the Times is a reflection of the divisions among the ru ling class and their mo uthpieces over how to respond to Abu Ghraib. The Times believes the overall interests of the US capitalists are best served by airing everything out, cutting their losses and showing the world they're sincere about getting to the root of the cancer. O'Reilly thinks the sheer damage caused by the publicity is too high a price to pay; better to downplay the sordid details and do what the the capitalist press is in business to do--manipulate, misinform and terrorize the public into total submissiveness.

But the image of Christian soldiers sexually humiliating Muslims is also driving O' Reilly's frustration over the extensive coverage of the atrocities committed by US forces. He doesn't want the world to hear about US soldiers forcing Iraqis to eat pork and drink alcohol and commit homosexual acts. He doesn't want the world to hear about the Iraqi covered in excrement, or the Iraqi boy raped, or the Iraqs who had lime poured on his genitals, or the Iraqi general who was smothered to death. O' Reilly's not comfortable with the image of an American soldier giving the thumbs up next to an Iraqi who was beaten to death and wrapped in plastic.

The reason the Abu Ghraib story won't go away is that every day brings more revelations that responsibility for the torture goes right to the top command of the US military and government--Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Sanchez, Miller, Pappas, and the rest of this nest of vipers. Just today we learned from the Washington Post that Capt. Donald J. Reese, the company commander of the US reservists charged with abusing Abu Ghraib prisoners, testified that Col. Thomas Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at the prison, was there the night an Iraqi prisoner was beaten to death in a shower room, discussing how to cover the murder up.

And if the top leadership is busted, O'Reilly knows his goose may be cooked too, because he's been right there with Rumsfeld and Bush justifying the need for harsh interrogation measures with the military necessity doctrine. This is a bogus argument for two reasons: First, The Convention Against Torture, w hich became US law specifically states: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a ratification of torture."

We've learned from recently declassified documents and memos that the Bush administration was obsessed with the issue of torture, working overtime to simultaneously redefine it and protect themselves from the international prosecution they knew t hey were setting themselves up for. Bush accepted the arguments of his White House lawyers that Taliban and other forces captured in Afghanistan were not prisoners of war but were instead "illegal combatants"--a term not recognized under international law.

Bush wrote that while he was ignoring the Geneva convention with respect to prisoners captured in Afghanistan, all prisoners were to be treated humanely. And we've seen the results of that "order" from George W. Bush. Every day new revelations of murder, torture and abuse of Afghan detainees are emerging.

Given Bush's language in the order, it's no surprise that only horrors resulted. Just listen to Caesar Bush: "I accept the legal conclusion of the attorney general and the Department of Justice that I have the authority under the Constitution to suspend Geneva as between the United States and Afghanistan, but I decline to exercise that authority at this time."

As far as Iraqi detainees were concerned, it was a no-brainer for the brainless Bush. "Iraq was going to be all Geneva, all the time," was how a military lawyer put it in a briefing to reporters last week.

And we've seen how that turned out. Notice the moral clarity of Bush; the sheer moral weight and authority he brings to the position of commander in chief of the US imperialist military command.

These imperialist dogs tortured Iraqi detainees for the same reason that the French tortured Algerians, the same reason the Americans tortured Vietnamese, the same reason the Israelis torture Palestinians--faced with a hostile population who refuse to accept their enslavement, the colonial occupiers are driven to commit torture to break the resistance of the occupied. And they never learn it won't work, because it only drives the occupied to fight them even harder.

The second reason the military necessity doctrine fails to justify torture is that it doesn't work. This is one of those purely emotional arguments that seems plausible on the surface but collapses like a deck of cards upon closer examination. Which is why a demagogue like O'Reilly is so comfortable using it, and why he ends up rationalizing torture with renegade scoundrels from the liberal left like Alan Dershowitz and Christopher Hitchens.

The argument goes like this: if you've got a terrorist suspect in custody who knows about a horrifying terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction, you have a moral imperative to torture that suspect in order to save the lives of millions of innocent people.
Putting aside the important point that torture is not reliable, my reply is this: O'Reilly, Bush, Dershowitz, and Hitchens are lying and throwing dust in our eyes to divert us from this truth--this government didn't need to torture anyone to prevent 9/11. Aside from all the specific advance warnings, the wiretap intercepts, the FBI informants, the CIA penetration, the suspicious insider trading, the training of the hijackers at US military bases, the military standdown, and much more, you had a British Muslim named Niaz Khan walk into a FBI office and tell them he had been trained as a hiajcker for bin Laden and that there were plans afoot to hijack US airliners; an Australian named Jack Roche do pretty much the same thing; an Iranian "spy" tell the US before 9/11 that it was coming; a former US Naval Intelligence officer named Mike Vreeland who was jailed in Canada at Washington's request in Dec. 2000 on vague credit card fraud charges and spent months warning US intelligence of the pending attacks based on documents he possessed that gave specific details; Vreeland wrote what would happen and sealed it in an envelope before Sept. 11. After the attacks, the envelope was opened and the statement showed Vreeland was right in predicting the WTC, Pentagon and White House were targets, and contained this revealing comment, "Let one happen, stop the rest."

No torture was needed to prevent Sept 11. And no torture is required to prevent the next attack.
JUST OPEN ALL INTELLIGENCE FILES, including those regarding Israeli involvement in Sept. 11, which was reported by Fox News's own Carl Cameron before the story was dropped like a hot potato.

So enough with that demagogic rubbish about how we need torture to save millions. Hitchens, Dershowitz, and O'Reilly can go to hell.

O'Reilly also accuses the NY Times of using the Abu Ghraib scandal for partisan purposes to "hurt Bush." COSMOS LEFT is no defender of the Times, but throughout American history newspapers have been a primary framework for different voices in the ruling class to make themselves heard about the direction of the nation. The Times obviously has come to the conclusion that Bush is damaging US imperialism on Abu Ghraib and an airing out is needed to reverse the damage Washington is suffering from the scandal.

The Times, which played a key role in helping Bush lie his way into this Iraq war, now realizes the consequences of this complicity and is lobbying hard for Washington to change course or risk an unleashing of uncontrollable forces. The Times is by no means the strongest bourgeois critic of Bush. O'Reilly's been characteristically silent on the fact that 26 former military and diplomatic officials released a statement saying Bush has damaged national security and urging his defeat in November. These were predominantly Bush Sr. and Reagan officials, not "bombthrowers" or "leftist loonies."

So far Bush has avoided like the plague the anonymous former CIA officer whose new book, "Imperial Hubris," says Bush's war on terror failing because his invasion of Iraq has bolstered bin Laden and made the US even more vulnerable to an even more devastating terrorist attack.

COSMOS LEFT is unalterably opposed to the Times, Imperial Hubris, Al Gore, or any other Bush critic whose objective is strengthening imperialist domination more shrewdly than Bush is doing. But what's important here is how O'Reilly refuses to acknowledge the serious debates and divisions occurring within ruling circles over Bush's policies. O'Reilly does not publicize these differences because he feels that would weaken the unity and resolve of America's fighting forces. His only recourse is to continue lying, call people names, distort others' positions and blindly back Bush.

When Al Gore strongly attacked Bush's unscrupulous linking of 9/11 with Iraq this week, O'Reilly characterized this as a personal attack. It was no such thing; it was a political attack by another concerned ruling class voice against the gangsterism of this presidency.

JUNE 26, 2004:

Speaking of God and morality, it's hard not to notice the congruence of views on secularism lately between O'Reilly and his arch enemies, extreme Islamic fundamentalists. Anyone who watches O'Reilly regularly is familiar with his constant refrains denouncing secularism as one of the most dangerous threats to the well being of society. O'Reilly divides America into "secularists" and "traditionalists," where the former, led by the NY Times and the "fascist" ACLU, are trying to impose their godless, anything goes values on the rest of America, on the traditionalists, who recognize that this nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.
That's the axis in America. Not the haves and have nots; not the workers and the capitalists. No, what defines America now is the culture war and the battle between godless secularists and God-fearing traditionalists.

Compare O'Reilly's views with those of Yussuf al-Ayyerri, a close bin Laden associate who authored a book called "The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad" before he was killed in a Riyadh shootout in June 2002. Ayyerri wrote that the biggest threat facing Islam was the "unbelief" fostered by the West's "secularist democracy." This "unbelief" convinces the people that they are in charge of their destiny and that, thinking collectively, they can make policies and pass laws as free from the moral dictates of Islam. This causes them to ignore the "unalterable laws" God gave all of mankind which are codified in the Islamic shariah.

Al-Ayyeri wrote: "Do we want what happened in Turkey to happen to all Muslim countries? Do we want Muslims to refuse taking part in jihad AND SUBMIT TO SECULARISM...? [emphasis added]

Sound like anyone we know? Do we see where Christian and Islamic fundamentalism intersect? This congruence in anti-secular thinking between O'Reilly and Al-Ayyeri is a reflection of the intertwined and symbiotic relationship between Bush and bin Laden. Both need each other. Both have declared a crusade against their enemies. Both say God is on their side.

We'll explore these issues further in the coming days. But we'll end by calling O'Reilly out for falsifying US history when he inaccurately states America was founded as a Judeo-Christian nation by traditionalists who judged moral behavior.

In an excellent World Socialist Web Site article, Shannon Jones wrote:

"The founders of the United States were hostile to attempts to legislate codes of thinking and personal conduct based on religious teachings. The American Revolution and its aftermath undermined the concept that there existed a 'unitary set of values formulated by God and readily ascertainable by man (The Americanization of the Common Law, William E. Nelson, University of Georgia Press, 1994, p. 115). In its place developed the view that the discovery of truth was a complex process involving the open clash of opposing ideas. Thus, society had no business attempting to impose one set of beliefs, religious or politicqal, that all had to accept.

"In the period following the American Revolution the prosecution of individuals for violations of a purely moral character declined. The principle that personal beliefs and personal ethics, so long as they did not harm others, were not to be dictated by the state, but reserved for the individual, became embedded in popular conciousness, marking a major advance in democratic rights."

Which in 2004, fascist demagogues like Bill O'Reilly are trying to roll back by spinning US history to fit his reactionary political agenda.

************************

BILL O'REILLY'S TRUTH POLICE

June 29, 2004--Lately O'Reilly's been taking Orwellian doublespeak to new absurdities with a feature entitled, "Truth Police," in which he thinks he's dressing down someone or another based on the facts. O'Reilly's June 29th show contained such a barefaced and provocative lie that COSMOS LEFT decided to turn his "Truth Police" against him.

On tonight's show O'Reilly continued his ongoing smear campaign against Michael Moore by maliciously distorting a comment the liberal film maker made last year about Iraqi insurgents. Frustrated and humiliated by Bush's declining approval ratings, Abu Ghraib and Lynndie England's grinning face, and the plummeting support for the Iraq war among Americans, O'Reilly does what any fascist demagogue would do--resort to the tried and true tactics of Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Goebbels--fearmongering, hatemongering, treachery and deceit.

O'Reilly claimed that Moore had equated the beheaders in Iraq with the American Revolution's Minutemen. That's a blatant lie. In a statement made last year, Moore compared those Iraqis who are fighting to kick foreign invaders out of their sovereign country with the American colonists who fought the King's army for their independence. HE DID NOT COMPARE THOSE WHO ARE BEHEADING HOSTAGES IN IRAQ WITH AMERICA'S REVOLUTIONARY MINUTEMEN.

O'Reilly continues to do Bush's bidding in brainwashing Americans into thinking that all Iraqis fighting to defend their nation from foreign aggression are bloodthirsty terrorist killers from Al Qaeda. The overwhelming majority of Iraqi insurgents are kids who have seen their families and friends slaughtered all around them by US bombs, tanks, gunships, and bullets. We don't know who's doing the beheadings, and the Berg execution for sure was suspicious and smacked of a US/Israeli psy/op murder. Of course you'd never know this from O'Reilly, who continues to pass on whatever the government says as the Gospel, despite the fact that nearly everything its said has proven to be a lie.

Iraqis fighting for the independence and sovereignty of their country from foreign occupiers do have that in common with the Revolutionary Minutemen. The difference, however, can be found in the word "Revolutionary." In taking up arms against British colonial rule, the Americans were carrying through a bourgeois democratic revolution. The Iraqi insurgency unfolding today is not a revolutionary upsurge led by revolutionaries--socialist or bourgeois democratic.

This leadership crisis has not prevented Iraq's toilers from making do with what they have and giving US and UK imperialism more than t hey bargained for.

But Moore's Minutemen comment was made last year, long before the current spate of beheadings. O'Reilly was well aware of this. He consciously and with malice sought to defame Moore's character with this vicious and blatant distortion of the latter's statement. Moore's lawyers should be looking into this. Perhaps they'll contact Eric Alterman's attorneys, who are preparing their suit against O'Reilly for calling Alterman a Fidel Castro confidante.

O'Reilly's so rattled he's contradicting himself in his holy war against secularists. In a segment with a Texas Republican who was defending her party's reaffirmation that we are a "Christian nation," O'Reilly, playing the level-headed sane man to the religious fanatic, said that things aren't so bad for Christians, because the secularists' campaign to rid the public arena of crosses was only a minor annoyance; and besides, his right to attend Church and observe his Christian faith was not under attack.

Oh Really O'Reilly?

Then why have you been foaming at the mouth n ight after night over the "fascist" ACLU's campaign to remove Christian crosses from governmental displays? Why have you been accusing the ACLU of trying to tear down the moral fabric of society?

June 3-11, 2004--Like we needed Bill O'Reilly to tell us that there's danger on the horizon. This is what he gets paid millions for?

We're in danger because the reactionary capitalist rogues that allowed Sept. 11 to happen so they could go to war are still in power, and influential media stooges like O'Reilly are still covering up for them.

When Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller scared the wits out of the nation just before the Memorial Day weekend by announcing a severe terrorist attack was imminent, Bill O'Reilly wasted no time serving as a lapdog and mouthpiece for the capitalist state. He trotted out one of his terrorism experts to discuss the seven alleged Al Qaeda suspects likely to commit the dastardly deed to come, according to Ashcroft and Mueller, who just happened to have their names and photographs for the media to p laster all over our screens; just like hours after the Sept. 11 attack the government magically produced the names and photographs of the 19 alleged hijackers, while claiming it had no idea where the attacks came from.

Ashcroft and Mueller's credibility is dishwater. Mueller lied about FBI knowledge of Al Qaeda suspects training at flight schools, and his FBI just got caught trying to frame American attorney for the Madrid bombings. Ashcroft was oblivious to the pre-911handwriting on the wall, preferring to bust whorehouses in New Orleans, but after Sept. 11 he's been leading the assault on our civil liberties under the guise of fighting terrorism.

But there was O'Reilly, showing he's learned nothing from Iraq, accepting at face value everything Ashcroft and Mueller were saying about the seven alleged Al Qaeda suspects, pronouncing each Islamic name in that condescending, mocking tone for the benefit of those racist and chauvinistic O'Reilly viewers hanging on his every word.

JUNE 5, 2004:

This "dynamic duo" of "justice" presented no evidence against these individuals. They didn't know if the suspects were in the US; they didn't know where they were, nor did the US, according to Mueller, "have any reason at this time to believe that they are workng in concert."

O'Reilly enthusiastically relayed the booga booga cries from Ashcroft and Mueller that the seven Al Qaeda terrorists could be next door, under your bed, anywhere. "Have you seen them in your communities? Have you heard that someone might be helping them to hide?" Mueller told the May 26 news conference.

Ashcroft, Mueller, and the obedient O'Reilly left out a few facts that have come to light--at least two of the alleged suspects identified by Ashcroft as an Al Qaeda cell that is poised to strike the US this summer are already in jail. Trackingthrethreat.com, a web site that contains databases on terror suspects, lists Amer El-Maati as "incarcerated." And Aafia Siddiqui, the female former MIT student, was arrested in Pakistan over a year ago, NBC reports.

Other anomalies regarding the seven suspects, found at inn.globalfreepress.com, cast further suspicions on the already bizarre press conference by Mueller and Ashcroft that was, as the World Socialist Web Site accurately put it in a May 28 article, an exercise in "sowing panic to prepare a provocation."

Here's another little tidbit of information that the cutting edge journalist with all the in side sources who's supposedly looking out for you left out--the cell that Ashcroft and Mueller claim are about to strike the US--doesn't even exist!

Last month, the Boston Globe reported that US intelligence officials and "terrorism experts" stated that the group purporting to be Al Qaeda-related which was claiming responsibility for the Madrid train bombings seemed to be a "phantom organization." This is the same group that Ashcroft told us was "90 percent ready" to launch a catastrophic attack on US soil.

No doubt they are. Ashcroft should know.

The US government is waging psychological warfare against the American people, and Bill O'Reilly is leading the way in the media. He is literally, to use his own words, an enabler of terror.

O'Reilly has papered over his earlier criticisms of Ashcroft and seems content now to sitteth at the right hand of Ashcroft during this Christian-led holy war against terror. Yes, in the face of overwhelming evidence that pointed to Ashcroft's obliviousness to terrorism pre-911, O'Reilly had issued a perfunctory criticism of the faith-based attorney general alongside his more ringing indictment of Janet Reno and Bill Clinton. Since 911, Ashcroft has earned O'Reilly's seal of approval as a more effective warrior against terror.

Translation: Ashcroft didn't trample the Bill of Rights enough before Sept. 11, but since then, the Patriot Act and other totalitarian measures by Ashcroft has proved to O'Reilly that this attorney general is strong-armed enough for the Factor host.

The next Ashcroft/O'Reilly dog and pony show involved Jose Padilla, the alleged dirty bomb suspect who has been held in solitary confinement for nearly two years in a South Carolina military brig without evidence brought against him and denied counsel until recently.

On June 2, just weeks before the Supreme Court is to rule on Padilla's case, Ashcroft's Deputy Attorney General, James Comey, told the press that Padilla had confessed he had plotted to commit mass murder in the US by blowing up apartment buildings. But when pressed by reporters, Comey admitted the government didn't have a shred of evidence. All we've got is word from the Justice Department that Padilla confessed to everything. Oh really. Now what was used this time? Waterboarding? Electric jolts to the genitals while he was naked and hooded. Vicious dogs?

But for Bill O'Reilly, the word of the Justice Department is good enough for him. To need to be skeptical in light of the historical record, because after all, he's only a journalist. O'Reilly's already con victed Padilla on the airwaves.

"The ACLU's vision of providing EVERY CAPTURED TERRORIST [emphasis added] with a civilian lawyer and the right to remain silent is quite simply dangerous and irresponsible. You don't handle a Jose Padilla the way you handle Martha Stewart." [Note the class hatred and bias dripping from that last sentence.]

Captured terrorist? How do you know, O'Reilly? Have you seen the evidence that no one else has seen? No doubt O'Reilly was reminded by his lawyers after the show to be sure to include the word "alleged" next time. There's this pesky thing called the Constitution which keeps getting in O'Reilly's vision of how the world should be ordered.

If O'Reilly were a true journalist and not a pimp for US imperialism, he would have let his audience in on this little exchange from Comey's press conference, which showed the government's got NOTHING on Padilla:

Question: "Why don't your bring criminal charges against him now?"

Comey: " Well, what we're going to do is use all legal tools available to protect the American people from Padilla. I'm not ruling out that criminal charges might not be an option some day. [His use of a double negative reflects his disarray.] We, obviously, can't use any of the statements he's made in military custody, which will make that option challenging."

Translation: We've got nothing except a confession that was extracted illegally, probably through torture.

Question: "So you would describe the release of this information as a coincidence considering that the Supreme Court is about to rule on the Padilla issue?"

Comey: "Yes, I would. If it had been done sooner, it would have been released sooner. If it wasn't done from a month from now, it would be done. [HUH?} This was a huge task , worked on very, very hard by a lot of people who care that the American people have the information to answer some of these questions....I'm not doing this to influence the Supreme Court."

Translation: I don't know what I'm talking about, I can't answer your question honestly. I am doing this to influence the Supreme Court. [More on the timing of these revelations shortly.]

Question: "You said that if you had picked him up under criminal charges that he would have gotten a lawyer, would have clammed up and would have walked free. But couldn't you have done what the Justice Department does thousands of times every year and offered him a plea agreement to work with you?"

Comey: "All the time we offer plea agreements and people cooperate if we have a hammer over them. the challenge of the Padilla case, for me as the United States attorney, was the absence of a hammer."

["If he had a hammer, he'd hammer Padilla, he'd hammer due process, and the 1st Amendment, too"--adapted from Woody Guthrie]

["If he only a hammer, he could lock us up forever, if he only had a hammer"--adapted from The Wizard of Oz]

["And the hammers, batter down the door/You'd better run"--Pink Floyd, The Wall]

Comey: "If I can't credibily threaten criminal charges, no lawyer in the world is going to tell their client to talk to me, because a good lawyer would know, what I'm sure Mr. Padilla's lawyers knew, that if you just clam up, they can't do anything with this."

Translation: They don't have a shred of evidence against Padilla. But they have hammers--the Patriot Act, conjured up legal concepts like "enemy combatants" and the growing totalitarianism of the US capitalist state.

Question: "So at this point, you have no plans to present any of this to a grand jury?"

Comey: "No, we do not have any plans to present this, the information I've given you today, to a grand jury. I don't believe that we could use this information in a criminal case, because we deprived him of access to his counsel and questioned him in the absence of counsel."

Translation: We violated the US Constitution, so we can't prosecute this case!

Question: "...if you're not going to bring charges any time soon and yet he has access to counsel, where does that leave him in the long run ? Does he remain in military custody until the war on terrorism is over, whenever that is?"

Comey: "Well, that's an issue that we are thinking about actively. AS WE UNDERSTAND THE LAW [emphasis added], the president has the power to hold him as a soldier of the enemy until the hostilities are over, whenever that might be. BUT THERE MAY BE OTHER OPTIONS FOR HIM THAT WE WILL EXPLORE." [emphasis added]

Translation: WE are the law, and if Bush decides Padilla or anyone else is an enemy combatant, then fuck the Constitution and international law. We'll find a way to keep his ass in jail.

The Second Court of Appeals had other ideas, ruling on Dec. 13, 2003: "Padilla will be entitled to the constitutional protections extended to other citizens. Charge, try, and convict Padilla. bud do so under the same rules and protections as are accorded any other citizen of the United States. . . .We also conclude that Padilla's detention was not authorized by Congress, and absent such authorization, the President does not have the power under Article II of the Constitution to detain as an enemy combatant an American citizen seized on American soil outside a zone of combat."

It is this ruling that the Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on in several weeks, which is why many are questioning the calculated timing of Comey's press conference. Which brings us to O'Reilly's segment on this topic with Fox legal analyst Andrew Napolitano.

JUNE 6, 2004:

Napolitano is a conservative jurist who sounds more like William O. Douglas when forced to rein in the fascist-minded O'Reilly. Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge well schooled in bourgeois law, shows a modicum of respect for the bourgeois democratic legal principles enshrined in the US Constitution. O'Reilly, who throws out the law and seeks only order, treats the Bill of Rights with barely concealed disdain. In O'Reilly's world, the First Amendment applies only to Bill O'Reilly. Ask Jeremy Glick.

This Napolitano segment turned out to be one of those "Col. Hackworth" moments, which regular COSMOS LEFT readers know occurs when a faithful Fox analyst comes on the Factor and makes O'Reilly look like the idiot he is.

Napolitano wasted no time criticizing the timing of Comey's press conference, given that the Supreme Court is currently writing its opinion on Padilla's case. Napolitano also reminded O'Reilly that Padilla has been locked up without charges or evidence presented against him.

O'Reilly: "But we have to assume that the Supreme Court had heard the evidence..."

Wrong again, O'Reilly, Napolitano told him. Then he threw his right hook, bluntly declaring that Comey's press conference was a "shameful attempt to sway the Supreme Court."

You could see O'Reilly hitting the canvas as he weakly asked, "Why is it shameful?"

Because the information given by Comey was irrelevant to the question of whether Padilla has any constitutional rights, Napolitano replied. Then he knocked out O'Reilly by declaring that Abu Ghraib was hurting Bush in the Padilla case because even the Supreme Court can't believe the military--or its commander in chief.

JUNE 10, 2004:

Napolitano had raised a sore spot for O'Reilly these days--the wisdom in blindly trusting this government. O'Reilly could see the trap door he had stumbled into but was powerless to do stop his fall.

"Sure, a journalist should always challenge the government--that's what we're supposed to do..."

You could see O'Reilly was almost choking on his words as he remembered it wasn't long ago when he was forced to admit that he wasn't skeptical enough of Bush's weapons of mass destruction claim.

Yes, that's what a free and rigorous press is supposed to do--ask questions, challenge the government, dig deeper. But that's NOT what O'Reilly did in the months preceding the invasion of Iraq. While many of us were challenging B ush's lies based on the well-documented historical record that Washington's been lying about every war it's been in since the Spanish-American War, O'Reilly was urging his viewers to "give the benefit of the doubt" to Bush.

Now he's opportunistically using Judith Miller's scandalous reporting about Iraq's nonexistent WMD to bash his favorite liberal whipping post, the NY Times. But O'Reilly neglects to remind everyone how he helped Miller perpetuate her lies by repeating nightly that Iraq had WMD and Hussein had to be taken out.

This Napolitano segment couldn't end a minute too soon for the hapless O'Reilly, who tried to cut his losses in his conclusion by saying he was still glad the government had come out with the details on Padilla so it could justify holding him for so long without any charges and evidence and with extremely limited counsel. All this did was reconfirm that O'Reilly, far from being a skeptical journalist looking out for the people, is nothing but a media lapdog who parrots the government line.The FBI says he's a terrorist; that's good enough for O'Reilly.

JUNE 10, 2004:

Sure, trust the FBI, the same outfit that allowed informants to attack the WTC in 1993 and blow up the Murra federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995; that sabotaged the investigation of flight schools and the Moussaoui arrest; that missed two alleged Sept. 11 hijackers, despite the fact that an FBI informant lived with them in San Diego; the Robert Hansen spy case, the McVeigh case; and most recently, the FBI that let a British Muslim named Niaz Khan walk into and out of their office in April 2000 and tell them he had been trained as a hijacker for bin Laden and that there were plans afoot to hijacker US airliners; after all this, all O' Reilly can manage is to meekly ask Napolitano, "Can the government lie? What can be done about it?"

Napolitano vaguely responded that sanctions could be applied if it could be proven that Comey lied in that press conference. But Comey didn't even have to lie. The damage was done by media morons like O'Reilly for not reporting the full story. The New York Sun reported that "Padilla tried to down play or deny this commitment to Al Qaeda and the apartment hunting building mission. He said he never pledged an oath of loyalty and was not part of the Al Qaeda. He said he and his accomplice proposed the dirty bomb plot [for which he was arrested at O'Hare Airport] only as a way to get out of Pakistan and to avoid combat in Afghanistan. He said he returned to America with no intention of carrying out the apartment building operation."

That doesn't sound like the slam dunk confession O'Reilly made it out to be. Besides, Comey already admitted that Padilla's confession could not be entered as evidence because it occurred in the absence of a lawyer.

Trust the FBI? Oh Really O'Reilly?

They couldn't even get their facts straight regarding the alleged dirty nuclear bomb that Padilla was allegedly trying to detonate. At the June 1 press conference, the Justice Department said that Padilla was planning on detonating "uranium wrapped with explosives"that would unleash a deadly radioactive cloud. According to scientists, there's just one problem with this theory: uranium's very low radioactivity would make such a bomb a dud. Cobalt and cesium isotopes are the ingredients of choice to set off a deadly radiological explosion. A spokesperson for the Justice Department, Mark Carallo, didn't directly answer if they had checked with scientists before issuing the uranium-based scare. All he could manage was that Padilla's statements made clear that he was "willing to cause devastating harm to innocent Americans."

Carallo said that it was Padilla who made the uranium claim, but a leading  physicist, Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists, said of Padilla, "If that's what he planned, it shows he doesn't know what he's talking about and  hasn't done even rudimentary homework." Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said Washington "should have known this was nonsense.

"When they frightened everybody, what were they trying to do, if they knew better? To show the administration is on top of things?"

Newman is so confident the government is lying that she WANTS her client to be indicted. "Maybe the problem is the evidence is so weak, it's laughable."

Even the charge that Padilla and other "Al Qaeda" suspects sought to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas has been dismissed by Con Edison officials.

Trust the FBI, O'Reilly?

The same FBI that falsely accused American attorney Brandon Mayfield of being connected to the Madrid train bombings? The FBI that insisted Mayfield's fingerprints were on the bag containing the detonators, even after Spanish police said the match was "conclusive negative"? The FBI that went through Mayfield's possessions and claimed they'd found "miscellaneous Spanish documents" which turned out to be his children's Spanish homework?

What say you, O'Reilly?

Nothing.

O'Reilly also had nothing to say about this exchange between Justice John Paul Stevens and US Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement:

Stevens: "Are there any cases in the international field, or the law anywhere, explaining that the interests in detaining a person incommunicado for period of time for the purpose orf obtaining information from them is a legitimate justification?"

Clement: "I don't know that there are any authorities that I'm aware of that address exactly what you're talking about."

I bet you don't. Just like you can't explain where Bush came up with "enemy combatants"--the legal fiction he invented to circumvent the Geneva Conventions prohibition against illegal detentions and torture.

Trust the FBI, O'Reilly? The same group that ignored Khan, who told 911 relatives that he informed the FBI of hijack training he was supposed to receive from Al Qaeda more than a year before Sept. 11?

And should we also trust Australia's intelligence services after they too ignored warnings of the Sept. 11 plot from an Australian citizen named Jack Roche, who told the agency that he'd met Bin Laden and discussed bombing operations in Australia, and that he twice met Khalid Shaikh Mohmammed, the alleged Sept. 11 mastermind?

O'Reilly has not said a word about the Roche and Khan cases. Nor has he ever discussed the case of Sybil Edmonds, who may turn out to be the smoking gun behind Sept. 11. Edmonds is the FBI wiretap translator who discovered evidence on pre-911 intercepted communications that revealed details
of the Sept. 11 attacks that were on the way. Sept. 11 families like the Jersey Girls want to hear what Edmonds has to say, but a gag order slapped on Ms. Edmonds by the Justice Department has prevented that thus far.

Something else O'Reilly's been dutifully avoiding like the plague is the news that Bush has contacted a private Washington lawyer, James Sharpe, regarding the ongoing grand jury investigation of whoever in the White House illegally exposed Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

You remember, O'Reilly, that's the case that you smugly predicted when it broke last year would go nowhere and be over with in a few weeks. Well, Capitol Hill Blue reported on June 3 that witnessed told the federal grand jury that Bush "knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name [Plame] to a journalist [Robert Novack] in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq." [Joseph Wilson]

What say you, O'Reilly?

"We are not going to use the pictures tonight, but we will tell you they portray naked Iraqis in humiliating positions with some soldiers posing immaturely, some say sadistically, beside them."--Bill O'Reilly, April 30, 2004

Well aware that US imperialism is still reeling from its defeat in Falluja, and no longer so cocksure the US will win, Bill O'Reilly wasted no time trying to minimize the titanic political damage caused by the latest war crimes flowing from this criminal occupation--the sickening torture and humiliation of Iraqis by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, 20 miles from Baghdad.

The photos of US troops torturing and humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has cooked Washington's goose in Iraq. The US has lost the war. Oh sure, Bush could nuke the country into oblivion like that other great decisive mass murderer, Harry Truman did to Japan 59 years ago. But Washington has lost the political war in Iraq. The resistance will only grow, despite the best efforts of O'Reilly--and much of the US capitalist press--to suppress the photos and contain the irreparable political damage they have unleashed.

In his April 30 Talking Points memo, "Putting Americans in Danger..." O'Reilly accused CBS of endangering the lives of US soldiers when it published the photos of Iraqis being tortured on "60 Minutes II."While conceding it was a "big story, press had to report it," O'Reilly claimed that "by using those graphic images of the torture, CBS has given the enemies of America a powerful weapon. And that's disturbing."

O'Reilly then attempted to distinguish Fox News from the irresponsible CBS network, piously announcing "we are not going to use the pictures tonight, but we will tell you they portray naked Iraqis in humiliating positions with some soldiers posing immaturely, some say sadistically, beside them."

O'Reilly asks his viewers, "Now what would you do if you were running CBS News? No question it's a big story. And you have exclusive shocking pictures. But you know your country will be hurt when those pictures get out. You also know somebody else will most likely get the story and the pictures. So what would you do?"

"I would run the story but not the pictures. I'd describe them using vivid words." [Yes, we all know about O'Reilly's lurid and graphic literary prose from his pornographic novel, "Thou Shall not Trespass," soon to be adapted to the big screen by the equally lurid, graphic, and pornographic Mel Gibson. But a picture is worth 1,000 words, and no matter how vivid O'Reilly's words, they could never communicate the inhumanity and depravity captured in those photos: "The pictures that lost the war."]

MAY 8 UPDATE: As Donald Rumsfeld testified on May 7, "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. WORDS DON'T DO IT. [emphasis added] The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of which is true, that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs, and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged."

Which is precisely why O'Reilly wanted the photos censored, to blunt the outrage and minimize the political cost to Bush and the US imperialist occupation.

O'Reilly [April 30]: "But I could not put my fellow countrymen, I should say in even more danger than they are now by running the photographs." [By blindly endorsing Bush's criminal and deceitful war, and by serving as his chief media propagandist for this Nazi-style aggression, O'Reilly has done more than put working class youth in danger--he has their blood on his hands. And if the photos' publication hastens the withdrawal of US forces, than US--and Iraqi--lives would be saved.]

MAY 4, 2004:

"I'm not condemning CBS News. I'm just telling you what I'd do." [No, you're not condemning CBS. You're just accusing them of endangering the lives of US soldiers. O'Reilly neglected to tell his viewers that at the request of General Richard Meyers, CBS WITHHELD this story for two weeks and produced it in cooperation with the Pentagon. Besides, the world was about to see the photos anyway. O'Reilly refuses to accept that the Internet has changed EVERYTHING. Lying rogues like him can't get away with their deceitful demagoguery any more. And it's killing him.]

O'Reilly then launched into his tiresome tirade against the foreign press for having the temerity to cover this explosive story, first and foremost his arch-nemesis, Al-Jazeera.

"Al Jazeera played the story big, pointing out the atrocities, but somehow failing to mention that arrests have been made. We expect that kind of reporting from that network, which is so hateful towards the U.S.A." [From the May 3 Al-Jazeera edition: "The US occupation military has reprimanded six senior commissioned and non-commissioned officers in connection with the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, a senior US military official has said. . . .Six other soldiers are already being criminally investigated for their involvement in the alleged abuse."

O'Reilly then shifted into major damage control, parroting the same National Party Line used to defend US military atrocities as is used to defend police brutality--those few rotten apples who ruin the pristine reputation of the vast majority of those in uniform.

"So 17 fools exposed by CBS News have damaged America's reputation worldwide. 17 out of 200,000 military people in this theater. What a shame."

Every once in a while, the facts blow up in O'Reilly's face right on his show, demolishing his spin in front of the entire world. It happened last year when Col. David Hackworth told O'Reilly that US troops were wounded by biological agents released by American bombing of a chemical depot, not because Hussein had launched a biological attack, as O'Reilly had clearly implied in his introduction to the segment.

MAY 7, 2004:

And it happened again on May 3, when Bill O'Reilly, desperately trying to contain the damage unleashed by the scandalous prison photos, met Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski and a real journalist, Seymour Hersh.

It didn't take long before Karpinski, who along with six other officers faces anadministrative reprimand, demolished O'Reilly's "17 out of 200,000" spin by declaring that the atrocities that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison by US soldiers were ordered by military intelligence. After suffering through several minutes of her military bureaucratic doubletalk, Karpinksi told O'Reilly that the "focus of operations at Abu Ghraib prison became the interrogation effort....it shifted from standard detention procedures or correctional confinement to an interrogation effort almost specifically....And because the record number of security detainees who were in that category waiting or undergoing interrogation, the focus was shifted. And the responsibility was shifted to the military intelligence command."

As in the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency; as in the CIA; as in the commander in chief, George Bush. But of course we didn't hear that from O'Reilly, whose agenda is to cover up for the White House.

Karpinksi repeated that the numbers of detainees continued to grow. "And they were bringing in the people through raids or whatever...."

O'Reilly wasn't even listening to his guest, missing the significance of what she had just said. We'll return to that point shortly. Karpinski's words had no sooner left her mouth when O'Reilly pounced on her:

"All right. And you got an overcrowded prison....You've got interrogations going on every day."

Karpinksi: "Right."

O'Reilly: "Probably around 24, 7. But the thing that disturbed me and I think many other Americans is that the soldiers, the FEW soldiers that we know so far who abused these prisoners did it in such a blatant way. [EMPHASIS ADDED] I mean, they took pictures of it. They were standing around smirking about it. They didn't seem to have any fear of being caught. It seems like they were operating in a zone like we can do whatever we we want because there's no accountability."

Duh! That's because the torture and abuse by that took place at Abu Ghraib prison have long been routine practices and standard operating procedures by US and other imperialist occupation armies, are central to the Washington's illegal occupation of Iraq, and are directed by the upper echelons of the US military and government.

The very existence of the horrifying photos proves that O'Reilly's few rotten apples spin is bogus! The American soldiers didn't care because they were operating in an environment that condoned and approved the sadistic torture of Iraqis.

Karpinski tried to enlighten the ignorant O'Reilly as to this reality.

"I disagree. I think they were instructed to do some of those things."

O'Reilly: "Instructed to do those things and take pictures?"

Karpinksi: "No, I think - let me qualify that. They were given instructions initially to improve the situation for the interrogations to effectively take place."

O'Reilly: "Soften them up?" [Notice how helpful and knowledgeable O'Reilly is here.]

Karpinski: "....Yes, that expression has been used."

O'Reilly: "Don't do that by taking their clothes off and putting them in piles and standing there with a stupid grin on your face?"

Karpinski: "That's correct. But I can also say with great confidence that those MPs did not wake up one morning and decide to to those things. It just wouldn't occur that way."

O'Reilly: "But they did them....And they didn't seem to me to be afraid of getting caught. And that usually reflects--now, you're at the top of the chain, but it usually reflects that mid management wasn't keeping an eye on these people. Am I wrong?"

Yes, as usual. But we'll let Karpinksi correct him.

"Or the people that were responsible for keeping an eye on them were parhaps participating or encouraging."

O'Reilly: "You're talking about military intelligence now?" [Brilliant, O'Reilly. That's why you earn the big bucks.]

Karpinski: "Because they were responsible for the intelligence operations. And that's where those photographs were taken."

O'Reilly: "Are you telling me that military intelligence in the Iraq theater is corrupt and do this all the time?" [You're getting hotter, O'Reilly.]

Karpinski wouldn't go that far, so she awkwardly retreated: "No, I'm not telling you that, but I'm telling you that they were under tremendous pressure to get more actionable intelligence and information from the detainees."

O'Reilly: "And because they're under that pressure, they abuse the detainees on a consistent basis?"

Karpinski: "Well, the photographs would indicate that, yes...."

O'Reilly: "Then why didn't you know anything about it?"

Karpinski: "At that particular time....THE ABU GHRAIB PRISON WAS NO LONGER UNDER MY CONTROL." [emphasis added] . . .it was principally an interrogation and an intelligence operation out there for interrogation...under the control of the M.I. brigade."

Karpinski further discredited O'Reilly's 17 out of 200,000 spin by later stating: "They [the 6 reservists] didn't come up with those ideas on their own. They were somehow encouraged or coached or instructed on what to do. And if it worked well with six, then perhaps it would work twice as well with 12 or 10 times as well with 120."

Ooh. O'Reilly's down for the count. That's already well past his 17 out of 200,000 mantra. His last question to Karpinski was classic: "Who's the villain here?"

Karpinski: "I think it's probably shared responsibility. And the villain is somebody who was designing those techniques and telling the military intelligence command and pressuring them, in fact, to get better information and get more information...."

O'Reilly: "So it's either Army intelligence, CIA, that are involved?" [That's it, O'Reilly, deflect all responsibility away from the White House.]

Karpinski: "Other government agencies, yes."

As in OGAs, yes. Seymour Hersh, whose interview with O'Reilly will be discussed shortly, quoted Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, one of the six soldiers facing criminal charges, who in a letter to relatives last fall recounted the interrogation of a detainee under the c ontrol of the "OGA," or other government agencies, that is, the CIA and its paramilitary outfits. Frederick wrote: "They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice. The next day the medics came and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away."

Translation: they tortured him to death and covered up the atrocity.

Wrong. The services that private military companies (PMCs) like CACI International and Titan Corporation provide for the CIA are far more sinister than mere interpreting. These are the two companies that were named in Hersh's article as participating in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. CACI's website states that its mission is to "help America's intelligence community collect, analyze and share global in formation in the war on terrorism." Titan boasts that it is "a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions and services for national security."

That sounds like more than interpreting is going on, Brig. Gen. Karpinski.

The Guardian's Julian Borger reported that the military and CIA may be using private "security" and "national security" firms because they are not subject to military jurisdiction. Borger wrote, "One civilian contractor was accused of raping a young male prisoner but has not been charged because military law has no jurisdiction over him."

This is nothing new. The CIA has used torture by proxy for years. In March 1995, CIA assets in Guatemala murdered American citizen Michael Devine and a guerrilla leader married to an American woman. And investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported that the CIA had "systematic links to Guatemalan Army death squad operations that go far beyond the disclosures" that had been made public by the Clinton administration. Nairn also learned from former US and Guatemala officials that "CIA operatives work inside a Guatemalan Army unit that maintains a network of torture centers and has killed thousands of Guatemalan civilians."

Then in June 1995, Baltimore Sun correspondents learned about the CIA's chummy collaboration with a Honduran military intelligence unit, Battalion 316. The Sun reporters revealed that after the CIA and Argentine military intelligence had perfected the art of torturing and killing dissidents for a decade, they in turn passed on their interrogation and surveillance techniques to Battalion 316. Two CIA interrogation manuals were published in 1997 as a result of the Sun's Freedom of Information request.

It appears the manuals' techniques are still in vogue. One 1983 manual, written for use in Honduras, was entitled, "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual." It stated: The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing asuperior outside force to bear on his will to resist. Regression is basically a loss of automony."

Sgt. Frederick says prisoners at Abu Ghraib were isolated for up to three days in windowless rooms. The CIA manual says, "a person's sense of identity depends upon the continuity in his surroundings, habits, appearance, relations with others...Detention should be planned to enhance...feelings of being cut off from anything known and reassuring."

Think of the hooded man forced to stand on that box, wires attached all over his body and told he'd electrocuted if he'd moved. The Honduran manual said that threatening a prisoner with electrocution may be more effective than actually doing it.

The 1983 CIA manual sheds some light on what the agency hoped to learn from sexually humiliating the prisoners. "The effectiveness of most of the noncoercive techniques depends on their unsetlling effect. The interrrogation situation is in itself disturbing to most people encountering it for the first time. The aim is to enhance this effect, to disrupt radically familiar emotional and psychological associations...When this aim is achieved, resistance is seriously impaired. There is an interval...of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock or paralysis. It is caused by a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world. At this moment the source is far likelier to comply."

It should be noted that this notorious 1983 CIA torture manual was written for use in Honduras during the time that the US ambassador to Honduras was none other than John Negroponte, chosen by Bush to be the US ambassador to the puppet Iraq.

O'Reilly concluded his interview with Karpinski by asking her if the scandal is going to get worse. She said no, because of all the attention it's getting. O'Reilly pressed:

"But do you think they are more towards your photographs and more horror stories and maybe deaths and thinks like that?"

Karpinksi: "No, I don't believe there is."

Wrong again, as we'll learn from O'Reilly's interview with Seymour Hersh and the floodgate of horror stories that has been opened since that interview.

MAY 8, 2004:

If Karpinski scored a TKO on O'Reilly, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh knocked him out. O'Reilly had to shed the tough guy posture and treat the widely respected Hersh with kid gloves, even crediting him for exposing the My Lai atrocities committed by US forces during the Vietnam war.

O'Reilly quickly revealed all he cares about regarding this scandal is how it affects the US war drive. "I think for the country's sake [translation: the capitalists' sake] we need to k now if this scandal is going to get any worse because we're taking a beating worldwide. And if so, who is the evildoer here?" [expressing his solidarity with Bush's religious fanaticism]

Hersh: "First of all, it's going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There were a lot of problems. There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse."

O'Reilly: "All right. So we're going to see in the weeks to come more pictures and videotapes of atrocities against Iraqis? Is that what we can look forward to seeing?"

O'Reilly's choice of words reveals his own inhumanity. There's not a trace of sensitivity toward the Iraqis who were tortured. All that concerns O'Reilly is "what we can LOOK FORWARD to seeing." [emphasis added]

Hersh replied that in this age of digital cameras and the Internet, those photos and tapes were destined for worldwide publication, whether or not CBS showed them.

O'Reilly: "All right. Well, the damage to the country [translation: US imperialism] obviously is just immeasurable. But reading your article in "The New Yorker." I just get the feeling that the Army, when they heard about it, started action almost immediately. It wasn't a coverup situation. Or did I read your article wrong?" [Yes, you read his article wrong.]

Hersh then praised Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, author of the US Army report on Abu Ghraib that found
"systemic" abuse of thousands of Iraqi prisoners, the report that Rumsfeld, Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Myers, and George Bush sat on for five months.

O'Reilly: "OK, but Sanchez the commander put him in charge fairly quickly. They mobilized fairly quickly."

Hersh: "No, look, I don't want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations." [Seymour, knock yourself out and ruin O'Reilly's evening. Maybe if enough of his evenings are ruined, he'll leave this earth and join all the Christian zealots before him who are burning in hell for the barbarism they showed toward fellow humans while Nature cursed us with their existence].

"One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it's very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison."

And guess who's now the commander of Abu Ghraib prison? Major General Geoffrey Miller, of course. Put that in the fox guarding the chicken coop category, right next to the British intelligence hack responsible for the fraudulent sexed up dossier on WMD being promoted to chief of MI15, and the FBI hack who squashed his agents' pleas to investigate Moussaoui and the flight schools being promoted to an even higher rank in the Bureau.

O'Reilly: "Correct me if I'm wrong [you are], but what I see unfolding here from what you told me and then General Karpinski told me is that there is a tension between the interrogators who wanted to find out by you know, using means that are dubious information, and the military police who basically who objected to some of these techniques." [Whew! Covering up here, O'Reilly? Spinning like a top? Clinton's got nothing on you in the doubletalk department.]

Actually, O'Reilly got that tension line from Taguba's report, not from anything Hersh or Karpinski told him.

O'Reilly: "But you can understand that like Vietnam, you have people shooting at Americans, blowing them up, and then running into mosques and hiding behind children and all of that. So how far do we go to get the information that protects our own troops?" [How much torture can we get away with to terrorize people into ratting on their fellow Iraqis who are trying to defend their nation's soil?]

Like Vietnam? Choose your words carefully, O'Reilly. Didn't you castigate Senator Kennedy and others for comparing Iraq to Vietnam? But it's true, the US in Iraq faces an unwinnable colonial war because the entire people are the enemy of Washington's criminal occupation. It's the US that's invaded Iraq and slaughtered tens of thousands, not the other way around. Iraqis are defending their national sovereignty against an illegal invader and occupier, which is their inalienable right.

Then things really got interesting when Hersh said, "....The problem here is they were picking on people that they hadn't made any differentiation on."

O'Reilly: "There's no justification for it. But how do you wind up in a prison if you're just innocent and didn't do anything? See, our commanders and our embedded reporters tell me that they're way too busy to be rounding up guys in the marketplace and throwing them into prison. So I'm going to dispute your contention that we had a lot of people in there with just no rap sheets at all, who were just picked up for no reason at all. The people who were in the prison were suspected of being either Al Qaeda or terrorists who were killing Americans and knew something about it."

Hersh: "The problem is that isn't my contention. It's the contention of Maj. Gen.Taguba....It's his contention that more than 60 percent of the people in that prison, detainees, civilians had no thing to do with the war effort."

O'Reilly: "How did they get there, then? Because I..."

Hersh: "....I'll tell you how they get there. You bust the guy that doesn't have anything to do. You humiliate him. You break him down. You interrogate him. He gives up the name of you want to know is an insurgent, who is Al Qaeda? He gives up any name he knows."

O'Reilly: "Do you really believe that U.S. forces were sweeping Baghdad and the others -- you're just picking people up the street for no reason?"

Hersh: "Well, inevitably you get people in a sweep that have nothing to do with what you're looking for."

O'Reilly: "All right, now that's true. But to the number of ....50 percent [it was 60 percent], I'm not buying that. I mean, I could be wrong. [You are.] But I'm going on the basis of our reporters in the field [who are in bed with the military and thus not credible]. And I'm asking them, have you ever seen any of these - no. These guys are way too busy. They got stuff to do all day long. They're not sweeping up." [Yes, NOW they're way too busy fighting a united Sunni AND Shiite armed uprising which O'Reilly claims with a straight face is not happening!]

Hersh then reminded his hapless host, "We're talking about last fall [you know, BEFORE the uprising that isn't], when things weren't as acute as they are now....things were much calmer. People were being swept. This did happen."

Yes, it did, and if O'Reilly were a serious and professional journalist instead of US imperialism's chief propagandist and spinmeister, he would have known about and reported to his viewers what many have been reporting since the invasion began--that US troops have conducted massive sweeps, midnight raids, assassinations, and torture against Iraqis.

Last month, the Baghdad-based Organization for Human Rights stated that at least 18,000 Iraqis were being illegally imprisoned in notorious jails like Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper at Baghdad Airport, and Camp Bucca near Un Qasr.

O'Reilly never said a word.

Also last month, a human rights organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams issued a report based on interviews with 72 imprisoned Iraqis. It found in part: "houseraids using excessive force against unarmed civilians; theft and destruction of personal property; lack of legal representation or clear judicial process for detainees; mistreatment, including torture of detainees during interrogation and in prison camps; withholding of information about detainees' whereabouts and well-being from the detainees' families and/orIraqi and international human rights organisations."

O'Reilly never said a word.

In fact, as we will now discover, O'Reilly is directly implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal and its coverup.

In his introduction to the May 3 Talking Points memo, "A Tough Weekend for America," O'Reilly deplored "this entire episode because human rights violations have no place in the American landscape and because the scandal diminishes the heroism and sacrifice of our military, which on the whole has been brilliant in Iraq."

Every word is a lie. O'Reilly's latter formulation is sheer dogma and rhetoric, lacking a single fact demonstrating heroism, sacrifice, or brilliance on the part of the US military.

Human rights violations have no place in the American landscape?

Oh Really O'Reilly?

Human rights violations, atrocities and war crimes are as American as apple pie, as Counterpunch's Ron Jacobs reminded us the other day. Beginning in 1776, 6,000 US troops razed over 20 Cherokee villages, "destroying crops, inflicting serious casualties on noncombatants and sweeping much of the population into Spanish Florida."

In 1864, Col. John Chivington ordered the massacre of about 200 Cheyenne and Arapho Indians at Sand Creek, Colorado--half of them women and children.

In 1868, Lt. George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh U.S. Cavalry attacked a noncombatant Cheyenne village and killed more than 100, many of them women and children.

In 1890, the Seventh Cavalry struck again, massacring 350 unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Most of the victims were women, children and elderly men.

From 1898-1905, the U.S. Army wrested the Philippines from Spain and then drowned the Filipino independence movement in blood, killing hundreds of thousands of Filipino workers and peasants.

Jacobs' admittedly incomplete list left out the most devastating and murderous weapon of mass destruction attack in history: in 1945, Washington dropped atomic bomgs on two Japanese cities--Hiroshima and Nagasaki--instantly incinerating hundreds of thousands of people.

During the Korean War, US troops shot at least 300 unarmed civilians to death under a bridge at No Gun Ri after bombing killed another 100. Two million Koreans were killed by US forces, many from napalm dropped in massive aerial bombardments.

In 1968, Lt. William Calley led 150 soldiers into the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai and murdered more than 500 civilians--women, children and elderly men. During that war, thousands of Vietnamese were tortured to death by US forces in the CIA-organized Phoenix Program's infamous "tiger cages."

The US has run a virtual torture training factory at its School of the Americas in Washington, DC, and Ft. Benning, Georgia, unleashing Latin American death squads that have murdered hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants from Guatemala to El Salvador to Argentina to Chile. The CIA also trained the Shah of Iran's vicious secret police, SAVAK, which killed many tens of thousands of Iranians.

We've already discussed Bush's new ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, and his familiarity with torture and death squads while the US ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s. It should be added that Bush's current advisor to the Iraqi security forces, James Steele, just happened to be the senior US military officer in El Salvador in 1985, the heyday of that regime's murderous repression of El Salvadoran workers, peasants, and students.

In Afghanistan, hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war suffocated to death inside cargo containers after surrendering to Northern alliance and US forces in Kunduz in November 2001. Around the same time, hundreds of other Taliban prisoners of war from Kunduz were massacred at the Mazar-i-Sharif prison by US and Northern Alliance troops. These crimes have been virtually ignored by the US media, led by Bill O'Reilly, as has the movie by Scots film producer Jamie Doran, "Massacre at Mazar."

In addition to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile and the other nations mentioned above, the CIA has trained torturers and toppled governments in Bolivia, Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Brazil, Congo, Haiti, Iran, Laos and dozens of other countries that make up the "American landscape" of torture and human rights violations.

In Afghanistan, hundreds of Taliban prisoners of war suffocated to death inside cargo containers after surrendering to Northern alliance and US forces in Kunduz in November 2001. Around the same time, hundreds of other Taliban prisoners of war from Kunduz were massacred at the Mazar-i-Sharif prison by US and Northern Alliance troops. These crimes have been virtually ignored by the US media, led by Bill O'Reilly, as has the movie by Scots film producer Jamie Doran, "Massacre at Mazar."

MAY 9, 2004:

Since Sept. 11, the US government has turned the entire world into gulags and concentration camps, from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Diego Garcia. The principal excuse given for these camps and the accompanying draconian measures of sweeps, mass arrests, indefinite detentions, cages, hoods and shackles is that this is a war on terrorism and those arrested are enemy combatants lacking any rights who can be detained indefinitely for interrogation with no counsel to represent them and no evidence presented against them.

These Nazi-style methods violate the US Constitution and international law, including the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war from interrogation and isolation and require their immediate release after hostilities are over. The Conventions do provide exceptions for "illegal combatants" but only if a competent tribunal decides that the POWs are actually guilty of war crimes. All POWs are presumed to be LAWFUL combatants, and the burden of proof is on Bush to prove the contrary.

There have been no tribunals and no evidence shown that any of these prisoners were COMBATANTS, let alone war criminals.

May 9, 2004--Bill O'Reilly has enthusiastically endorsed Bush's policy of indefinitely imprisoning so-called "enemy combatants" in concentration camps from Guantanamo to Bagram Air Base. Aware of the constitutional flaw inherent in this position, his only tactical criticism of Bush is that he should have preempted this legal defect by declaring war on the entire world, just to cover himself.

O'Reilly has echoed Bush's lie that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is part of a war on terrorism related to the Sept. 11 attacks. He pigheadedly assumed that every detainee in Abu Ghraib prison was a legitimate suspect, ignoring the well documented and universally reported fact that US troops have been conducting midnight raids and house to house sweeps for months.

On this basis alone, Bill O'Reilly bears part of the blame for the Abu Ghraib war crimes. But, as we learned in the May 8 NY Times article, "Soldier's Family Set in Motion Chain of Events of Disclosure," O'Reilly's role in the media coverup of the torture scandal may even be more overt.

The article recounts how William Lawson, the uncle of one of the Army reservists facing criminal charges for the prisoner abuse, turned to O'Reilly's old friend Col. David Hackworth for help in defending his nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick. The article's authors, James Dao and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that Mr. Lawson felt the incriminating photos "are evidence of a complete breakdown in training and authority in the Iraqi prison system.

"He shared his frustration in his March 23 e-mail message to Mr. Hackworth's Web site, writing: 'We have contacted the Red Cross, Congress both parties, Bill O'Reilly and many others. Nobody wants to touch this.'"

What? O'Reilly wouldn't touch it? Was he too busy filling the screen with scantily clad women, gay men writhing, tales of child molestation? Was he too busy trying to decide whether Britney Spears or Lucious is most responsible for corrupting our children's morality? Was he too busy praising and pushing "The Passion of the Christ?" [but not recommending it due to the violence!]

No, Mr. I'm Looking Out for You quickly decided not to look out for Staff Sgt. Frederick and the other Army reservists facing courts martials. O'Reilly may be an ignoramus, but he can smell a group of sacrificial lambs a mile away. Frederick, England and company had 'scapegoats' written all over them. He wanted no part of that story. He was part of the coverup. O'Reilly knew.

O'Reilly's job, above all, is to cover up for US imperialism's crimes; minimize the impact of the prisoner scandal; and deflect attention away from Bush (which explains his criticism of Rumsfeld; more soon on that). Hence O'Reilly's vitriol toward Robert Scheer, Gary Trudeau, Ted Rall, and other critics of the Iraq war who would "exaggerate or exploit the tragedies of war to make their points."

Whatever the political limitations of liberals like Scheer, Trudeau, and Rall, at least they're honest individuals trying to stop the madness that O'Reilly is in part responsible for, because when O'Reilly lies, people die--Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans.

And according to Mr. Lawson's email to Col Hackworth, O'Reilly's been caught in still another bald-faced lie. In his May 6 Talking Points memo entitled, "President Bush Scolds Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld," O'Reilly said the following:

"....But we will remind you three weeks ago, we reported that Rumsfeld had lost control of the Iraqi occupation and his mistakes were endangering U.S. troops. AT THAT TIME, we didn't know anything about the prisoner abuse..." [emphasis added]

Recall that according to Dao and Lichtblau, Lawson emailed Hackworth on March 23 that O'Reilly had been among those who didn't want to touch the story. On May 6, O'Reilly said that as of three weeks before, he knew nothing about the prisoner abuse. That would be mid-April, at least a month after he had been contacted by Lawson on behalf of Staff Sgt. Frederick.

O'Reilly's a liar with blood on his hands and darkness in his soul.

Before we demolish O'Reilly's absurd contention that this entire matter proves the system works because the story saw the light of day and the violators will be punished, let's prove again how historically wrong he was in claiming human rights violations have no place on the "American landscape," calling once again on O'Reilly's favorite newspaper, the NY Times.

The May 8th article, "Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S." directly contradicts O'Reilly's rhetoric in its opening paragraph:

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates."

In Pennsylvania, we learn, inmates routinely are forced to strip in front of other inmates. In Arizona, male inmates at a Phoenix jail are forced to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation. And Wallens Ridge maximum security prison in Virginia, inmates say they're forced to wear black hoods and are frequently beaten by guards and made to crawl on their knees.

And get this. Lane McCotter, the man who oversaw the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison last year and trained its guards, WAS FORCED TO RESIGN AS DIRECTOR OF THE UTAH DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS IN 1997 AFTER AN INMATE DIED WHILE SHACKLED NUDE TO A RESTRAINING CHAIR FOR 16 HOURS.

And guess who specifically recommended McCotter for the job as boss of Abu Ghraib? None other than Attorney General John Aschroft, the fascist-minded religious fanatic in charge of America's justice system. This should be no surprise, given his boss Bush dug up the Iran/Contra graves of convicted liars and war criminals like John Poindexter, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte and appointed them to be ambassadors, UN officials,and human rights officers in his cabal.

During the last 25 years nationwide, according to the Times, "over 40 state prison systems were under some form of court order for brutality, overcrowding, poor food or lack of medical care..."

A former secretary of corrections in Washington State and Colorado was quoted as saying, "In some jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison culture that tolerates violence, and it's been there a long time."

MAY 10 UPDATE: The evidence keeps pouring in to refute O'Reilly's spin that human rights violations have no place in the American landscape. The May 9 Daily Mail reports that Charles Graner, the grinning Abu Ghraib prison guard, was once a guard at a federal prison where inmates were humiliated regularly.

The 35-year old Graner, considered the mastermind behind the Abu Ghraib atrocities, is accused of "grooming his 21-year-old soldier girlfriend Lynndie England to abuse Iraqi captives."

It seems that Graner learned his "psychopathic torture techniques at Pennsylvania's Greene state prison, where guards worked at "adjusting the attitudes" of inmates with beatings and sadomasochistic sex.

What's that you were saying, O'Reilly, about human rights violations having no place in the American landscape?

O'Reilly concluded "A Tough Weekend for America" with a futile attempt to salvage "a small amount of good news" amidst the rubble of the Abu Ghraib scandal:

"Our system does work. The story's out. The violators will be punished."

Oh Really O'Reilly?

How many lies can he cram into three brief sentences?

The imperialist "system" is in a deepening crisis and historic decline, reduced to lashing out in volanic eruptions of militarism and aggression against defenseless peoples; it faces a monumental defeat in Iraq; its credibility is worth toilet water across the planet; and Bush has emerged as one of the most hated men in history, taking his place among the ranks of Hitler and Stalin.

"The story's out?"

Oh Really O'Reilly?

According to that Times piece, O'Reilly did his best to ensure that the story did NOT get out. Once again, O'Reilly played a principal role in helping the US government censor in formation that would expose their war as a criminal and immoral enterprise, one that fouls and stains everyone it employs to do its bidding--conquer Iraq to control its oil and strategic position in the Middle East.

The story would not have gotten out without the courageous whistleblowing of a US Specialist Joseph Darby, digital cameras and the Internet. The International Red Cross warned Washington for more than a year about the widespread abuse and torture against Iraq prisoners occurring in US-controlled detention centers throught Iraq. The Red Cross reports many " serious violations of humanitarian law," including beatings and prolonged solitary confinement. It also states that abuses have not been limited to Abu Ghraib but other prisons as well. The Red Cross alleges that prisoners were kept naked in cells and in darkness; prisoners were beaten to death, and soldiers fired on unarmed prisoners from towers, killing several of them.
The report says the abuses were widely tolerated. ICRC director of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, stated, "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system."

Mr. Kraehenbuehl said that the Red Cross had over the prior year consistently warned Bush about the abuses occurring at Abu Ghraib. And even before the invasion of Iraq, Amnesty International had warned the US about the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan. Another report from Amnesty warned Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalitional Provisional Authority in Iraq, as far back as June 2003.

The Guardian's David Leigh reported in its May 8 edition that the sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was not an aberration by demented individual guards, but was "part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources."

These techniques, known as R21--resistance to interrogation, are similar to the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners that occurred at Abu Ghraib.

One former British special forces officer said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq [no doubt CACI and Titan] that the prison guards were using R21 techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

This officer said that British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these methods, which were taught at the joint services interrogation center in Ashford, Kent. "There is a reservoir of knowledge about these interrogation techniques which is retained by former special forces soldiers who are being rehired as private contractors in Iraq. Contractors are bringing in their old friends."

"Using sexual jibes and degradation, along with stripping naked, is one of the methods taught on both sides of the Atlantic under the slogan "prolong the shock of capture," he remarked.

The British former officer said the dissemination of R21 methods was even more dangerous because of the poisoned morale among US soldiers.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11."

That's because they're all under the sway of Bill O''Reilly and Fox News, singlehandedly responsible for the all too pervasive belief among too many Americans that Iraq was behind Sept. 11; a lie reinforced by the daily dose of propaganda emanating from Fox and the O'Reilly Factor, who continue to refer to Iraq citizens as "terrorists"--implying they're connected to 911--insteadof patriots defending their nation against an illegal foreign occupation.

R21 techniques also include forcing prisoners to remain naked, which is what the Abu Ghraib photos show, along with made to crawl on a leash; forced to masturbate in front of a female soldier, mimic oral sex with other male prisoners, and forming piles of hooded, naked men.

MAY 11, 2004:

Isn't it inspiring to witness those pillars of civilization--US and British imperialism--training together in the finer arts of torture and humiliation to beat back the Muslim savages?

Isn't it coincidental that Brig. Gen. Miller, fresh from his stint as head of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, came to Abu Ghraib and recommended that prison guards start interrogating detainees, and the humiliating torture of Iraqis in custody began soon after?

Bremer knew last year. Rumsfeld knew but didn't read Gen. Taguba's report for five months. Gen. Meyers knew but didn't read the report for five months. Bush knew. O'Reilly knew. That the US has been torturing detainees is nothing new. It's been reported since the Afghanistan war. And it's not that the government and media totally covered it up. To the contrary, they openly discussed the use of torture on television. Liberals like attorney Alan Dershowitz, conservatives like Tucker Carlson and Bill O'Reilly, freely opined about how much torture would be acceptable to inflict on suspected terrorists. It was openly stated that Washington was passing on suspects to countries like Egypt and Jordan to do the torturing for them.

In Dec. 27, 2002, Human Rightws Watch wrote bush urging him to investigate allegations of torture in Iraqi reported in the Washington Post. On Feb. 6, 2003, Newsday reported that former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro told reporters, "Better intelligence come from a senior al Qaeda detainee who had been held in the US base at Guantanamo, Cuba, and was 'rendered to Egypt after refusing to cooperate.They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started to
tell things."

On March 8, 2004, Human Rights Watch revealed that US forces in Afghanistan have "arbitrarily imprisoned civilians, used excessive force during arrests of non -combatants, and mistreated detainees. Released detainees testified that US forces severely beat them, doused them with cold water and subjected them to freezing temperatures. Many said they were forced to stay away, or to stand or knee in painful positions for extended periods of time."

In the US after Sept. 11, hundreds of Arab and Muslim males were illegally jailed, beaten and abused in detention centers throughout the country, like Javaid Iqbal and Ehab Elmaghraby, who charge in the federal lawsuit they've filed that they were repeatedly slammed in walls and dragged across the floor while shackled and manacled, kicked and punched until they bled, cursed as 'terrorists' and 'Muslim bastards,' and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including a flashlight up Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum.

The reservists facing courts martial and criminal charges say t hey were following orders from their superiors to "soften up" the detainees in order to break them during interrogation. Far from being an isolated aberration, this behavior has become the norm for the US government and its armed forces.

O'Reilly's ill-fated attempt to spin Abu Ghraib as an isolated incident involving a handful of pinheads has already been thrown in the garbage can, like just about everything else this charlatan has said about the Iraq war--including his prediction that Washington's invasion of Iraq would bring peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Since the story broke there have been many more photos released, with promises from Rumsfeld that videos and more sickening photos are on the way, including rape and murder, according to Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. We've seen the latest image of Ms. England dragging a detainee by a leash around his neck, and the naked prisoner cowering in front of attack dogs. We've learned that at least 25 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have died while in US custody. We've learned about the US soldiers who last year put a harness on an elderly Iraqi woman and forced her to crawl on all fours before riding her like a donkey. She was imprisoned for six weeks.

MAY 15, 2004:

The tip of the iceberg has become a massive glacier. It is difficult to keep up with the avalanche of reports of torture and murder committed by US forces under the command of George Bush from Guantanamo to Afghanistan to Iraq. O'Reilly's attempt to spin Abu Ghraib as an isolated folly by immature and ill-trained soldiers has collapsed like the rest of his analyses.

If it's so isolated, O'Reilly, explain to us the Afghan colonel imprisoned for six weeks last summer who said he was beaten, stripped naked and sexually abused on suspicion of connections to the Taliban. Explain the Human Rights Watch March report that found routine occurrence in Afghanistan of beatings; dousing with cold water or exposure to freezing temperatures; sleep and sensory deprivation; forced nakedness and "stress and duress" techniques. Explain HRW's assessment that abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan has been "systemic." Explain the fact that of the 35 criminal investigations of prisoner mistreatment in Afghanist and Iraq, 25 have involved deaths--that we know about. Explain the case of Saddam Saleh Aboud, who says US guards tortured him and chained him to the bars of his cell. Explain the at least 50 incidents of abuse reported by the International Red Cross at Camp Cropper, an other notorious American-run prison near Baghdad, where, according to a May 15 NY Times article, prisoners were "hooded, cuffed, threatened with being tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, 'force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days.'"

Explain what happened to Asad Abdul Kareem Abdul Jaleel, the 47-year-old father who was arrested by US troops and allegedly tortured for five days in a sadistic manner. According to Spiegel TV, Jaleel died on January 9, 2004, in US custody. An American doctor wrote he died in his sleep, without conducting an examination or autopsy. US soldiers turned his body over to the International Red Cross. An Iraqi pathologist diagnosed torture marks on Jaleel's body. Ph otos of the dead man corroborate the pathologist--severe bruises and lacerations covered his body, particularly his wrists and ankles.

Explain the case of 57-year-old Sadiq Zoman, who was detained by US soldiers on July 21, 2003 when they raided his Baghdad home in search of weapons. One month later, US troops dropped Zoman off at a Tikrit hospital. He was comatose and bore signs of torture: burns on his skin, bludgeon bruises on the back of his head, a badly broken thum, electrical burns on the soles of his feet, whip marks on his back and electrical burns on his genitals.

These stories, and many others like them, have been reported for many months but ignored by O'Reilly and the rest of the elite media. Web sites like Cosmos Left and hundreds of others worldwide have been raising the alarm about the systemic and widespread torture occurring in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere.

Government stooges like Bill O'Reilly have been ignoring these reports and are still covering up for imperialism's war crimes. And it's not just US imperialism. British, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Israeli Portuguese and Japanese imperialisms have also been guilty of monstrous human rights abuses and war crimes over the last century.

The evidence emerging is overwhelming that the US military's high command was responsible for the methods of interrogation that lie behind the systematic abuse. The May 13 Seattle Times reported that Lynndie England said that officers told her and others that "the abuse and humiliation of the Iraqis was paying off."

The veil has come off the netherworld of secret torture centers run by the CIA around the globe, where terrorism suspects endure "water-boarding"--turned upside down into a pool of water and threatened with drowning.

The Statue of Liberty has been replaced by a new icon--a blackhooded prisoner, shackled, sexually humiliated, and tortured.

This new icon may reflect Bill O'Reilly and George Bush's America. But it does not reflect ours. This is capitalist America driven to desperate methods to preserve its declining empire. The world is waiting for us to fight the US capitalist class and put our stamp on society.

Bush no doubt feels very much at home viewing the sadism and homoeroticism practiced at Abu Ghraib, given his days as a Skull and Bones inductee when he shared a coffin with a naked boy. And we've seen enough of O'Reilly's twisted mind from the steady stream of lurid and pornographic images that floods his show on a regular basis.

The prison abuse in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Afghanistan mirrors similar methods routine practiced throughout the US penal system. It is no accident that several of the Abu Ghraib reservists facing court martials learned their trade as prison guards in the US, as did the private contractors from CACI and Titan who are implicated in the abuse of Iraqis.

It was almost fitting that on a recent Factor program, right after he'd claimed that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, O'Reilly, without even realizing he was doing so, confirmed that US imperialism's brutality overseas is of the same piece as its brutality against working people on US soil. For the second time in less than a year, O'Reilly defended the cold-blooded murder of 42-year-old Nathaniel Jones by Cincinnati cops, even as the video of cops beating him to death with clubs played in the background.

As we close this essay, breaking news: Reuters reports that in next week's New Yorker, Seymour Hersh reveals that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved an "unconventional" interrogation plan for Iraq that would include mirror what the US had done in Afghanistan.

"Grab whom you must. Do what you want," is what flowed down the chain of command from the Pentagon's boss, according to an unidentified former intelligence official.

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May 21, 2004--When Bill O'Reilly is upset, angry, frustrated, and whining like he is these days, things are going badly for US imperialism. Which is GOOD news for the majority of humanity. The source of O'Reilly's dismay is that the Iraqi masses have made a fool of him and humiliated the US ruling class behind George Bush. Washington has already LOST the political war in Iraq, and it's not doing that well militarily, either, no matter how many military hacks O'Reilly trots out to say otherwise.

But above all, the Abu Ghraib scandal has exposed O'Reilly as a worthless journalist and a crude propagandist for US imperialism's war drive. We've already seen how O'Reilly turned a deaf ear to Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick's request to explain his side of the story, which would have revealed that responsibility for the prison torture goes all the way up the military command.

Tonight, O'Reilly sharply criticized the rest of the capitalist media's nonstop coverage of the Abu Ghraib atrocities. It's nonstop, repetitive, 24/7, we don't need it constantly drilled into our heads. We get it. It was bad. The guilty ones are being prosecuted. A few bad apples can't tarnish the entire war effort; so let's deal with them so we can get back to winning the war on terror. The US is taking a beating because of Abu Ghraib, and the media is inflaming world opinion against America with the around the clock reporting of every new image revealed.

This is all O'Reilly cares about--the public relations damage that Abu Ghraib has inflicted on O'Reilly's pristine and false image of imperialist America as a beacon of freedom and democracy. He has not shown an iota of compassion or sympathy for the victimized Iraqi prisoners. It's all about how it may adversely affect Bush and the war.

That's what drives O'Reilly to so piously and self righteously brag that he's the only major media program that has refused to show any of Abu Ghraib's images on his show. O'Reilly censors these images from his viewers in order to minimize the damage they are inflicting on Washington's failing attempt to colonize Iraq. He's not going to play a part in revealing the truth about US imperialism's predatory foreign policy and brutal wars of colonial conquest. He doesn't want working class Americans getting a glimpse of what capitalist America is all about and is doing in American workers' names. He doesn't want the veil to come off. He doesn't want working class America to meet capitalist America and have a talk about what the latter has been doing in the former's name and with the former's money.

O'Reilly knows best what his viewers should see. In his condescending way, he's protecting working class America from the ugly realities of their corporate masters. So rather than be a genuine journalist and give his viewers all the information they need to make informed opinions, O'Reilly puts the in terests of the US government first. The photos are hurting the war effort. The photos should be suppressed to help the war effort.

This is not journalism. This is acting as a propaganda minister for the government and the war machine. In that capacity, O'Reilly ridiculed the media for showing different variations of the same old pictures to prove his point that there wasn't much new to be reported. "Today the Washington Post ran a new photo of a naked Iraqi man cowering before a German Shepherd. What's it going to be tomorrow, a cocker spaniel?"

This kind of trivializing of the torture and humiliation inflicted by US forces against Iraqi detainees is an insult to all Iraqis and Americans. It also reveals how barbarian and debased O'Reilly truly is.

But it's deeper than the dogs. Once again, O'Reilly is lying to his audience. The reason why the media keeps covering the story is because each day brings new revelations that show the prison abuse is far more pervasive and institutionalized than O'Reilly's few bad apples. It's not just a matter of German Shepherds or cocker spaniels. It's murder, rape, and coverup at the highest levels, which once again completely refutes O'Reilly's lying spin.

MAY 22, 2004:

O'Reilly claimed that it's hard to believe the commander in chief "micromanaged" the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib. O'Reilly doesn't have to reconcile that statement with White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez's Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush that advised ditching the Geneva Conventions in order to protect US officials from war crimes prosecutions, because O'Reilly never bothered to inform his viewers of the existence of this memo. Gonzalez wrote to Bush:

"As you have said, the war on terrorism is a new kind of war....In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders QUAINT some of its provisions." [emphasis added]

Gonzalez further wrote that he was worried that "prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges," which were based on a 1996 US law permitting the prosecution of "any grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions."

MAY 25, 2004:

And now we learn that a US military officer in Iraq is prepared to testify that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the US military chief in Iraq, was in attendance during some of the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Besides, even if Bush and R umsfeld didn't personally order the Geneva Convention vilations, Article 12 of the Convention places responsibility for prisoner abuse on them, not the soldiers being charged, because Bush and Rumsfeld make up the leadership of the "Detaining Power." Article 12 says:

"Prisoners of war are in the hands of the enemy Power, but not of the individuals or military units who have captured them. Irrespective of the individual responsibilities that may exist, the Detaining Power is responsible for the treatment given them."

O'Reilly has not mentioned this little historical tidbit in all his fair and balanced, fact-based approach to the Factor.

And O'Reilly's paternalistic censorship has ensured his viewers didn't hear about the military intelligence analyst who says the 16-year-old son of an Abu Ghraib prisoner was stripped naked by US soldiers, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, covered with mud and shown to his father at Abu Ghraib to break down his resistance to interrogation.

O'Reilly hasn't told his audience that the soldier who reported this abuse, Sgt. Samuel Provance, told ABC News that dozens of soldiers, not just the seven reservists charged so far, inflicted abuse and torture on detainees at Abu Ghraib, and that the Army has tried to cover it up.

Provance, a member of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last year, spoke to ABC in defiance of orders to keep his mouth shut.

Provance said, "What I was surprised at was the silence. The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something.

"There's definitely a cover-up. People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet....The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something."

Provance further said that Major General George Fay, who was heading up the Abu Ghraib investigation, told him not to go public with his revelations.

JUNE 12, 2004:

Since this essay was originally written, an avalanche of evidence has surfaced that completely refutes O'Reilly's lies that 1) Abu Ghraib was the work of a few bad apples and that 2) Bush could not have "micro-managed" the torture his forces were inflicting on Iraqis in that prison.

A quick sample of recent headlines that demolish O'Reilly's first point:

"Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey: deaths and mistreatment in Iraq and Affhanistan are focus";

"Justice Memos Explained How to Skip Prisoner Rights";

"Unit Said to Take Harsh Procedures to Iraq from Afghanistan";

"Forced Unity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents" are among the horror stories of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and murder that have been committed by US forces in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq.

As to the second point, O'Reilly's use of the word "micro-managed" has come back to haunt him. Strikingly similar memos from the Justice Department in 2002 and the Pentagon in 2003 reveal that the use of torture was specifically authorized and, even more damaging to Bush and O'Reilly, they argued that the laws prohibiting torture do not apply to the president of the United States, indeed, that the weight of a presidential order served as a shield against criminal prosecution.

Micro-managed indeed.

May 26, 2004--Bill O'Reilly and his staff are so frazzled by Bush's plummeting approval ratings and the deepening crisis of US imperialism they couldn't prevent an embarrassing typographical error from marring the TITLE of tonight's Talking Points Memo. They meant to say, "The Decline of Morality," but someone typed "Mortality" instead--a Freudian slip of mammoth proportions when you consider how the mortality rates for Americans and Iraqis are skyrocketing due to Washington's criminal invasion and occupation.

The substance of O'Reilly's memo reflected his political desperation as much as the glaring typo did. He actually blamed every manifestation of society's morality crisis--including Abu Ghraib--on secularism and the declining influence of the Vatican, instead of where it belongs: on the historical bankruptcy and decay of capitalism, a rapacious system based on exploitation of humans by humans that increasingly turns to gangsterism and murder to defend private profits and shore up a declining empire.

To blame Abu Ghraib on secularists, whose only crime is wanting humanity to pierce through the fog of religious dogma and have a crack at the accumulation of knowledge we have amassed over the centuries, instead of on the military and political command of an imperialist power, is an exercise in intellectual bankruptcy that debases history and insults the intelligence of every human being who has ever lived.

To blame the decline of morality on the decline of the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that burned people at the stake for being secularists and trying to tell the truth about the universe, is outrageous spin that is devoid of facts. O'Reilly is nothing but a contemporary equivalent of these Dark Age Neanderthals.

The decline in morality among America's kids has more to do with the fact that a sociopathic sadist inhabits the White House than any scientist or historical materialist. This is a ruling class in crisis. It has no answer to the crisis of the profit system other than predatory wars of colonial conquest like we're seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Capitalism's crisis is so deep that it literally throws up political leaders like George Bush, whose thuggishness and gangsterism accurately reflects the capitalist class he represents.

Capitalism's crisis is so acute that its leading media stooge is paid millions to lie to and deceive the masses, a loud-mouthed blowhard and reactionary windbag who is so afraid of competing ideas that he threatened to break a guest's head into fucking pieces for daring to mention the word "imperialism" on his program--a guest whose father died in the World Trade Center.

O'Reilly's Catholic-based conservatism is nothing new to America's landscape. He is the latest in a strain of right-wing, fascist-minded Catholics that runs from the Spanish dictator Franco (who received a telegram from the Pope thanking him for the immense joy w hich Spain's "Catholic victory" had brought him) to the Catholic priest Father Coughlin, the 1930s' "Father of Hate Radio" (who, like O'Reilly, also played on people's fears and blamed the economic depression on governmental incompetence instead of capitalism), to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led the anticommunist witchhunt in the 1950s.

Like any shrewd fascist, O'Reilly mixes in a dose of anticapitalist demagoguery with his witch's brew of hatemongering and scapegoating of immigrants, gays, and African Americans (especially single mothers and public school students who love rap).

As capitalism's crisis deepens, fascists like O'Reilly start stamping their feet and demanding stronger measures. Increasingly he is attacking Bush from the right. Listen to the titles of recent Talking Points memos: "Why Won't the Bush Administration Tell Us the Truth About Terrorism?"; "Everyday Americans and Bush"; "The Weakness of America"; "What Ever Happened to the War on Terror?"; and most recently, the one O'Reilly's staff choked on, "The Decline of Mortality."

O'Reilly can attack Bush from the right all he wants, but there is a disturbing symbiosis between them. The sordid images of Abu Ghraib's pyramid of sexual sadism mesh with those from that Illinois schoolgirl sexual sadism scandal so prominently featured on O'Reilly's show last year, the one that left the clueless Harvard graduate shaking his head and unable to figure out how it's all coming to this.

The Abu Ghraib images also bring Bush's sick Skull & Bones initiation rituals to mind, but that's not the reason Bush is accountable for the torture of Iraqis and Afghans. Every day the evidence accumulates that the responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib and the other US-run gulags around the world runs up the chain of command from Karpinski to Miller to Sanchez to Rumsfeld to Bush, with White House Counsel Gonzalez pitching in with legal advice specifically crafted to circumvent the Geneva Conventions.

O'Reilly continues to cover up for Bush on Abu Ghraib ("Is Enough Enough on the Iraqi Prison Story?" and the entire war on Iraq by echoing Bush's lie that it is being waged against those tied to Sept. 11. O'Reilly also is doing his best to prevent Americans from understanding what really happened on Sept. 11, covering up for Bush's complicity and/or criminal negligence for the attacks that killed 3,000 people.

So it was gratifying to see evidence that O'Reilly's reeling from the crisis facing Bush and US imperialism. Perhaps O'Reilly is hearing footsteps of war crimes prosecutors growing closer. He knows his goose is cooked too. Maybe he's realizing there are many of us who will not forget the integral role O'Reilly played as a willing propagandist and enabler for Bush's war crimes; who will not rest until O'Reilly joins Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, Feith, and the rest of the imperialist scum who have committed horrific war crimes and threaten the entire world as they defend the declining empire of US imperialism.

O'Reilly's pissed off because everyone's making him look like the fool he is. Bush is making him look bad; Rumsfeld's is making him look bad; Tenet's making him look bad; Michael Moore's making him look bad; and worst of all, the Iraqi people made him look bad by fighting so hard for their national sovereignty, dignity and independence that after their two-month long uprising that wasn't, the US has still failed to disarm Sadr's militias.

Everything O'Reilly has said has been proven wrong. He's still lying about the phony war on terror, falsely connecting the occupation of Iraq with Sept. 11, and slandering Iraqi working people as terrorists for defending their country. O'Reilly's still circulating the lies about Salman Pak, the alleged Hussein training ground for terrorists that has far fewer connections to Sept. 11 than US flight schools and military bases where the hijackers trained!

O'Reilly's still pushing the misinformation about Zarqawi, claiming definitively that he "continues to kill Americans" without providing a scintilla of evidence. He's still saying that after fighting in Afghanistan Zarqawi was "shipped to Baghdad, where his leg was amputated. He has direct ties to al Qaeda and is believed to have executed American Nicholas Berg."

We don't even know if Zarqawi is alive. Reports are he was killed in a US bombing raid over northern Iraq months ago. Strange how that leg amputation that O'Reilly referred to is now showing up in press reports as nasal surgery after the guy in the Berg execution video showed no sign of a leg amputation.

"He has direct ties to al Qaeda." False. His alleged connections to al Qaeda are murky at best. Bush's financial ties to the bin Ladens--and his grandfathers business links to the Nazis--are not.

"He is believed to have executed American Nicholas Berg."

Believed by whom? The CIA? Their credibility and objectivity are worthless. They probably made the video with their fellow professional killers from Mossad.

O'Reilly continues to demonstrate he's a willing shill and pimp for the war criminals in Washington. He belongs alongside them in the dock.

June 7, 2004 Postscript:

This is what William S. Lind of the conservative think tank Centre for Cultural Conservatism said on May 13 regarding the Uprising That Wasn't:

"America needs to make sure it has plans for a figh ting withdrawal from Iraq...The growing probability is that we will be drivenout by a general UPRISING [emphasis added], an intifada in which every American will be the target of every Iraqi and our boys and girls will have to fight their way out in a scene like that which faced Gordon in the Sudan. It's not a pleasant prospect.

"It means, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of American and 'coalition casualties, many times more Iraqi casualties, and one of history's more memorable defeats, right up there with Syracuse, Waterloo and Stalingrad. The aftershocks will be severe, as regimes tumble from Pakistan, through the Persian Gulf to Egypt, to Britain, and America itself.

"You can look forward to seeing the Dow at 3,000, it not 300."

As you reflect on these words, remember the great Sage O'Reilly's comments on April 7: "There's good news out of Iraq today. There is no general uprising."

May 4, 2004--Today MSNBC, the NY Times, and many other media outlets pulled or refused to run the above cartoon by Ted Rall that sharply dissented from the capitalist establishment's anointing of former NFL player-turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman as a national hero after he was killed in Afghanistan. Rall believes that Tillman's death has been shamelessly twisted into a propaganda prop for Washington's colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a conclusion that COSMOS LEFT finds irrefutable.

Tonight Rall appeared on the O'Reilly Factor and handled himself capably for a liberal. An intelligent man and seasoned debater, Rall managed to get in a few more words than Jeremy Glick did last year when he tried to inform O'Reilly that the thousands of Afghans killed by Washington's invasion had nothing to do with Sept. 11.

This entire discussion about Tillman and heroes inspired another essay on this page, "Profiles in Courage Today: Michael Newdow, Kristen Breitweiser, and Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia."

For now, COSMOS LEFT is publishing Rall's cartoon in defense of the 1st Amendment and Bill O'Reilly's latest evisceration of it.

May 10, 2004:

It should be noted that in his May 4th Talking Points memo, "The Left-Wing Press Weighs in on Iraq," Bill O'Reilly issued a thinly veiled threat against Ted Rall for his Tillman cartoon.

O'Reilly: "Rall has penned a cartoon that heavily implies Mr. Tillman was a fool for d ying for his country. Now few media organizations have run the cartoon. And few Americans would agree with Rall, who may now be facing a reaction I would not want to face."

An ominous tone accompanied this wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Here O'Reilly is whipping his legions of brain-dead, fanatical followers into a chauvinistic froth to go after Rall, whom O'Reilly had just accused of being disrespectul to the nation, Tillman and his family; in essence, he called Rall a traitor. When O'Reilly agitates his dogs, they respond like Pavlov's. People are indicted, fired, and threatened; boycotts are organized; newspapers cave in to the O'Reilly-inspired hysteria.

Watch for any reports regarding death threats against Rall. Remember that Sept. 11 commissioner was deluged with death threats after O'Reilly blamed her for erecting the bureaucratic "Wall" that allowed the attacks to occur.

O'Reilly's attack dogs constitute a potential mass base for a fascist movement in the United States. At some point when we're closer to a pre-revolutionary situation in the US, labor's defense guards and workers militias will have to deal with these bands of fascist thugs. But that's later. Right now we have to neutralize O'Reilly and try to win those workers who can still be won from his reactionary, antilabor, fascist/Bonapartist perspective.

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Recently Bill O'Reilly gave a back-handed endorsement of Disney's refusal to distribute Michael Moore's new movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which explores financial relationships between the Bush and bin Laden families and how Bush exploited Sept. 11 to wage long-planned wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to control those nations' natural resources.

In his typically disingenuous manner, O'Reilly stopped short of supporting this latest manifestation of corporate political censorship, saying instead, "It couldn't happen to a nicer guy."

O'Reilly brought in a Newsweek hack with an obvious axe to grind against Moore's left of center politics to help execute the hatchet job against Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," an obvious play on Ray Bradbury's novel about censorship in a future fascist society, "Fahrenheit 451."

We'll take up this hatchet job soon, but for now it should be noted that Mel Gibson's production company, Icon Productions, was supposed to finance Moore's movie, but pulled out last year after press reports that the White House "warned off" Gibson.

O'Reilly left out that little tidbit of news.

MAY 26, 2004:

Much to O'Reilly's horror, Fahrenheit 9/11 won the prestigious Palme D'Or award at the 57th Cannes Film Festival last week. Typical of his rude and uncouth character, O'Reilly could only derisively trivialize Moore's outstanding achievement.

"...liberal bomb thrower Michael Moore has won the Cannes Film Festival award for his film entitled, "I Hate Everything About President Bush." -- Oh wait, that's not the title. That's the theme."

O'Reilly continues his disturbing habit of casually, almost ritualistically labeling articulate and passionate leftists as "bomb throwers." This is provocative and incendeniary terminology shrewdly delivered by a slick demagogue. While O'Reilly deflects attention away from the real bombs thrown by Bush and the Pentagon that have slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent civilians, O'Reilly simultaneously imparts the subliminal message that people like Moore, Robert Scheer, and even liberals like Frank Rich and Paul Krugman are wide eyed radicals who threaten public safety with their rhetorical bomb throwing.

Notice how O'Reilly is not even a serious and professional enough journalist to provide his viewers the actual name of Moore's film, either because he's not sophisticated enough to understand the connection between Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and the name of Ray Bradbury's novel about censorship in a futuristic fascist society, or because O'Reilly is well aware of the derivation of Moore's title and once again is himself censoring vital information from his audience, denying them data needed to think critically so that he can more easily twist and mislead his viewers so they'll follow his Pied Piper road to American fascism.

That's right, O'Reilly, Moore's just one of tens of millions on this planet who hate George Bush for who he is and what he's done as chief political leader of the US capitalist class--stole the election; trampled on the Constitution; allowed 911to happen either through complicity or criminal negligence; exploited 911 to wage two long planned wars of criminal aggression and colonial conquest to seize control of natural resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, with more on the way; degraded the environment; looted the US Treasury; paving the way to loot Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; terrorized the entire world with weapons of mass destruction; strongly backing Israel's war of terror against Palestinians.

That's a weighty list of reasons to hate George Bush, and they're alongside his sociopathic sadism, his cowardice, his arrogance and mean spirit, his small mindedness and vindictiveness, his lust for killing and death and power.

And that's why we hate Bill O'Reilly, too.

O'Reilly's so thrown by Moore's Cannes award that he's asked his fans to help him decide if he should invite Moore on the Factor to talk about his provocative, antiBush film.

"A new billoreilly.com question asks, 'Should The Factor invite Michael Moore on?' Yes or no. Whatever you say goes in this case, and that's never ridiculous."

Oh, it was ridiculous in the 2000 Florida election, only that time O'Reilly was not so concerned about counting every vote.

June 1, 2004:

When O'Reilly and the Newsweek hack teamed up to bash Moore ridiculed him on two of his film's themes: that the Bush and Bin Laden families have enjoyed extensive business relationships for almost 30 years, and that in the days after Sept. 11 the US government secretly flew dozens of members of the Bin Laden family on specially chartered jets back to Saudi Arabia.

On the first point regarding the close business links between the two families--a documented fact which to my knowledge has never been mentioned on O'Reilly's show--O'Reilly simply ignored this with the help of his Newsweek guest. It was mentioned but never followed up on with a single word.

And the second point--that the Bin Ladens were secretly flown out of the US after Sept. 11, was ridiculed by O'Reilly and his guest as the stuff of conspiratorial nonsense and urban legend. Their proof was that Moore claims the Bin Ladens were ferreted out immediately after the attacks, when all other planes were still ground, thus suggesting special treatment for Bush's Saudi cronies.

Now I haven't yet seen Moore's film, but we do know that one of the authoritative Sept. 11 timelines compiled online by Paul Thompson states the following:

"September 13-19, 2001: Members of bin Laden's family and important Saudis are flown out of the US. The New York Times explains, "The young members of the bin Laden clan were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane WHEN AIRPORTS REOPENED THREE DAYS AFTER THE ATTACKS. "[emphasis added] A Tampa Tribune article describes a flight carrying Saudi royalty from Tampa, Forida to Lexington, Kentucky on September 13, while the ban on all nonmilitary flights in the US is still in effect. Witnesses describe multiple 747's with Arabic lettering on their sides are already in Lexington, suggesting another secret assembly point. It appears that the FBI were able to only interview the bin Ladens and Saudis only briefly, it at all. The existence of such flights during this ban is now unfortunately often called an urban legend."

So while O'Reilly heaps scorn on Moore as a propagandist who doesn't respect the facts, O'Reilly doesn't dare challenge Moore on the documented proof that the Bush and Bin Laden families have been financially intertwined for two decades and enmeshed in the BCCI and Iran/Contra scandals. And on the matter of the mysterious Bin Laden flights out of the US, O'Reilly ignores the multiple and credible reports that the Bin Ladens were ferreted out of the country with blazing speed in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

April 19-28, 2004--No sooner had Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner called for Jamie Gorelick to resign from the Sept. 11 commission did Bill O'Reilly endorse this White House-directed effort to take the 911 heat off Bush and place it on Bill Clinton.

The Bush/O'Reilly spin is as follows: In 1995, while a deputy attorney general in Bill Clinton's Justice Department, Democrat Gorelick authored a memo that gave instructions separating counterintelligence from criminal intelligence. This revelation was "declassified" by Attorney General John Ashcroft during his testimony before the September 11 commission in a transparent ploy to divert attention from his own criminal negligence. It was this "wall" built by a Clinton deputy attorney general that prevented the FBI and CIA from talking to each other before 911. The "wall" caused the intelligence breakdown that kept the dots from being connected. The "wall" enabled the terrorist attacks to take place. Pay no attention to the mountains of evidence showing Bush's criminal negligence or conscious complicity regarding Sept. 11. It was Clinton's "Wall" that blinded Washington to its enemies.

Well, this was music to O'Reilly, who lost no time informing his viewers that the conflict of interest inherent in Gorelick's authorship of that memo required her resignation from the commission. Strange how O'Reilly showed no similar concern over the much more serious conflict of interest regarding Philipp Zelikow, the commission's executive director who WAS PART OF BUSH'S INTELLIGENCE TEAM, has enjoyed a close professional relationship with Condoleeza Rice, and stated over a year ago that a prime reason for invading Iraq was to protect Israel.

Let's review a few facts about Ashcroft's "Wall" that were conveniently omitted by O'Reilly, a nasty habit he has whenever facts expose his spin and just might provide his audience a more fair and balanced perspective.

Let's briefly review the historical background to Ashcroft's "Wall" that were conveniently omitted by O'Reilly, a nasty habit he has whenever facts expose his spin and just might provide his audience a more fair and balanced perspective.

A November 22, 2002, article on the World Socialist Web Site by John Andrews entitled "US intelligence appeals court sanctions increased domestic spying" revealed that the source of Aschroft's whining is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was passed by the Congress in 1978 as an attempt to curb the rampant governmental spying on domestic political groups in the 1960s and '70s by both the FBI AND Central Intelligence Agency.
FISA required government agents to obtain an order from the secret 3-member FISA court (now appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist) before they could wiretap or search under the pretext of national security. Unlike the probable cause standard guiding the Fourth Amendment, a FISA surveillance order needs to only show reasonable suspicion that the surveillance target is an "agent of a foreign power," which includes "a group engaged in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefore."

In order to prevent US agents from using foreign intelligence investigations as an excuse for spying for use in domestic criminal cases, FISA required that intelligence gathering be the "primary purpose" of a FISA surveillance order. This is the source of the "Wall." It was not invented by Gorelick's 1995 Justice Department memo. Not only did previous administrations from both political parties establish this "Wall" to keep foreign intelligence gathering separate from domestic criminal investigations, but prior court decisions, even from the conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled that the Fourth Amendment mandated this "Wall."

In response to Ashcroft's charge, Gorelick stated that the "Wall" guidelines had been reaffirmed by Ashcroft's Justice Department in August 2001, and that she has been recusing herself from any testimony related to her tenure as Clinton's deputy attorney general.

Bush defenders will predictably argue that Zelikow also has recused himself from testimony relating to his participation at White House intelligence meetings, but as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission Zelikow shapes the whole framework and functioning of the panel and has far more of a leadership role than Gorelick.

APRIL 20, 2004:

COSMOS LEFT is no defender of Jamie Gorelick, who, like every member of the Sept. 11 panel,is an enemy of the working class. Gorelick's service to the ruling class has been impressive: a litigator for many US companies in the 1970s; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; a former Pentagon lawyer; a vice chairperson of Fannie Mae; deputy attorney general; her membership on the board of Schlumberger, a large oilfields service firm; and currently a member of the CIA's National Security Advisory panel and the President's Review of Intelligence, who enjoys a close personal relationship to CIA Director George Tenet.

Yes, Gorelick has a conflict of interest, but it's far more profound than the one O'Reilly and Sensensbrenner are squawking about. It's the same co nflict of interest gorelick shares with her colleagues on the commission--they are all loyal servants of US capitalism. Corporate lawyers like Richard Ben-Veniste, who once worked for the Enron-enabling law firm of Weil, Gotshal, and Manges; senators; congressmen; a former navy secretary and chairman of a private equity firm with close ties to Henry Kissinger; a governor who is on the board of weapons maker FMC Corporation; executive director Zelikow, a close Bush advisor and member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board who attended those presidential daily briefings on terrorist threats; and of course committee chairman Thomas Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey who also happens to have business ties with Khalid bin Mahfouz and Hussein Al Amoudi, alleged financiers of Al Qaeda and long-time business associates of George W. Bush.

In other words, the entire Sept. 11 commission is one obscene conflict of interest. The Sept. 11 commission was never about learning the truth about the terrorist attacks. If it were, they would have challenged Ashcroft's gag order on the two FBI wiretap translators who claim that pre-911 intercepted communications specifically discussed the 911 plot to hijack plots and crash them into national landmarks.

The last thing the commission wanted to do was get to the bottom of what happened the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Their job was to empower the very intellience agencies that allowed the attacks to occur. Their job was to turn the "investigation" into a celebration of the Patriot Act and thereby strengthen the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.

The FBI's job is not to protect the people of the US from a terrorist attack. The FBI is the capitalist regime's secret police; it's the US version of the Soviet KGB. It's job is to spy on Americans and violate our constitutional right to organize political dissent. The FBI has a long and sordid history of murderous repression against the people; of allowing innocent men to rot in jail while mobster informants were free to commit murder; whose informants did nothing to stop the first WTC bombing or the Okalahoma City bombing.

The CIA is not in business to protect the American people either. The CIA is a group of professional killers and assassins who specialize in torture training, drug trafficking, subversion, and overthrowing legally elected governments to create the most profitable environment possible for US corporations.

APRIL 28, 2004:

September 11 was not an "intelligence failure." IT WAS AN INTELLIGENCE SUCCESS. The US ruling class got the Pearl Harbor they so desperately needed to win public support for their war without end. And with the help of media propagandists like Bill O'Reilly, the rulers succeeded in convincing most Americans that Sept. 11 was organized by Islamic jihadists from Afghanistan caves or Saddam Hussein from Baghdad.

We've learned more about the origins of the "Wall" that further undermines Ashcroft's integrity and raises more questions about his motive for attacking Gorelick. Far from being "the single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem," Gorelick's memo aimed to improve communication within the FBI and overcome restrictions on information sharing that had its roots in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations.

According to Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress, a November 2002 decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review contradicted Ashcroft's interpretation of the Wall. The Court said that the requirement to have separation between criminal and intelligence investigations stemmed from a 1980 case, US v. Truong Dinh. Gude writes that this Truong requirement for some separation between criminal and intelligence investigations "arose out of the need to preserve the integrity of the long and fruitful investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The memo developed guidelines for the handling of evidence to ensure that information collected during the course of the investigation would be available to prosecutors at trial and intelligence agents working to prevent future attacks."

Contrary to O'Reilly's dogma that the hearings are laced with partisan bickering that precludes any rational conclusions from being drawn, it was commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, who forced Ashcroft to reveal that his deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, had reaffirmed Gorelick's memo in his own memo dated, ironically enough, August 6, 2001.

Gorton: "Your second issue is a severe criticism of the 1995 guidelines that, as you say, imposed draconian barriers to communications between law enforcement and the intelligence communities, the so-called wall. I don't find that in the eight months before Sept. 11, 2001, that you changed those guidelines. In fact, I have a here a memorandum dated August 6 from Larry Thompson, the fifth line of which reads, 'The 1995 procedures remain in effect today.' If that wall was so disabling, why was it not destroyed during the course of those eight months?"

Ashcroft: "The August 6 memorandum of Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson made possible significantly more information sharing by mandating that those individuals involved in intelligence investigations who came across information relating to a felony federal offense immediately provide notice of that felony federal offense to people on the criminal side of the house. It was a step in the direction of disabling the wall. It was a step in the direction of lowering the wall, providing for greater communication."

Gorton: "But it was after August 6, 2001, that Moussaoui was picked up and the decision was made in the FBI that you couldn't get a warrant to search his computer. So those changes must not have been very significant."

Ashcroft: "I missed your question, Commissioner."

Gorton: "Well, you say as a part of your criticism of the 1995 guidelines, after the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials had feared breaching the wall. Yet that was after these changes that you say were significant on August 6."

Gorton's comments demolish Ashcroft's erroneous contention that the Wall was responsible for Sept. 11. They also relate to another disturbing contradiction that emerged from the hearings. CIA director Tenet sated that the FBI had sought intelligence information on Zacarias Moussaoui from the Agency for the purpose of procuring a warrant under FISA from the special FISA court discussed above.

Ashcroft, however, testified that the FBI only applied for an ordinary criminal warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. Thus, FISA was not the basis for seeking the warrant, which was torpedoed by FBI brass.

The truth is there were no walls or barriers on sharing this intelligence information. There exist no legal restrictions that prevent intelligence operatives from sharing intelligence in formation with each other. Information gleaned from a physical surveillance or from an informant can be legally shared without restriction.

MAY 12, 2004:

The Wall had nothing to do with the military standdown in effect the morning of Sept. 11 that left the nation's airspace defenseless, this in the face of multiple, specific warnings that jets would be hijacked and crashed into New York and Washington targets. The Wall does not explain the 45 minute lapse between the crash of Flight 11 into the WTC and the launching of fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base. The Wall does not explain that no jets took off from Andrews Air Force Base, the one closest to Washington.

The Wall had nothing to do with the CIA penetration of "Al Qaeda" cells. The Wall had nothing to do with the FBI's sabotage of their own agents' investigations and warnings of what was about to occur on Sept. 11. The Wall had nothing to do with the National Security Agency's destruction of their own intercepted tapes of Bin Laden conversations days before Sept. 11. The Wall had nothing to do with the fact that the CIA didn't tell the FBI unti August 2001 that alleged hijackers al-Mihdhar and al-Hawazmi had been in the US early in 2000 after attending an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. The Wall doesn't explain the contradiction that while al-Mihdhar and al-Hawazmi were listed in the San Diego phonebook, the latter taking flight training while the former garnered a reentry visa from the US State Department, and their roommate and/or landlord was an FBI informant, that these two men's names didn' make it to the Los Angeles FBI office until Sept. 11, 2001.

The Wall doesn't explain that despite the fact US intelligence operatives had been tailing alleged hijacker kingpin Mohammed Atta since 2000, and knowing he was an Al Qaeda operative who had bought huge amounts of chemicals, they allowed Atta to waltz in and out of the US several times without a visa and immigration didn't say a word.

O'Reilly's never said a word about any of this.

He also had nothing to say about the fact that between 1991 and 2001, a regional sector of NORAD simulated an hijacked jet crashing into a building in the US as part of a training exercise.

But it is O'Reilly's silence about what may turn out to be the smoking gun behind Sept. 11 that is most revealing--the former FBI translator turned whistleblower named Sibel Edmonds, who was hired after Sept. 11 to translate intercepted wiretaps that had been recorded in the year prior to the attacks.

MAY 14, 2004:

Ms. Edmunds, a 33-year-old Turkish American who speaks fluent Farsi, Arabic and Turkish, began translating intercepted wiretaps on Sept. 20, 2001. While working in the FBI's Washington offices, Edmonds claims she saw information proving senior officials knew of Al-Qaeda's plot to attack the US with aircraft months before Sept. 11. Edmonds gave secret testimony to the recent Sept. 11 commission that the FBI had specific information prior to Sept. 11 that a terrorist attack involving jets was in the works.

Edmonds told Salon, "We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June/July of 2001." [Actually, there was a high-level military alert from June until, alas, the end of August, when it was lifted at the conclusion of Bush's month-long vacation at his Texas ranch.]

Edmonds is outraged that Bush claims he didn't have any knowledge of the type of attacks that was coming.

"Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie."

Edmonds has passed a lie detector test given by FBI agents. She claims the tapes she translated clearly showed an al-Qaeda plot was being plotted. But Edmonds cannot say any more BECAUSE THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SLAPPED A GAG ORDER ON HER IN 2002.

Edmonds told Salon: "President Bush said they h ad no specific information about Sept. 11, and that's accurate. But there was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should've alerted the people to the threat we're facing."

Edmonds made the news in 2002 when she charged that the FBI had pressured the translation department to work slowly after 911 so that the agency would get more money in the next budget. Edmonds says that because of her critical reports, she was fired in May 2002.

A lawsuit was filed, and in October, Attorney General Ashcroft asked the US District Court to dismiss her case, invoking state secrets privilege in order to "protect the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States."

To my knowledge, O'Reilly has not said one word about Sibel Edmonds, or a FBI translator who corroborates her story. Once again, O'Reilly is covering up for the crimes of the Bush White House, keeping the people from discovering the truth behind the truth staring us all in the face--that the Bush administration looked the other way and allowed Sept. 11 to happen in order to use it to win instant public support for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again, O'Reilly is preventing us from getting at the killers because he's covering up for them.

Is it a coincidence that so many times when O'Reilly works himself and his legions of brain-dead lemmings into a lather, death threats are soon levied against targets of O'Reilly's wrath.

It may have happened again in the case of Jamie Gorelick. Shortly after a number of conservatives--including and most prominently O'Reilly--alleged that her 1995 memo built the Wall and contributed to the failure to halt Sept. 11, Gorelick told CNN she was receiving death threats.

"I can confirm that I've received threats at my office and my home. I did get a bomb threat to my home. I have gotten a lot of very vile e-mails. The bomb threat was by phone."

Hmm. Professor Al-Arian was besieged with death threats after O'Reilly accused him of being a terrorist on his show and suggested the CIA follow his every move. There have been other similar episodes. Now Gorelick.

COSMOS LEFT has also received death threats and vile emails from O'Reilly supporters--and he didn't even have to sic them after me!

We have long held that Bill O'Reilly is an extremely dangerous and powerful man who represents the face of American fascism. His rabid followers respond to his ravings like Pavlov's dogs. Marxists must make a concerted effort to politically counter and eventually defeat this demagogue. We ignore this at our own peril.

April 1, 2004--Last night Bill O'Reilly confirmed his indictment in any future international war crimes tribunal by publicly calling for the destruction of Falluja after the grisly murder of four US mercenaries in that besieged Iraqi town. This knee-jerk, jingoistic reaction on the part of America's most influential and vindictive national chauvinist should not surprise anyone. He has previously called for the murder of civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq if they have the audacity to get in the way of US firepower in their own countries.

Last night, this imperialist media gangster could not restrain his frenzied bloodlust for revenge. His Talking Points memo was littered with inflammatory rhetoric like "search and destroy"; "destroy Falluja"; "we'll put them in a refugee camp"; shoot on sight"; "I don't care about the people of Falluja"; "no more Falluja"; and "Let's knock this place down!"

O'Reilly M.O. is always the same: Warn the citizenry to evacuate their homes or they will be wasted by US firepower. This is Washington's true message to the workers of the world; this is the contempt the US rulers have for toilers from Waco to Baghdad.

In O'Reilly's twisted mind, America is "under siege" from the people of Falluja, who are "dangerous to US soldiers." Oh Really, O'Reilly? As usual, O'Reilly is turning historical reality on its head to spin his ideological dogma. It is the people of Iraq who are "under siege" from the world's most powerful and murderous military machine. Iraq hasn't invaded the US with 130,000 soldiers. Iraq hasn't just killed 15,00 American civilians. Iraq hasn't littered the US with depleted uranium shells. Iraq hasn't bombed American cities. Iraq hasn't destroyed American schools, hospitals, water systems. Iraq didn't impose severe economic sanctions that killed a million Americans over a 12 year period, most of them children. Iraqi soldiers aren't busting into American homes and dragging thousands of US citizens into prison camps on American soil. Iraqi soldiers aren't shooting women and children at checkpoints. Iraqi soldiers aren't shutting down US newspapers for exercising free speech. Iraq hasn't passed laws exempting its corporations or its soldiers from any liability for anything they do in the US.

Who is under siege, O'Reilly?

APRIL 5, 2004:

As usual, O'Reilly left out a few facts in order to deny his viewers any kind of historical context for what occurred in Falluja. He said nothing about the Marines' offensive against the town that preceded the killings of the 4 "civilian contractors," who were actually former Special Forces and Seals soldiers now working as paramilitaries for Blackwater Security, a private security firm.

On March 24, US marines began military operations against Falluja. Hundreds of marines in tanks and armored vehicles attacked the town's residents, killing 18 and wounding many more. A farmer told the Washington Post: "I didn't even seen the American soldiers. I don't know why they started
shooting. I didn't hear anyone shooting at them."

Marines blockaded and militarized the town, subjecting its residents to vehicle and house to house searches. Many young men were arrested. One citizen told the AP: "If they find more than one adult male in any house, they arrest one of them. Those marines are destroying us. They are leaning very hard on Falluja."

The marines tried to win over the hearts and minds of Falluja's residents by flooding the streets with Arabic leaflets that read, "You can't escape and you can't hide," obviously hoping that their commander in chief's Texas charm would help win Falluja over.

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele wrote an excellent account of the marines' rampage through Falluja and the intense anger it generated.

"[a]s residents ushered reporters into their homes a few days ago, shortly before this week's attack on four American security guards (though mercenaries might be a better term), it was clear that deep communal anger was lurking here, and had reached the boiling point.They wanted to show the results of several US incursions over four days and nights last week.

"Rockets from helicopter gunships had punctured bedroom walls. Patio floors and front gates were pockmarked by shrapnel. Car doors looked like sieves. In the mayhem 18 Iraqis lay dead. On the American side two marines were killed. It was the worst period of violence Falluja has seen during a year of occupation.

"So this week's retaliation comes as no surprise. The cycle of violence that US troops unleashed looks and feels increasingly like Palestinian rage in the face of excessive force by an occupying power."

Steele's interviews with the people of Falluja revealed "the chaos the marines left after sleeping in [a Falluja resident's] house. Cupboards were ransacked, a computer had gone, and empty brown bags which once contained army rations littered every room."

Steele ended his article by observing that "Not many of Fallujah's people are former Baathist loyalists, as the Americans say, nor have the Americans produced evidence of large numbers of foreign 'jihadists.' They are ordinary families, driven by nationalist pride, and increasingly by a desire to retaliate when their homes and neighborhoods are violated and their relatives and friends killed."

No, O'Reilly chose to censor any facts that might get in the way of his bloodthirsty, one-sided, pro-war spin. He didn't say a word about the 200 Fallujans who died when a British jet dropped a bomb on them in 1991. He didn't remind his viewers that US forces massacred scores of Fallujans right after Baghdad fell. He didn't mention the 13 unarmed Fallujan protesters shot to death by US soldiers on April 28, 2003.

To O'Reilly's simple mind, the 15,000 Iraqi civilians killed by US forces--the cause of the seething hostility among Iraqis--are not enough. His answer is to kill another 50,000. That'll learn 'em.

APRIL 6, 2004:

And that is precisely what Bush and Rumsfeld have in store for Iraqis. Their response to the gruesome killings of those 4 US mercenaries is already unfolding--to slaughter even more Iraqis in bloody reprisals. But in the last two days, the Iraqi people--Sunni and Shiite--have upped the ante and staggered Bush with fierce Sunni resistance from Ramadi to Falluja and armed uprisings by Shiites from Baghdad's Sadr City to Najaf.

The mutilation of those Blackwater mercenaries was barbaric, but that barbarism flows from the barbarism of the illegal, predatory, and brutal war of aggression by Washington. As Barry Grey of the World Socialist Web Site put it in his April 3 essay, "History is complete with examples of occupied peoples, in the face of the systematic brutality and overwhelming military superiority of foreign invaders, giving vent to their indignation and outrage in such acts of retribution."

As opposed to the barbarism of an occupying imperialist army that was shown by US soldiers in the Tiger Force wing of the 101st Airborne during the Vietnam war, when they burned and pillaged more than 40 villages, torturing and executing men, women, and children along the way, and keeping ears and scalps for souvenirs. In its October 2003 report, which just won a Pulitzer Prize, the Toledo Blade reported that one Tiger Force soldier decapitated an infant for its necklace and the teeth were kicked out of executed civilians for gold fillings. But don't expect O'Reilly to inform his audience about this story just because it won a prestigious prize.  He's still trying to figure out the difference between a Polk and a Peabody.

One by one, every reason Bush and O'Reilly gave for invading Iraq has been exposed as a lie--WMD, links to Sept. 11 and Bin Laden, and now liberating the people. Shockingly devoid of even an elemental understanding of history, O'Reilly flails about, demanding to know what went wrong, embarrassing himself every night with Alice in Wonderland inversions of reality.

Bully gangster that he is, O'Reilly knows only one thing--brute, thuggish force--as long as it's done by other folk's kids. "The US military should have dealt with Falluja a long time ago," meaning, as he eloquently put it on another show, "no more Falluja," "search and destroy," "shoot to kill," etc. After lamenting that the Pentagon had hesitated to take care of Falluja long before, O'Reilly urges a "carrot and stick approach" to "stabilize Iraq."

"75 percent of the country has now been pacified. the remaining dissenters must be harshly dealt with. Fear can be a good thing. Homicidal terrorists and their enablers must be killed or incarcerated. And their punishment must be an example to others."

Have you noticed how practically every word uttered by Bush and O'Reilly can be turned around and applied to them? Because the people of Falluja could certainly use O'Reilly's above words to defend their actions. To them, homicidal foreign terrorists have illegally invaded their defenseless nation, slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, destroyed much of the country's infrastructure, and now bombed their town, killing many of their people. Those four Blackwater Security employees were not food caterers.They were paramilitaries working for the occupying force on a contract basis, very likely armed CIA operatives. To Fallujans, using O'Reilly's lingo, they were terrorist enablers who had to be killed. And made an example of.

O'Reilly's lying, spinning, and propagandizing when he characterizes Iraqi resistance fighters as "terrorist." They are on their own soil. It is Bush's imperialist force that is illegally occupying Iraq and stripping it of its sovereignty. Iraqi fighters had nothing to do with Sept. 11 and have nothing to do with terrorism against the United States. It is Washington that is trying to militarily conquer a defenseless country with 130,000 soldiers. It is Washington committing state terrorism against Iraq. Iraqis who take up arms against the US--be they Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd--are fighting to defend their country and their resistance is legitimate.

Back to O' Reilly. "How do you think Saddam controlled Iraq all these decades? He did it by fear. We can't use his tactics, but we can certainly punish murderers and deprive towns who harbor killers of liberty."

This cretin's so drunk with arrogance he's clueless as to the implications of what he just said. That's an effective message for Iraqis today--we freed you so we can pacify you by scaring you to death--just like the dictator we freed you from! And Bush IS using Hussein's tactics of brutal military repression. And he's just getting started.

"'Talking Points f ully expects the U.S. marines to use maximum force in punishing the Falluja terrorists. That town should be quarantined, placed under martial law and a curfew imposed. Any violators of the curfew should be shot on sight.

"It's obvious that the terrorists in Iraq believe they can murder Americans and get away with it. The Pentagon has not contradicted that belief. It is time to start protecting American soldiers. It is time to use the stick."

For some time now COSMOS LEFT has been calling for the prosecution of Bill O'Reilly for war crimes charges based on his role as an enabler of those crimes through his position as a media propagandist for the Pentagon. This argument is based on the precedent set by the Nuremberg prosecution of Nazi media propagandist Hans Fritzsche, as discussed in David Walsh's April 16, 2003, World Socialist Web Site article.

As you read these excerpts from the prosecution's summary, keep in mind Bill O'Reilly's public call for the destruction of Falluja.

"Fritzsche is not in the dock as a free journalist but as a propagandist who helped substantially to tighten the Nazi stranglehold over the German people, who made the excesses of the conspirators palatable to the German people, who goaded the German nation to fury and crime against people they were told by him were subhuman.

“Without the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi State, the world would not have suffered the catastrophe of these years, and it is because of Fritzsche’s role in behalf of the Nazi conspirators, and their deceitful and barbarous practices, that he is called to account before the International Military Tribunal.

“For the correct definition of the role of defendant Hans Fritzsche it is necessary, firstly, to keep clearly in mind the importance attached by Hitler and his closest associates (as Goering, for example) to propaganda in general and to radio propaganda in particular. This was considered one of the most important and essential factors in the success of conducting an aggressive war.”

In Nazi Germany, “propaganda was invariably a factor in preparing and conducting acts of aggression and in training the German populace to accept obediently the criminal enterprises of German fascism. ...

“For the correct definition of the role of defendant Hans Fritzsche it is necessary, firstly, to keep clearly in mind the importance attached by Hitler and his closest associates (as Goering, for example) to propaganda in general and to radio propaganda in particular. This was considered one of the most important and essential factors in the success of conducting an aggressive war.”

In Hitler’s Germany, the reply to the verdict continues, “propaganda was invariably a factor in preparing and conducting acts of aggression and in training the German populace to accept obediently the criminal enterprises of German fascism. ...

“The basic method of the Nazi propagandistic activity lay in the false presentation of facts. ... The dissemination of provocative lies and the systematic deception of public opinion were as necessary to the Hitlerites for the realization of their plans as were the production of armaments and the drafting of military plans. Without propaganda, founded on the total eclipse of the freedom of press and of speech, it would not have been possible for German Fascism to realize its aggressive intentions, to lay the groundwork and then to put to practice the war crimes and the crimes against humanity. In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

Remind you of anyone?

"You'll be free and appreciate it if I have to shove this gun down your throat!"

April 7, 2004--The bloody reprisals against a civilian population that Bill O'Reilly exhorted Washington to carry out against the residents of Falluja are taking place as this is written. US jets and Cobra gungships have dropped a 500 pound on a mosque, reportedly killing at least 40 worshippers. US Apache helicopters are strafing villages, killing 25 women and children from just one family already. Arab media outlets report that a Falluja surgeon says 67 Iraqis were killed and over 148 wounded Tuesday night. Tanks are shelling residential neighborhoods. Bodies litter Falluja's streets. The death toll is over 100 in Falluja alone.

These all constitute serious war crimes. But in O'Reilly's twisted and sociopathic mind, this is nothing more than the "marines taking care of business."

Except the marines are taking heavy casualties too. Resistance from the people has been fierce, killing scores of Marines. And the blood of all the dead is on Bill O'Reilly as much as Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, Perle, Libby, and the rest of this murderous gang.

When O'Reilly calls for the destruction of a town that is already being brutally invaded, when he calls its inhabitants terrorists for trying to drive foreign invaders from their country, when he goads Americans to view Iraqis as barbaric savages incapable of understanding his version of freedom, then he isn't merely exercising his 1st Amendment right to free speech. Just as his predecessor Hans Fritzsche did for German imperialism's war machine, O'Reilly plays an integral propaganda role for US imperialism's predatory wars of colonial conquest.

To paraphrase the Nuremberg prosecutor, O'Reilly's propaganda is invariably a factor in preparing and conducting acts of aggression and in training the American populace to accept obediently the criminal enterprises of US imperialism. The basic method of his propagandistic activity lies in his false presentation of facts. His dissemination of provocative lies and the systematic deception of public opinion are as necessary to Bush's war drive as are the production of weapons and the drafting of military plans. Without propagandists like O'Reilly, founded on the total eclipse of the freedom of press and speech, it would not be possible for US imperialism to realize its aggressive intentions, to lay the groundwork and then to put to practice the war crimes and the crimes against humanity.

The deeper the crisis for Bush and US imperialism in Iraq, the worse O'Reilly looks. The more Iraq's working people resist the occupation, the worse O'Reilly looks. The more lies that are exposed, the worse O'Reilly looks. And the more shameful, ignorant, and embarrassing he sounds. Instead of being a man and admit he's been wrong, O'Reilly pigheadedly and blindly continues to support a disaster based on lies he helped to perpetuate, while concocting new ones more preposterous than before. In so doing, he's condemning more Iraqis and Americans to their deaths.

Over the last several nights, in Talking Points memos with such names as "It Is Time to Use the Stick," "Continuing Chaos in Iraq," and "The Second War in Iraq," O'Reilly continues to call Iraqi workers and farmers terrorists for daring to resist an illegal and murderous US occupation.

This is a concrete example of a provocative lie and systematic deception of public opinion. The Iraqi people are not terrorists in their own country. O'Reilly is consciously trying to brainwash Americans into associating Iraqis with "terrorism," that is, September 11. We have noted before that O'Reilly is probably the media stooge most responsible for the fact that 70% of Americans believe the falsehood that Hussein was behind Sept. 11.

The problem is that the Pentagon's been waging a "defensive action," you see. Forty thousand dead Iraqis are not enough for the bloodthirsty jackal who hosts the Factor. It's time to take the gloves off and really commit a bloodbath. After all, the Iraqis are not helping us occupy them. They won't fight for their freedom, according to O'Reilly. Iraqis don't value democracy like we do. So we've got to dispense with the hearts and minds strategy and let the military deal with the "bad guys."

If this reminds readers of the excuses that were given by imperialist apologists as to why the US lost the Vietnam war, than you're ready for O'Reilly's latest history lesson, which is always dangerous.

"Like South Vietnam, it is becoming increasingly obvious that many, PERHAPS MOST OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE are not going to fight for their freedom. [emphasis added] So what we have here is a population that doesn't seem to value democracy. America did all it could, including 55,000 dead to give the South Vietnamese a chance to be free, but the South Vietnamese would not fight. So for the past 30 years, they have lived with the boots of the Communists on their necks. Believe me, I've been there. There's nothing free about Vietnam."

Earth to O'Reilly: In case you haven't noticed, Iraqis ARE fighting for their freedom--they're taking up arms to evict an unwanted, foreign power that illegally invaded their land to control the oil and dominate the region for US corporations. As for South Vietnam, the US rulers sent 55,000 Americans to their graves and slaughtered millions of Vietnamese to DENY the Vietnamese people their sovereign right to be free from foreign occupation. The South Vietnamese "would not fight" for the corrupt regime of landlords that Washington tried to force down their necks. The South Vietnamese peasants sided with their brethren from the North and backed the Viet Cong, because the Communists gave the peasants land and freedom from the oppression of the South Vietnamese landowners. O'Reilly's wrong; the South Vietnamese fought, only not for Washington's puppets and landlords. They fought for national independence and sovereignty--and they won.

He's been to Vietnam? So what? He was in Haiti, too, and all he had to show his viewers was a chicken getting its head bitten off. O'Reilly's word means nothing. His credibility is right next to Bush's--in the gutter. And they belong right next to each other in the jail cells that await them.

O'Reilly has got some nerve lecturing the Vietnamese about freedom and how they've been denied it by Communist boots on their necks. He's got even more nerve scolding Iraqis for not embracing the freedom the US is giving them with a gun to their heads and marine boots on their necks.

APRIL 8, 2004: "There's some good news out of Iraq today. There's no general uprising . . ."--Bill O'Reilly, April 7 Talking Points, "Blood and Politics"

Oh Really O'Reilly?

Strange, you're about the only ruling class voice who actually saw good news coming out of the April 7th Sunni-Shiite armed uprising against Coalition forces. Even Rumsfeld said it was a bad day. At least dozens of US soldiers were killed in two days, the heaviest death toll since the war began. Not a general uprising? The entire nation is in revolt against US forces. Shiites in Kut, Kufa, Karbala, Najaf, Nasiriya, Basra, and Sadr City in Baghdad; Sunnis in Ramadi and Falluja; Kurds in Mosul and Kirkuk, all of Iraq is uniting in implacable opposition to the US occupation. Shiites and Sunnis are now fighting and marching together in Baghdad and elsewhere against the occupation. Bush turned out to be the great unifier after all--but not in the way his campaign advisors meant.

O'Reilly's attempt to spin the most disastrous crisis for Bush into good news is shameful, even by his gutter standards. The nationwide armed Shiite uprising coupled with the united front between Shiites and Sunnis constitute a devastating political defeat for US imperialism that demolishes still another Washington myth--that Iraqi opposition to the US occupation was limited to Baathist holdouts in the Sunni Triangle.

The day's bloody events were "good news" to O'Reilly in another sense--US forces were "hammering the enemy." In other words, Iraqi civilians being butchered made O'Reilly's day. Make no mistake about it--the "enemy" is the Iraqi people in O'Reilly's mind. He is in complete accord with Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt, the chief US military spokesperson in Iraq, who said of Tuesday's fierce fighting in Falluja: "I understand there was a large casualty toll taken by the enemy."

There usually is when you strafe neighborhoods with overwhelming firepower from Apache and Cobra helicopters, tanks and artillery. Dozens of women and children are dead. This is the "hammering of the enemy" that made O'Reilly's day.

While the nationwide uprising was bad news for the US capitalist ruling class, a fact recognized by most clear thinking bourgeois pundits, excepting Bill O'Reilly, the fact that the Iraqi working class is fighting back and waging a heroic resistance against the US occupation in face of massive firepower IS GOOD NEWS FOR WORKERS EVERYWHERE.

APRIL 9, 2004:

If Washington is forced to withdraw all its forces from Iraq, it would be a staggering defeat for US capitalists, but it would be a huge victory for US working people. It would put us in a stronger position for the class battles that are unfolding and will deepen. While capitalist swine like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly will be humiliated by a defeat for US imperialism in Iraq, US workers will never be more proud than when our internationalist solidarity with Iraq's working class helps them get that murderous yoke of their back.

O'Reilly, devoid of any historical sense, is clearly incapable of grasping the significance of Sunnis and Shiites uniting in common struggle against the occupation. He has only one answer: Drown the Iraqis in blood! They are helpless subjects who need to be civilized by American capitalist democracy, and if they don't go along, we'll just have to shove a gun down their throats until they let us free them.

O'Reilly is the personification of the predatory, thuggish faction of the US ruling class today. He understands nothing of Iraq or history; he knows only brute force. He does not recognize the capacity of Iraq's toilers to fight for their sovereignty and independence. He has no idea who he's dealing with. The Iraqi masses kicked the British imperialists out of Iraq in the 1920s, even after the big hero Churchill tried to terrorize them with chemical weapons.

O'Reilly's not the only clueless bourgeois scribe disgracing himself in these latest times that try men's souls. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist and darling of the US ruling class, distinguished himself recently with a piece entitled, "Are There any Iraqis in Iraq?" in which he states:

"The forces killing Americans and Iraqi police are primarily Sunni Muslims who want to restore the rule and privileges of their minority community and Baath Part, or foreign and local Islamists who are trying to undermine any prospect of modernism, pluralism and seculiarism in Iraq."

What planet is Friedman living on? What is rocking imperialism from Washington to London is the armed uprising among the Shiites, who were supposed to be in Bush's hip pocket, and whose militias are fighting pitched battles with Coalition forces from Baghdad's Sadr City to Kut, Kufa, Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, and Nasiriyah. Shiites gained control of Kufa, Najaf, and Kut, where they had driven out the Ukrainians. The Coalition is gaining ground but still don't completely control these areas.

"Are there any Iraqis in Iraq?" Friedman's contempt for Iraq's working people rivals that of Bill O'Reilly's. I'm sure American soldiers getting shot at would like to tell Friedman in his NY Times office that there are Iraqis in Iraq. There were Iraqis in Baghdad lining up to give blood for the victims in Falluja. One told a reporter, "We are giving our blood and money here now, but this is just the start. We will give our souls. This will be worse than Vietnam. The Shia and Sunni will fight together."

There was the young Fedayeen Iraqi who told a freelance reporter May Ying Welsh that they "were not afraid, but the Americans were very afraid, because they don't have a goal and we do." And their goal was? "My goal is martyrdom and the liberation of Iraq. They don 't know why they're here. We will fight to kick the Americans out of Iraq no matter how long it takes."

There was the Iraqi Sheikh who told Welsh that "the Americans are lost in Iraq. They're lost in the darkness because of their arrogance." [As are O'Reilly and Friedman!]

There was the young Iraqi Fedayeen in Baghdad who told Welsh that they are well aware their pistols and AK-47s and rocket propelled grenades can't match the Americans' firepower, they believe that it's their country, that they have a cause they're fighting for, and the Americans don't.

There were Iraqis in Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi militia during a recent March in Baghdad who chanted: "Say the word Moqtada and we will resume the 1920 Revolution."

Thus the Shia who are not on Friedman's radar know much more about their history and fighting capacities than either Friedman or O'Reilly.

And if those aren't enough examples of Iraqis for the deceitful Friedman, there was the elderly woman who told BBC Channel 4 news after losing family members in an attack by US forces, "give me a gun and I will kill them myself."

O'Reilly, the tabloid, fascist-minded "journalist," and Friedman, the more "respectable" mouthpiece for the US capitalist class have no clue as to the historic significance of the unity unfolding in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites. The dim-witted duo are out of their league regarding the young Shiite cleric, al-Sadr, who has galvanized the Shia population and won the respect of the Sunni as well.

On April 7, Al-Sadr showed he possessed a degree of political sophistication that runs rings around Friedman, O'Reilly and the entire US political establishment, including the trade union bureaucracy. From his base in bieseged Najaf, Sadr spoke directly to the American working class: "I call upon the American people to stand beside your brothers, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army, and to help them in the transfer of power to honest Iraqis. Otherwise Iraq will become another Vietnam for American and the occupiers."

APRIL 10, 2004:

Predictably, the capitalist media is throwing everything they've got against Sadr, as they do with anyone who dares stand up to imperialism. We're hearing a lot of negative things about this young leader of the Mehdi Army, the armed Shiite militias fighting pitched battles with US forces throughout Iraq. He's a fanatic; he's a thug; he's a lunatic. Most of this is probably not true. Remember the sources: O'Reilly and Fox News, CNN, Friedman, the Pentagon, Wolf Blitzer, Judith Miller, you get the idea. Liars, every one of them. Any person who accepts at face value ANYTHING these scoundrels say is a fool.

Information about Sadr has been sketchy. We know his father, also a leading Shiite cleric, was assassinated by Saddam Hussein in 1999. His character flaws are immaterial now. What's important is that Sadr has emerged from the impoverished Shiite masses to not only lay the foundation for uniting Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites in a common struggle against imperialism, he is also talking directly to the US working class. Sadr recognizes the difference between the US toilers and the US capitalist regime that has invaded and occupied his country. He is trying to stake out the commonality of interests between US and Iraqi working people--both victims of US imperialism.

The emergence of Moqtada al-Sadr is a reconfirmation of what the outstanding Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov meant by the role of the individual in history. What we are seeing before our eyes is the dialectical relationship between the masses and the leaders they sometimes throw up in struggle.

Sadr's courage sparked the Shiite masses, who responded to his call to fight the invaders. The Shiites, in turn, inspired the Sunnis to join them in the developing national liberation struggle.

Make no mistake about it; there is a class dynamic at work here. The Shiites are the most impoverished and oppressed part of the Iraqi working class. The fact that Sadr is attempting to establish a common ground between US and Iraqi toilers is a historic development. In paving the way for uniting Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, the 30-year-old Sadr is playing no small role in solving the leadership crisis facing Iraq's working people. In speaking directly to the American working class, Sadr has taken a small step in solving the leadership question facing the US and international working class.

Meanwhile, O'Reilly and Friedman continue to embarrass themselves and should be laughed off the public stage. Or better yet, let's appoint Bill O'Reilly to be Bush's personal emissary and send him into Falluja to enlighten the residents with his clear-thinking ways.

Most bourgeois journalists, whether trashy tabloid charlatans like O'Reilly or the more "respectable" Thomas Friedman, have been exposed as liars and accomplices in US imperialism's war crimes. They have nothing to say of value any more. Their time is over. There's a new generation of revolutionary journalists, writers, and worker-bolshevik correspondents who are telling the truth and exposing the deceit of the O'Reilly's and Friedman's.

And as the Iraqi toilers are reminding the world, the time is up for all the historically obsolete political leaderships incapable of defending working people. If the leaderships aren't up to the task, then the masses will step forward and fight, no matter what George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, Thomas Friedman, and even the Socialist Workers Party say. We will figure out what is to be done from the US to Iraq.

Bush told Aug. 6, 2001: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack inside the US"; "FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the US consistent with preparations for hijackings"

"These lies are like their father that begets them: gross as a mountain, open, palpable." (Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, ii, iv, 260.)

Bill O'Reilly's got a lot of explaining to do. Despite his pretense of nonpartisanship, O'Reilly is the most influential front man for Bush in the US corporate media. As Bush's lies about Sept. 11 and Iraq unfold by the day, apologists like O'Reilly are squirming like stuck pigs and are reduced to spinning bad news like David Kay's empty-handed resignation so fast you can dance an Irish jig to it.

But Bill O'Reilly--like his cowardly commander in chief--will learn that you can run but you can't hide.

O'Reilly's got his work cut out for him. Bush has made O'Reilly look bad. The Factor host unequivocally backed Bush's war on Iraq and urged Americans to give the president the benefit of the doubt. "If he's lying, I'll hang him," O'Reilly demagogically told his viewers.

O'Reilly's got to posture himself as being critical of Bush while at the same time covering up for Bush's lies about WMD, 911, and Iraq, which are O'Reilly's lies as well.

You know Bush is in trouble when O'Reilly scolds Republican mouthpiece Clifford May for spewing "right-wing spin" while defending Bush's Iraq war. May, one of the most repulsive talking heads to disgrace television screens, is currently the leader of reactionary, prowar outfit called the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. More on what this notorious enemy of working people had to say will follow.

O'Reilly launched his coverup for Bush's mushrooming WMD scandal in a January 30 Talking Points memo called "Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them." O'Reilly, in attempting an ironic swipe at Al Franken's book title, ends up illuminating his own Orwellian-laced intellectual dishonesty.

O'Reilly tries to pass off Lord Hutton's exoneration of British Prime Minister Blair for his role in the death of whistleblower Dr. David Kelly and for his lies regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as proof that neither Blair nor Bush lied about WMD. O'Reilly also spins Hutton's whitewash to validate his strident attacks on the BBC. As usual, an examination of the facts reveals O'Reilly is lying and not telling the entire story.

"The far-left bomb throwers are exploding all over the place and it's certainly satisfying to watch it."

This is O'Reilly simultaneously employing an insidious McCarthyite tactic and revealing his own coarseness--calling political opponents "far leftists" and "bomb throwers" who are "exploding all over the place" is a transparent effort to subliminally whip up hatred against them. Liberal economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman is neither a far leftist or a bombthrower. In truth, it's Bush supporters like O'Reilly who are unraveling and publicly squirming, and it's certainly satisfying for million of us to watch it.

"In Great Britain, the head of the BBC and his top aide have been removed because a government investigation found they misled their viewers about Prime Minister Tony Blair."

Notice how O'Reilly could not bring himself to utter the name "Lord Hutton"--the former Lord Chief Justice of Northern Island who was picked by Blair to shepherd an investigation into covering up rather than revealing the truth. Lord Hutton, the very representative of the Crown who defended British soldiers involved in the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of Catholics and prosecuted Irish Republicans in the star chambers of the juryless Diplock courts. And O'Reilly is of Irish-American descent. Disgraceful.

Actually, BBC director general Greg Dyke and his aid Gavyn Davies resigned, as did Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter who reported Kelly's reservations about British WMD intelligence. They all caved into the intense political pressure from the government, but they were resigned, not removed. Get your facts straight, O'Reilly.

"As you may know, the BBC accused Blair of lying about weapons of mass destruction, the same unfounded charges leveled against the Bush administration. When the British government demanded proof of the charges, the BBC folded."

Not a word in this paragraph is true. O'Reilly doesn't even tell his audience that the focus of the Hutton Inquiry was not whether Blair lied over WMD but whether he played any role in the suspicious death of Dr. David Kelly. A week before Kelly's alleged suicide, Blair fingered him as the source for Gilligan's March 2003 report that Blair's Director of Communications Alastair Campbell had ordered Britain's spooks to "sex up" the case for war in the infamous September 2002 intelligence dossier.

Gilligan had also reported in that March report that there existed widespread dissent within British intelligence agencies over the September 2002 intelligence dossier that said Iraq could hit Britain with biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes.

Hutton did not clear Blair of lying about weapons of mass destruction. In fact, Hutton laid the foundation for his whitewash by SPECIFICALLY EXCLUDING the central question of the veracity of the weapons of mass destruction claims and whether the invasion of Iraq was valid. Instead, Hutton focused his investigation solely on the causes of Kelly's suspicious death--WHICH O'REILLY DID NOT SAY A WORD ABOUT!

So much for O'Reilly's fair and balanced "journalism."

Hutton executed the whitewash by narrowly focusing on Blair's subjective state of mind about WMD and the decision to go to war. Hutton tried to nail Gilligan for reporting that Blair knowingly used false intelligence claims about Iraq's nonexistent 45 minute capability and tried to "sex up" the dossier , arguing that Blair must be given the benefit of the doubt [Where have we heard that before--O'Reilly?] that he truly believed the intelligence he received from the MI6, MI5, and the Joint Intelligence Committee.

Because Gilligan could not get inside the mind of Blair, Hutton ruled that Gilligan's report "that the government probably knew the claim was wrong or unquestionable was unfounded." With that, Hutton cleared Blair of any wrongdoing and attacked the BBC and Kelley. The facts that no WMDs were found in Iraq and every claim made by Blair--like Bush--has been proven wrong, were irrelevant to Hutton, who did his job--exonerate Blair, attack the BBC and freedom of the press, and admonish the British ruling class to paper over the divisions and close ranks.

In keeping with his refusal to examine the accuracy of British intelligence and Blair's conduct of the war, Hutton ignored the fact that Blair had received 3 intelligence reports in the 6 months before the war warning him that intelligence data regarding Iraq's 45-minute WMD capability was weak. John Scarlett, chairman of the JIC,and Geoff Hoon, Secretary of the State of Defense, knew that it was only "battlefield mortar shells or small-calibre weaponry" that could be deployed in 45 minutes, not long range missiles.
Blair expects the world to believe that Scarlett and Hoon did not inform him of this distinction. Yet intelligence official Dr. Bryan Jones told Hutton that the dossier's 45 minute claim had been "over-egged" due to pressure from "spin merchants" from Blair's office.

But just as he did on all the facts concerning the war, Hutton concluded that the distinction between the two types of armaments was beyond his purview.

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as House Leader in protest of the war, urged the new Butler inquiry into WMD investigate why this key information was apparently kept from Blair. On June18, 2003, Cook told the Guardian: "I think it would be fair to say that there was a selection of evidence to support a conclusion. I fear we got into a position in which the intelligence was not being used to inform and shape policy, but to shape policy that was already settled."

Exactly, and this is precisely what happened on the other side of the Atlantic as well. The "intelligence" was a pack of lies from the beginning. There was no intelligence. Intelligence had nothing to do with the decision to invade Iraq. Bush and Blair planned this war from January 2001, as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has confirmed.

As the Queen shouts in Alice in Wonderland: "Verdict first, trial afterwards!"

February 14, 2004--O'Reilly remains mute in the face of reams of documented evidence emerging on both sides of the Atlantic proving that Blair and Bush brushed aside intelligence data showing Iraq had no WMD and waged a war they had long planned to conquer Iraq and seize its oil.

Lord Hutton also completely exonerated Blair from any responsibility for Kelly's "suicide," refusing to hear testimony from Kelly's former confidante who doubts he committed suicide and says he received death threats from the government. Since Hutton's whitewash of Blair's role in Kelly's death, three British doctors have publicly stated that the evidence given to the Hutton inquiry did not demonstrate Kelly committed suicide.

Hutton's whitewash was so one-sided it stunned most of Britain's bourgeois press, which expected a more balanced verdict that would contain at least some criticism of Blair for his outing of kelly as the source of reports 10 Downing had "sexed up" intelligence data on Iraq's WMD.

The Financial Times said that Hutton's conclusions were "unlikely to end the controversy that began with the suicide of the distinguished weapons inspector . . . .The government escapes too lightly for its role in outing Mr. Kelly, and the questions raised about the use of intelligence were beyond Lord Hutton's remit."

The Independent warned, "Mr. Blair's triumphalism is mistaken: this unbalanced report does not vindicate his decision to go to war."

Paul Routledge of the Mirror opined that Hutton's "establishment whitewash of wrongdoing in high places which caused a man to kill himself stinks to high heaven."

Even the Daily Telegraph conceded, "there is a strange disjunction between the sober workings of government as portrayed in the Hutton report, and what we know from the evidence to the inquiry of what was going on the ground at the time."

The only two British papers that were jubilant over Hutton's coverup were the Times and the Sun, owned by--surprise, surprise--Rupert Murdoch, who just happens to be Bill O'Reilly's boss.

Let's return to O'Reilly's own words in "Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them" to explore further this connection between Hutton's whitewash, freedom of the press, and Fox News.

"Throughout the Iraq war, the BBC's coverage was deemed biased, even by some of its own correspondents. Now here in the USA, we don't have government funded media, so anyone can make irresponsible charges and pretty much get away with it. But when you deal in defamation, there's usually a price to pay and the BBC pinheads have paid it."

Oh Really O'Reilly? Let's analyze each false or misleading statement--it'll be a crash course in how not to be a journalist.

"Throughout the Iraq war, the BBC's coverage was deemed biased, even by some of its own correspondents."

The BBC's coverage WAS biased, but according to a study by Cardiff University's school of journalism, it was skewed toward SUPPORTING the war, not opposing it. Professor Justin Lewis said this about the study's examination of the Iraq war's coverage by the four biggest British news broadcasters--the BBC, ITN, Channel 4 and Sky:

"Indeed, far from revealing an anti-war BBC, our findings tend to give credence to those who criticized the BBC for being too sympathetic to the government in its war coverage. Either way, it is clear that the accusation of BBC anti-war bias fails to stand up to any serious or sustained analysis."

Here are some of the facts that O'Reilly spins to mislead and misinform his audience:

1) Eleven percent of the sources quoted by the BBC came from the military or coalition authorities--the highest proportion of all British networks.

2) The BBC was the least likely to quote Baghdad's sources, and less likely than Sky, Channel 4 or ITV to employ independent news sources.

3) The BBC underreported Iraqi civilian casualties more t han Channel 4, Sky, and ITN.

4) The BBC was least likely to cover Iraqi opposition to the invasion.

5) The BBC's bulletins were three times more likely to depict Iraqis as pro-invasion than anti-invasion.

"Now here in the USA, we don't have government funded media, so anyone can make irresponsible charges and pretty much get away with it. But when you deal in defamation, there's usually a price to pay and the BBC pinheads have paid it."

February 24, 2004--No, we don't have government funded media in the US; we have a capitalist media, a big business media, a media that is owned by and serves the financial oligarchy that runs the country. And since the government is a capitalist government, a cozy incestuous relationship exists between it and the media. The capitalist press acts as a propaganda ministry for Washington, a reality that is never more apparent than in times of war.

We also have freedom of the press enshrined in the 1st Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which is what O'Reilly is whining about when he laments that "anyone can make irresponsible charges and pretty much get away with it."

If anyone is making irresponsible charges and getting away with it, of course, it's Bill O'Reilly, who uses his position of power and influence in the mass media to wield McCarthyite smear tactics against political opponents like Professor Al-Arian; who convicts people like Michael Jackson in the press every day, trampling on the presumption of innocence; and who polluted the airwaves with government lies that helped Washington kill tens of thousands of innocent people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the twisted and biased minds of O'Reilly and Lord Hutton, "defamation" is when a reporter exposes the lies told by the government to justify criminal wars of aggression, and, in O'Reilly's case, when someone exposes his lies and passionately demolishes his intellectually bankrupt arguments based on the facts.

We can see this convergence of O'Reilly and Hutton's mindset in Hutton's Inquiry report. Not only did he exclude from his investigation any consideration of London's reasons for going to war, he also ruled that no investigation of the government was appropriate under any circumstances! The media's right to investigate the government must be balanced against the reality that "false accusations of fact impugning the integrity of others, including politicians, should not be made."

That sounds like it could have been lifted from any one of Talking Points memos that rail against defamers and smear merchants who attack pillars of truth and integrity like Bush and O'Reilly.

"But when you deal in defamation, there's usually a price to pay and the BBC pinheads have paid it."

Translation: When you exercise your 1st Amendment rights so effectively that you expose the government's lies to a degree that may threaten the war effort, the government will come after you.

When O'Reilly talks about BBC having paid it, he's only talking about the resignation of BBC's leadership. But the British government--and the British capitalists--are after a lot more than the departure of a few suits.

The BBC's public charter is up for renewal in 2006, and London is reviewing its status right now. There are strong indications that the BBC's Board of Governors will hand over their regulatory duties to the government's newly formed media regulatory agency, Ofcom. Ofcom is looking to deregulate the British media to increase privately owned media companies, which will be granted a higher market share. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this move will be--surprise, surprise--Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly's boss at Fox News.

Indeed, on Feb. 14 the Sunday Times reported that London "is considering a plan to break up the BBC and remove its independent status" following the bitter dispute with the station over the Iraq war. The Times also reported that government papers suggested that the task of enforcing the BBC's impartiality might be taken away from the Board of Governors [and given to Ofcom].

The Times wrote that the measures being considered include givinga government media watchdog more control over the BBC's programming, shutting down BBC outlets, and forcing the company to share its license fee revenues with other broadcasters [like Rupert Murdoch].

O'Reilly then lumps two Democratic presidential candidates in the category of pinheads paying for defamation--Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.

"So has Howard Dean. His campaign is in chaos because he surrounded himself with fanatical ideologues, who encouraged him to lash out, which he did with relish. Americans took a hard look and turned away."

February 28, 2004--Once again, not a word O'Reilly says is true. Dean went down because the Democratic Party establishment, the corporate media, and the ruling class as a whole had turned on him even BEFORE Dean's I Have a Scream meltdown on the night of his Iowa defeat. Confronted with the possibility of a Dean nomination or even a Dean presidency, the rulers decided he was a tad too independent and unreliable for what they have in mind.

Dean initially succeeded precisely BECAUSE he articulated the anger of millions of Americans over the Iraq war and the policies and personality of George W. Bush. Organizationally, Dean rode the crest of the Internet-inspired wave that was instrumental in organizing the massive antiwar demonstrations that took place worldwide before Bush and Blair's invasion. His candidacy attracted hordes of idealistic, largely college-age and Web-savvy youth, angry over the inevitable march toward war; angry over Bush's theft of the 2000 election and his policies of tax cuts, privatization, repression and militarism.

MARCH 24, 2004--These were the "fanatical ideologues" that O'Reilly claims Dean "surrounded himself with." Millions of young people angry a president had lied in their name to wage an illegal war for oil that killed tens of thousands of Iraqis who had nothing to do with Sept. 11. That kind of anger doesn't make it in the No Spin Zone, particularly when the anger extends to blowhard media demagogues who echoed and rationalized those lies and called for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.

No, that kind of anger isn't legitimate to Bill O'Reilly, who believes he has a God-given authority to monopolize righteous anger. That kind of anger has no place in the national political discourse in the judgment of O'Reilly, who physically threatened Jeremy Glick for opposing the Afghanistan war and believing US foreign policy had something to do with Sept. 11.

Despite O'Reilly's erroneous attempt to paint Dean as a bombthrowing ideologue, the truth is the former Vermont governor is a conventional capitalist politician and a loyal servant of US imperialism. In fact, this "antiwar" candidate supported Bush's occupation and opposed an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, offering the same lame excuse any typical bourgeois hack would offer, "Well, since we're there now, we're stuck. We can't leave. Got to get the job done. We just need international help."

Still, Dean was a threat to the Democratic Party establishment and the US ruling class as a whole. As long as it seemed Bush's reelection was a shoo-in, Dean's candidacy was needed to keep that angry antiwar sentiment mired in the capitalist two party shell game. But as the Iraq WMD debacle unfolded in 2003 and Bush's approval ratings plummeted, the corporate elite concluded they needed a more reliable "alternative" to Bush; a supporter of the colonial conquest of Iraq whose nomination would assure that a meaningful debate about Iraq would be absent from the presidential campaign. Enter John Kerry, a Skull & Bonesman whose war record would make him an even STRONGER war president than the scandal-ridden, AWOL-plagued Bush.

That's when the rulers went after Dean with a series of relentless and embarrassing attacks designed to humiliate him and torpedo his candidacy. Dean's campaign was sinking well before his I Had a Scream meltdown concession speech when he lost Iowa. Dean was just too politically naive and inexperienced to stomach the barrage of attacks levied against him.

Dean's eclipse was fueled by his own political contradictions and flaws. The "antiwar" candidate was nothing of the sort. Once voters realized he was in alignment with Bush's policy on Iraq, that he opposed the only principled antiwar stance--unconditional withdrawal from Iraq--Dean's campaign stumbled as if it no longer knew its own purpose. In the end, Dean attacked Kerry from the right for not supporting the first Gulf war in 1991.

So once again O'Reilly's wrong--it wasn't "Americans" who took a hard look at Dean and turned away. It was the American political and corporate elite who rather skillfully pushed Dean off the stage and anointed the far more reliable John Kerry the honor of being the "lesser evil."

"So, too has Wesley Clark fallen after his embarrassment with Michael Moore. Calling people liars and such is not the kind of public discourse which commands respect [as opposed to threatening to smash Jeremy Glick into pieces for opposing the invasion of Afghanistan]. Sometimes it has to be done, usually to defend oneself against bogus charges, but the smear merchants who traffic in this kind of invective will never succeed in the long run."

MARCH 29, 2004:

Here O'Reilly is referring to the Clark campaign event in which Moore introduced Clark as a war hero who is more qualified to lead the country in the war on terror than its present occupant, who deserted during the Vietnam war (more accurately, Bush went AWOL, but what do you expect from a guy whose alternative to Bush was a war criminal with stars on his uniform?)

O'Reilly claims that Clark's association with an irresponsible, bomb-throwing defamer like Moore destroyed his credibility and doomed his candidacy.
The truth is Clark was finished before he left the starting gate. On the first day of his campaign, Clark could not make up his mind whether he supported the war against Iraq. Not a good sign. He didn't get much better on the campaign trail, and he was positively disastrous in the debates, particularly when Peter Jennings nailed him on Moore's calling Bush a deserter.

First of all, Clark shouldn't be embarrassed for associating with Moore. It's Moore who should be embarrassed for endorsing a war criminal whose hands are bloodied with working people from Serbia to Waco.

Second, Clark blew the Jennings question because A) he admitted his ignorance on the subject of Bush's military record, uttering three words politicians should never say, "I don't know." He admitted he hadn't investigated the story any further, he didn't know the facts, so he couldn't comment, except to weakly offer that Moore's not the only one who feels that way about Bush's military past.

If Clark had half a political brain, he would have seized on the chance to politely correct Moore for misstating that Bush was a deserter when he in truth went AWOL. Then, if he had researched the issue further, which one assumes would be of i nterest to a general running for president against a phony war president who used his rich boy connections to get into the coveted Air Guard, skip out on drills during the last year, and leave early to go to business school after he and the military brass "worked it out."

THAT'S what did in Wesley Clark. Moore gave him an opening, however clumsily, but Clark blew it. Unlike O'Reilly, however, Moore at least uncovered an issue that deserved scrutinty and forcibly injected it into the national "debate," phony, limited, and skewed as it is. At least Moore forced Bush's cowardice and the political connections behind him who attempted to cover up his dereliction of duty to the country he professes to love with all his Chistian "passion."

O'Reilly, on the other hand, covered up for Bush once again; dismissing the charges against Bush with contempt, not worthy of O'Reilly's intellect. Not one time did O'Reilly examine any of the multitude of facts that pointed to the in escapable conclusion that Bush went AWOL and used his father's connections to cover up the embarrassing details. Not once did O'Reilly respond to the weighty testimony of numerous guardsman who swear they n ever saw him. Not once did O'Reilly report the commanding officer never saw him. Not once did O'Reilly discuss the lies told by Bush people concerning his record, his previous failure to turn over relevant medical records. Not once did O'Reilly mention how the sparse pay stubs that Bush finally released did not account for the months of missing time in Alabama. Not once did O'Reilly cover the explosive revelations from Bill Barkett, the former top advisor to the Texas Guard commander, who says he overheard senior Texas Guard commanders and Bush advisers discuss "cleansing" potentially embarrassing details about Bush's less than complete military service.

No, all we heard from O'Reilly was the spin coming from the White House--Bush did his time, he was honorably discharged, end of story.

But when O'Reilly saw the AWOL charge was inflicting political damage on Bush, the rightist demagogue shifted to what has become a familiar tactic: he tries to cover up for Bush by ignoring the facts that damn him and lumping all charges now in circulation in one category--defamatory mudslinging. Listen to his Feb. 13, 2004, "The Sliming of Politicians Continues":

"After four years of President Bush in office, why would his National Guard service more than 30 years ago even be an issue? After 20 years of service in the Senate, why would John Kerry's Vietnam protesting be an issue?

"Both men should be evaluated on what they have done in office. This other stuff is just garbage thrown out there by people looking to hurt candidates with whom they disagree."

O'Reilly goes on to pontificate about how we all make mistakes when we're young, and that most of us mature. [Except for O' Reilly, who threatened to smash Jeremy Glick into fucking pieces because he opposed the US war in Afghanistan; Glick, who lost his father in the WTC on Sept. 11.]

"To keep sliming politicians for what they might have done decades ago hurts the country." [Translation: trashing Bush for going AWOL during Vietnam hurts Bush's credibility as commander in chief in leading US imperialism's wars today.]

" 'Talking points' has said that the upcoming presidential race will be the dirtiest in the nation's history." [That would be because the social tensions and class polarization resulting from the deepening crisis of capitalism are reaching unprecedented levels, which tends to spill over and find reflection in the two-party capitalist shell game.]

"Already rumors about the candidates are flying around the Internet. And that kind of stuff will continue because the media loves it. Any whiff of scandal means higher ratings and more circulation. So the press can't get enough of character assassination."

O'Reilly's referring to the rumor about Kerry's alleged affair with an intern. He omits the fact that his employer, Fox News, was one of the biggest disseminators of that story.

Of course, "any whiff of scandal" usually makes it on the O'Reilly Factor, from child pornography to child molestation to scantily clad women and gay men writhing all over the screen, to Gary Condit to Kobe Bryant to Laci Petersen.

Higher ratings, more circulation
O'Reilly opines to a live laughtrack
Dirty girls and sissy boys
That'll keep 'em coming back

It seems that it's Bill O'Reilly who can't get enough of character assassination--Andy Rooney, George Carlin, Sani Al-Arian, Ludicris, Frank Rich, George Soros, Ramsey Clark, Al Franken, Jeremy Glick, to name but a few.

We opened this essay by discussing how O'Reilly was covering up for Bush's WMD lies as they relate to fellow war criminal Anthony Blair's own WMD-related scandals involving Dr. Kelly and the BBC.

For several weeks in January and Feburary, O'Reilly cranked out the spin to blame CIA director George Tenet--that CLINTON holdover--for the WMD scandal, and sympathize with George Bush, who was victimized by bad intelligence, and, well, maybe he wasn't "skeptical" enough, O'Reilly painfully concedes.

In a series of segments entitled, "How Should the Bush Administration Deal with the WMD Controversy?"; "Will David Kay's Report Hurt President Bush?"; and "The WMD Controversy Heats Up," O'Reilly's message is relentless: "Bush should retire George Tenet, the CIA chief. This is the third huge mistake the agency has made. First, the Chinese embassy was bombed in Belgrade because we didn't know where it was. [There you go again, O'Reilly, mindlessly parroting whatever the government tells you to. THEY KNEW, THEY KNEW.] "Second, September 11." [More on this page and other pages of this site regarding O'Reilly and 911. Briefly, not one thing he's said about it is true or helpful. Not one.]

"And third, WMDs. Enough is enough, Tenet should go."

Notice it's all Tenet's fault. Bush is the victim.

"I don't think Bush lied about WMDs, but he should be stronger in fixing US intelligence. My mistake was not being skeptical enough about the CIA's reporting on WMDs."

MARCH 30, 2004:

That's a lame excuse that doesn't wash and rewrites history. Evidence began accumulating in 2002 that Bush was cherry picking in telligence, ignoring the accurate reports that Iraq's WMD were gone, setting up a special Pentagon intelligence unit to fabricate what the CIA couldn't find. There were many journalists trying to get this information out to the public, but they were drowned out by the "elite media," led by Bill O'Reilly, who echoed Bush's lies and suppressed information that undermined Bush's arguments. Scott Ritter, a Republican and ex-Marine, was open minded and knowledgeable enough to be skeptical. O'Reilly, the rightist ideologue, was not.
Ritter tried to explain the truth to O'Reilly by pointing out the factual record that demolished Washington's claims about Iraq's nonexistent WMD, but O'Reilly refused to listen to a far more intelligent man. He was too busy trying to besmirch Ritter's character by falsely insinuating Ritter had a f nancial relationship with Saddam Hussein.

Strange, but O'Reilly has never exhibited a similar curiosity regarding Bush's business connections with the Bin Laden family.

Tens of millions of demonstrators worldwide were right. O'Reilly was wrong. History will judge us all. O'Reilly will be judged harshly, and will be deemed one of the most vicious, reprehensible cretins of his time. May these words reach future generations of humanity.

Before examining O'Reilly's disingenuous attack on Richard Clarke, let's review a sampling of the above-mentioned Talking Points that show how he's trying to deflect political responsibility from Bush and heap it all on George Tenet.

"So you admitted the intelligence was bad. You didn't trust the intelligence." [To Robert Baer, former CIA agent, Jan. 29, 2004]

"I mean, David Kay believes . . . that the top echelons of the CIA, i.e., George Tenet, who briefs the president, basically said, look , they're there and they weren't there. And it's a CIA problem." [To Baer]

"Listen, when the team loses big on 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction, you got to move the manager out even if it is not the manager's fault. Do you think Tenet should be fired, Mr. Baer?" [Uh, the manager here would be Bush, fool. The buck stops with him. That's why millions are signing petitions to impeach Bush.]

"And the Bush administration gave us erroneous information, NOT BECAUSE THEY LIED [emphasis added], but because they got erroneous information from the Central Intelligence Agency. And I believe President Bush hasn't been nearly aggressive enough in holding those people in the agency accountable." [to Clifford May, Republican hack with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Jan. 26, 2004]

This is how O'Reilly paints himself as an independent thinker, distancing himself from Bush and a Republican android like May. After May sets up O'Reilly by regurgitating the Republican mantra that Tenet's the root of the problem, O'Reilly replies obligingly, "Well, what about Bush, though? Why isn't he doing it now? He knows the 9-11situation better than anyone on the planet."

Oh Really O'Reilly? If that's true, it's been like pulling teeth from this font of wisdom regarding 911, since he blocked the in vestigation as long as he could, refused to release unedited transcripts of his presidential briefings about Sept. 11, had to be threatened w ith subpoenas, initially refused to allow Riceto testify under oath, and now has to have Cheney hold his hand when they do meet with the commission in private, lest he say something stupid again like that he watched Flight 11 crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on a television at the Booker Elementary School, when the only known tape of the North Tower crash wasn't shown on television until much later. Which means that if Bush correct the two times he made that claim, then Bush watched the crash on a Secret Service feed from the secret camera recording the North Tower.

BUSH KNEW.

APRIL 12, 2004:

Yes, the story that O'Reilly and the rest of the capitalist elite media chose to ignore for almost two years is back--Bush knew on August 6, 2001, that an "Al Qaeda" terrorist skyjacking plot targeting New York and Washington was coming and did nothing to prevent it. Instead of immediately putting airport security and the nation's air defenses on high alert, particularly around New York and DC, Bush stayed on vacation at his ranch until the end of August, right when the military's high alert was lifted.

This doesn't seem to bother Bill O'Reilly, whose biggest priority right now is reversing Bush's rapidly plummeting approval ratings, a decline that has accelerated in the wake of the rising US death toll in Iraq and the unfolding September 11 scandal starring Richard Clarke and Condoleeza Rice.

Even before this weekend's release of the August 6th presidential daily briefing, a series of Talking Points entitled, "The Meaningless Finger-Pointing over Sept. 11"; "More Blabbing in Washington"; and "The Poll Numbers About Richard Clarke's Testimony," clearly laid out the same "throw the dust in our eyes" and "plague on both houses" approach that O'Reilly has consistently employed to cover up and apologize for Bush on WMD, Sept. 11, and even his AWOL record. It was the CIA and FBI's fault; both Kerry and Bush were irresponsible in their youth; it was Bush and Clinton's fault, with a heavy emphasis on Clinton.

From "The Meaningless Finger-Pointing over Sept. 11" (March 23, 2004):

"Richard Clarke's book attacking President Bush for not being proactive enough against Al Qaeda will make Clarke some money." [Observe O'Reilly's aim here--begrudging Clarke the phenomenal success and interest his book has garnered, and besmirching Clarke's character by suggesting he's only pimping off of the nation's tragedy and Bush's misfortunes.]

O'Reilly knows that Clarke's revelations can potentially torpedo Bush's presidency, so he carries out the Bush game plan by attacking the messenger to detract away from the message. And the message is that Bush slept at the wheel regarding Al Qaeda, but was all serious about playing commander in chief to invade a defenseless country.

O'Reilly conceded that "the guy [Clarke] had some interesting points, but ultimately the truth is very simple. Both President Clinton and President bush did not act aggressively enough in confronting Bin laden and Al Qaeda. Period. All the other blather is political and boring, in my opinion. The 9-11 Commission can be useful if it spotlights things that need to be improved to protect us in the future, but if it's all about partisan finger-pointing, spare me."

Translation: The commission can be useful only if it's limited to oiling the intelligence machine so that it's more efficient in spying on and preventing political dissent, but if it's about holding the Bush administration accountable for allowing 911to occur either due to their criminal negligence and stupidity or their conniving complicity in an heinous crime against the US populace.

"Bottom line, I believe Clinton and Bush were both shocked by what happened on Sept. 11. Remember this scene? Sarasota, Florida, when Andrew Card told Mr. Bush about the attack. You can't fake that reaction. President Bush was stunned as all of us were."

Oh Really O'Reilly?

Many of us have been stunned over BUSH's befuddled reaction to hearing the news that was only part of his bizarre behavior that morning. Before he entered the classroom at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, he was already aware that Flight 111 had crashed into the North Tower.

Later Bush would twice say that "And I was outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and I said, 'There's one terrible pilot.' And I said, 'It must have been a horrible accident.'"

Now, since the only fo otage of the North Tower crash was not broadcast until much later, if Bush is telling the truth, that would mean he watched Flight 11's impact on a top secret Secret Service video taken from a hidden camera watching the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.

After Card told Bush about the second plane hitting the South Tower at 9:06 a.m., Top Gun sat there for another 10 minutes in a stupor reading goat stories to the kids. It apparently hasn't dawned on O'Reilly that if his commander in chief was a true leader he would have leapt into action to organize the nation's defense, and the Secret Service would have hustled him away to safety.

"And at this point the important thing is which party is more effective at fighting the terror war? You can play the blame game all you want, but it's pointless. The only thing that matters is defeating terror in the future. If you really want a no spin approach, ask youself this question, who do you think bin Laden wants to see win the presidential election? If you think you know the answer, vote for the other guy. That's the litmus test."

APRIL 14, 2004:

"And at this point the important thing is which party is more effective at fighting the terror war? "

False. Since even O'Reilly admits that both parties are to blame for 911, since it's obvious that this war drive is a BIPARTISAN war drive, and that the 911 coverup is a BIPARTISAN coverup, the most important "thing" facing the American population is breaking from the capitalist two party shell game and forming a workers party that protects US against THEM.

"You can play the blame game all you want, but it's pointless. The only thing that matters is defeating terror in the future."

Here O'Reilly warns the people that it's futile to get to the bottom of 911; that it's pointless to examine the messy details and the facts that point to a US government standdown on Sept. 11; that we have no choice but mindlessly back Washington's colonial wars to control natural resources.

"If you really want a no spin approach, ask youself this question, who do you think bin Laden wants to see win the presidential election? If you think you know the answer, vote for the other guy. That's the litmus test."

APRIL 17, 2004:

This twisted formulation proves once again that "no spin" means O'Reilly's spin. What a revealing commentary on the state of American democracy. Americans should base their vote on who they perceive bin Laden favors. O'Reilly's not so subtle implication is that bin Laden wants Kerry to win, so the logical answer for Americans is Bush. But given the long and profitable business relationship between the Bush and bin Laden families, a fact O'Reilly has never mentioned and will not permit to be uttered on his show, it's no given that bin Laden would endorse Kerry. Further, Bush support of Israel and his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are Osama bin Laden's biggest recruiting tools. Bin Laden would welcome Bush's reelection.

This, then, is American democracy according to Bill O'Reilly: a choice between Bush or Kerry--both of whom are militant supporters of Israel, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Patriot Act--and that choice should be dictated by Osama bin Laden's endorsement.

The only point illuminated by O'Reilly's raving is that no matter who is "elected" in November, Washington's war drive will continue. Kerry vows he will be a more effective and stronger war president than Bush. Kerry has no fundamental disagreement with Bush's objective of conquering the world--he'll just do it smarter than the dim-witted Bush.

"Talking Points believes President Bush has been an effective terror warrior, although he has made some miscalculations, but his administration has won some big victories and has Al Qaeda on the run. I also think Senator Kerry would be tough on Al Qaeda, but I do worry about how much the far left would influence him."

First, to the extent Bush has "won some big victories" with his unilateral, preemptive, aggressive military aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq, THEY HAVE BEEN ON BEHALF OF THE CAPITALIST CLASS BUSH REPRESENTS.

Not the little guy that O'Reilly professes to look out for.

Second, for all Bush's alleged successes against "Al Qaeda," a creation of the CIA and very likely still an asset, terrorist attacks occur regularly in Madrid, Turkey, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and will inevitably happen again in the US. Most Americans do not feel Al Qaeda is on the run. Most Americans believe another massive terrorist attack is just around the bend. Bush's war on terror is a war of terror. This eruption of US imperialism that O'Reilly enthusiastically endorses is plunging the entire world into madness and chaos.

Bush has been an effective terror warrior? By invading Iraq and slaughtering tens of thousands of Muslims? By wholeheartedly supporting Sharon's dispossession of the Palestinians? Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq has transformed an essentially secular country into one where every Islamic warrior on the planet wants to flock to and kill Americans--just as Bush's own intelligence warned him would happen. Bush's war crimes are turning US soil into a death trap for its inhabitants.

O'Reilly's concern about the "far left's" influence on Kerry only reconfirms how right wing O'Reilly is. In this demagogue's eyes, the New York Times is "far left."

COSMOS LEFT is far left. Rest assured John Kerry is not listening to this Web site.

Let's turn to O'Reilly's partisan spin on Richard Clarke's revelations that rocked Washington but had been reported here and elsewhere for almost two years.

Let's turn to O'Reilly's partisan spin on Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar whose inside revelations that Bush ignored Al Qaeda before 911 and undermined the war on terror by invading Iraq has rocked the Bush administration and made O'Reilly, once again, look like a raving idiot.

From the beginning, O'Reilly recognized that Clarke was a formidable foe who had to be debunked with care. This was no ordinary Bush basher who O'Reilly could dismiss with his usual anti-liberal or anti-leftist rantings. Clarke had served US imperialism loyally for 30 years under four presidents, two from each party, including Reagan and Bush Senior. Clarke has been a hawk who supported the first gulf war and aggressive action against Hussein. For a man of this stature to be blasting Bush with such passion, thus legitimizing what many of O'Reilly's arch foes have been saying since 911, posed a problem for O'Reilly. He responded the only way he knows how--regurgitating White House lies.

APRIL 30, 2004:

We will return to O'Reilly, Richard Clarke, and Sept. 11 soon. The weight of events in Iraq this week compels us to return to O'Reilly's Most Ridiculous claim that no uprising has been taking place in Iraq against the US occupation. Iraq According to O'Reilly has completely collapsed. Everything he has said about Iraq has been proven wrong. His entire worldview has been exposed as false, illegitimate, based only on lies and dogma and spin. Every reason for the Iraq war has been revealed to be a lie--WMD, Sept. 11 links, and now liberating the Iraqi people, a particularly thorny problem for O'Reillly because now too many American soldiers whom he professes to care so much about are dying because of lies that he helped tell.

The Iraqi uprising that didn't exist in O'Reilly's mind has just forced the marines to retreat from Falluja--ignoring O'Reilly's passionate pleas to level it to the ground. "No more Falluja," as this good Christian put it. O'Reilly--and Bush--have been humiliated by the heroic people of Falluja. The Pentagon is in disarray, claiming not to be aware of the deal that replaces the marines with an Iraqi force led by a former Hussein general. Someone on the ground, however, realized that the political price that would be paid by destroying Falluja--nationally and internationally--is unacceptable at the present time.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way in the Iraq According to O'Reilly. We were supposed to be greeted as liberators by a thankful people glad to be rid of a horrible dictator. There was no uprising. There is no uprising. Pay no attention to the rising US death toll and the nightmarish devastation unfolding every day.

O'Reilly is confused and befuddled. He doesn't know where to turn. He's flailing about, blaming Rumsfeld, the CIA, the foreign press, Al-Jazeera, and most of all, the Iraqi people themselves for being ungrateful of all Bush has done for them.

If O'Reilly wasn't such a vicious, mean-spirited and bloodthirsty gangster, one could almost feel sorry for him. Despite his Harvard education, he's so confused, so ignorant of history, that he is incapable of grasping what is happening before our eyes in Iraq. In the spirit of secular humanism and traditional values like respect for one's elders, COSMOS LEFT offers O'Reilly the wisdom of a 92-year-old man to help him understand Iraq.

"Any country that wants to impose its will on another nation will certainly fail and all nations fighting for their own independence will be victorious. Everyone in the world should acknowledge that each country has the right to independence and sovereignty. Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom."

These words were spoken the other day in Hanoi by General Vo Nguyen Giap, commander of the North Vietnamese army that evicted US forces from his country 29 years ago today.

MAY 1, 2004:

Of course, Giap's words would go right over O'Reilly's head. He is nothing but a thug and a brute who is incapable of thinking on Giap's level and thus unable to grasp one of history's most fundamental truths--that people will fight for their country's independence, sovereignty, and dignity. O'Reilly is a modern barbarian who respects no other civilization, culture or religion other than his own. This loud-mouthed lout is so swelled with imperialist arrogance that he cannot hide his contempt for peoples from other nations.

After echoing the Pentagon's propaganda for months that resistance to the occupation was predominantly foreign terrorists and die-hard Hussein Baathists, the "reality on the ground" in Iraq has forced O'Reilly to concede that there's this little thing called THE IRAQI PEOPLE that just doesn't cotton to the idea of foreign invaders slaughtering their people and plundering their land. In O'Reilly's cartoonish mind, the Iraqis don't appreciate all America has done for them. They're ungrateful for Bush's effort to "free" them. They don't understand freedom like Bill O'Reilly does. Thus, they're not worth Americans dying for, concludes the Factor spinmeister.

But it wasn't the weeks of intense fighting by Shiite militias from Najaf to Baghdad and Sunni fighters in Falluja and Ramadi that convinced O'Reilly the Iraqis don't want this US occupation. It wasn't the fact that historic enemies like the Sunnis and Shiites joined forces to fight the US forces that persuaded O'Reilly the PEOPLE want the US out. To admit these truths would be to admit that O'Reilly was dead wrong several weeks ago when he absurdly stated there was no popular uprising taking place in Iraq.

No, it took a CNN-Gallup poll that showed 57% of Iraqis wanted the coalition forces to leave their country, and 70% believe the coalition is occupying rather than liberating Iraq. This poll gave O'Reilly the means to divert attention away from his most ridiculous assertion ever that no uprising was taking place in Iraq. More on this shortly.

Listen to O'Reilly from is April 29 Talking Points memo:

"Now this poll should be taken very seriously by the Bush administration. [Not as seriously as Sunni and Shiite fighters inflicting significant casualties on US forces.] It's becoming clear that we are not going to win the propaganda war in Iraq. And the people don't believe our forces have the right to defend themselves. [No, the whole world can't believe that you don't recognize that IRAQIs have a right to defend themselves!] Any military action by the coalition is viewed by many as anti-Iraq. Thus there is no way we can win the battle for the hearts and minds." [Well, when a military action by the coalition usually ends in the deaths and maiming of scores of men, women and children, the people on the receiving end tend to view this as anti-Iraqi. This clown went to Harvard?]

"So what do we do? The new military strategy seems to be to bribe former military strong men and some clerics to keep the peace. [The imperialist-imposed peace--the peace of the grave.] That's what we're doing in Afghanistan. We bought the warlords there. And the money keeps rolling in, as long as we keep the peace. We even let them harvest opium."

Wow. This guy's unraveling so bad he doesn't even realize he needs to have a serious sit-down with his staff and lawyers. Things are so bad that O'Reilly endorses the new military strategy of bribing Iraqi generals and clerics, just as "we're doing in Afghanistan."

So it's okay for bribery to be the lynchpin of US foreign policy, but anyone who's been watching the Factor for the past few weeks knows that O'Reilly's had a decidedly holier than thou moral stance toward the bribery that's allegedly at the center of the UN oil for food scandal. O'Reilly's is hyping the significance of this story in a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the Iraq debacle by implying that the bribery and kickbacks involving Hussein and European governments vindicates the US aggression against Iraq, despite the fact that Republican congressmen Chris Shays repeatedly warned O'Reilly that Americans were also on the take.

MAY 16, 2004:

The UN's "oil for food program" was a fraud from the start. It was never designed to help Iraqis. It was part of the world imperialism's attack on Iraqi's sovereignty that served to provide cover for the harsh, even lethal economic sanctions that killed about one million Iraqis over 12 years, half of them children. If the alleged payoffs took place among various European powers and Hussein, it should come as a surprise to anyone, but O'Reilly and other war apologists should heed Hayes's warning that Americans may have been in on the corruption as well. Indeed, in recent days, we've learned that none other than Coalition Provisional Authority boss Paul Bremer has blocked the release of funds to investigate these charges.

Thus O'Reilly is using allegations of corruption among Hussein and Washington's European rivals to justify Washington's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Pay no attention to the absence of WMD, the absence of connections between Sept. 11 and Iraq, and the growing Iraqi resistance to the occupation, pleads O'Reilly. Just look at that corruption involving FRANCE and Hussein. That makes everything right.

Well, it doesn't. All O'Reilly is accomplishing with this campaign is illuminating the criminal economic sanctions against Iraq and the reactionary role the imperialist-dominated United Nations played in the deaths of a million Iraqis.

March 22, 2004--We all know how well connected Bill O'Reilly is and how authoritative his sources are, most recently evidenced by his sure-fire prediction that Pakistani forces had Osama bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, cornered near Wana, Pakistan. But O'Reilly said something last week that has ominous implications.

As George Bush's political fortunes have continued to plummet, Bill O'Reilly has been flailing about for answers and hauling in former Clinton advisor Dick Morris every other day for answers and advice on how Bush can turn it around. O'Reilly has walked a tightrope on this issue, taking care to be seen as distancing himself from Bush and his credibility gap while still defending Bush and trying to put the best possible light on his presidency.

At the conclusion of one of these exercises in futility, O'Reilly looked the camera in the eye and knowingly stated that "something's going to turn this around."

Been talking to General Tommy Franks lately, O'Reilly?

At a recent Chamber of Commerce meeting in Kansas, Franks stated that the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq was "absolutely not" too high a price to pay. "If it costs 500 [lives] that's OK, or 5,000, that's OK, or 50,000 that's OK with me" (Salina Journal, Jan. 29, 2004).

Franks's thinking is right in step with O'Reilly's Democratic buddy Madeline Albright, former Secretary of State under William Clinton, who once said that the price of 500,000 Iraqi children dying from the US imposed sanctions against Iraq was "worth it."

What say you, O'Reilly?

It's possible that the supposed Zarqawi memo inspired Sunni militants in Iraq to carry out the bombings against Shiites while they prayed on their holiday. While Iraq was once a largely secular country, one consequence of the US invasion has been the growth of Islamic fundamentalists and jihadists in the country, an event facilitated by the absence of a revolutionary workers leadership.

It's also possible that the bombings were committed by pro-US forces as a provocation intended to effectuate exactly what has occurred since the bombings--increased US security in Shiite communities.

There's been a pattern emerging in Israel and Iraq, whereby an act of terrorism allegedly committed by Palestinian or Iraqi guerrillas conveniently sabotages negotiations or a looming diplomatic breakthrough.

More of us are asking the burning question: Who benefits from terrorist acts when they occur? From Israel to Iraq to September 11 to the US-based attacks that are coming? Ask yourselves: Who benefits? Run searches on O peration Northwoods. Then run some more on Pearl Harbor, the McCollum Memo, and what Roosevelt knew about the attack.

Then ask yourselves again: Who benefits?

In the meantime, the Iraqi people don't need Bill O'Reilly to tell them how to think and what to feel as their blood flows in the streets from Baghdad to Karbala. Iraqi working people are well aware that "Regardless of who perpetrated the attacks, the political responsibility lies entirely with US imperialism," as the World Socialist Web Site put it recently.

Right after the Baghdad attacks, grieving survivors of the bombings surrounded and threw rocks at US military vehicles arriving on the scene. Western journalists were beaten, and a large crowd threw stones and shouted anti-US chants as they marched on a US military base.

The next day grievers at the Karbala funerals chanted "God is greatest, America is the enemy of God," No, no, America. No, no terrorism," and "We are brothers, Sunnis and Shiites, and we will not sell our country to foreigners."

Shiite leaders, feeling the heat from their communities, blasted Washington for the terror and chaos plaguing their country. "We put the responsibility on the occupation forces directly and indirectly . . . The existence of the occupation encourages such attacks."

An Ayatollah in Najaf said this: "We put reponsibility of ensuring security in our country and of protecting sacred Shiite sites on the occupation forces because they have left our country open to infiltrators. . . In the meantime, these forces have spent their time pillaging the riches of Iraq."

O'Reilly has no moral authority to speak for or to the Iraqi people. This latest O'Reilly outrage--whereby he actually berated Iraqis for having the audacity to express anger over the illegal US invasion and occupation that's killed tens of thousands of their people--is of the same piece as O'Reilly blaming Afghanis and Iraqis for their own deaths if they stubbornly remained in their cities when US forces bombed them.

O'Reilly has no moral authority to lecture Iraqis, Afghanis because he has their blood on his hands. He has nothing but contempt and racist imperialist arrogance toward the working people of both nations, who I think can be safely said hate O'Reilly double back.

I think I can speak for many Americans, Iraqis, and Afghanis, not too mention Cubans, French, Canadians, Germans, English, Irish, Spanish, Italians, Venezuelans, Haitians, Colombians, and Koreans, to name a few, when I say that millions of us throughout the world would stand up and cheer at the image of Bill O'Reilly wearing an orange jump suit and shackles, alongside Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and the rest of the gang similarly dressed, being marched off to prison for a life of hard labor. That's if we didn't stoop to their level and give them the revolutionary justice they really deserve.

February 17, 2004--Last night Bill O'Reilly acted as if he were achieving the journalistic coup of the century in reporting that ABC News political director Mark Halperin admitted online the media had a liberal bias. O'Reilly crowed with misplaced triumphalism that Halperin's opinion vindicated O'Reilly's harsh views of the liberal "elite media," as represented by the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, etc. This myth of a liberal bias in the media could be the subject of a separate essay, but it has been demolished convincingly in a number of forums, including Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?," and Mike Hersh's 3-part series for Online Journal, "Note the Bias."

O'Reilly's two guests on this segment were veteran ABC journalist Peter Collins, whose views echo those of O'Reilly and Bernard Goldberg, author of "Bias," (whom Alterman refutes in "What Liberal Media?"), and American University history professor Alan Lichtman. When Lichtman tried to tell O'Reilly the results of a study showing most reporters are conservative on economic issues, the Factor host contemptuously dismissed Lichtman's findings as "mumbo-jumbo," proving once again that O'Reilly never lets the facts get in the way of his spin.

February 17, 2004--Last night Bill O'Reilly acted as if he were achieving the journalistic coup of the century in reporting that ABC News political director Mark Halperin admitted online the media had a liberal bias. O'Reilly crowed with misplaced triumphalism that Halperin's opinion vindicated O'Reilly's harsh views of the liberal "elite media," as represented by the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, etc. This myth of a liberal bias in the media could be the subject of a separate essay, but it has been demolished convincingly in a number of forums, including Eric Alterman's "What Liberal Media?," and Mike Hersh's 3-part series for Online Journal, "Note the Bias."

O'Reilly's two guests on this segment were veteran ABC journalist Peter Collins, whose views echo those of O'Reilly and Bernard Goldberg, author of "Bias," (whom Alterman refutes in "What Liberal Media?"), and American University history professor Alan Lichtman. When Lichtman tried to tell O'Reilly the results of a study showing most reporters are conservative on economic issues, the Factor host contemptuously dismissed Lichtman's findings as "mumbo-jumbo," proving once again that O'Reilly never lets the facts get in the way of his spin.

February 26, 2004--"Oh Really O'Reilly" will soon return to the unfinished essay below entitled, "Bill O'Reilly: Homophobe, Smut Peddler, and Losing the Culture War," which left off in October 2003 discussing the controversy that was already surrounding Mel Gibson's film about the death of Jesus Christ, "The Passion of the Christ." The revised essay will also excoriate the latest O'Reilly demagogic bigotry concerning gay marriage.

"The Passion" is a reactionary movie made by one of Hollywood's most reactionary and repugnant personalities, Mel Gibson. On the day after the film's opening, which was greeted with overflow crowds and mixed reviews. COSMOS LEFT feels compelled to pass along this little tidbit of news from the Manila Bulletin Online: A 57-year-old woman died of a heart attack while watching the climatic moment of "The Passion" in a Wichita, Kansas movie theater. Gibson's "masterpiece"  is apparently one of the most sadistic and violent films ever made that revels in the graphic torture and death of Jesus Christ.

My criticism of Gibson's film has nothing to do with Abraham Foxman's of the Zionist Anti-Defamation League. As an artist, Gibson has the right to make any movie he wants in any manner he chooses. When it is agenda-ridden and based on shaky historical grounds, we have the right to respond independently of the movie's artistic merit, which may be substantial since Gibson has made some good films.

When a Zionist like Waxman charges that "The Passion" is anti-Semitic, whatever validity there is to that accusation is undermined and clouded by Foxman's status as an unwavering, strident apologist for the ongoing atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians. Anti-Semitism is on the rise today because of the murderous and barbaric policies being committed in the name of the Jewish people by Sharon and the rest of the Zionist ruling class in Tel Aviv, and since Foxman dogmatically defends those crimes against humanity, his views on "The Passion" are worthless.

The source of the film's anti-Semitism is this: Before 1965, the Vatican's official doctrine stated that Jews bore collective responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ. But in that year the Second Vatican Council repudiated that position and renounced the charge of deicide and all manifestations of anti-Semitism. Mel Gibson belongs to an ultraconservative Catholic sect that specifically REJECTS the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. So Gibson, O'Reilly, and the rest of their congregation can dispense with the feigned shock over the anti-Semitism charge.

More on Gibson, O'Reilly, and "The Passion of Christ" soon.

February 20, 2004--Tonight's Talking Points memo was entitled, "Why Traditionalists Are Losing the Culture War"--confirming the thesis we began developing several months ago, though, as Bob Dylan once put it, "we just saw it from a different point of view."

Since then, the WMD scandal, David Kay's report, Paul O'Neill's revelations, the continuing stagnant job market, the disastrous State of the Union speech and equally disastrous Russert interview, have all contributed to a growing crisis for Bush and the capitalist class he represents.

Increasingly, the ruling class--through thuggish media stooges like Bill O'Reilly--are fighting back with the only weapon they've got--the "culture war."

They are holding up the cross to block every extension of freedom, every breakthrough from myth, superstition, hatred, and obscurantism. They are throwing holy water on a deepening social and economic crisis.

We will not let them get away with this.

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March 10, 2004--COSMOS LEFT will soon see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." In the meantime, a few comments on the movie, its success, and the role of Bill O'Reilly in this entire phenomenon.

Ever since "The Passion"s $200 million blockbuster success, O'Reilly's been crowing that he's the only genius around who predicted Gibson's movie would do so well, and that the record-breaking box office performance proves that Americans are a Christian people who have voted with their wallets and weighed in on the culture war against the godless secularists.

Perhaps when one watches O' Reilly so closely, you tend to tune in on his clear thinking, insightful mind, because it was no surprise to me that "The Passion" might break all box office records. How could it be otherwise? Combine a gory, historic story like the crucifixion of Christ with a slick, shrewd marketing campaign led by a mega-movie star and aided by the cable TV's most effective demagogue, who happens to be his business partner, and you didn't have to be Nostradamus to predict the huge commercial success of "The Passion."

Hype for "The Passion" was built by a shrewd marketing campaign in which Gibson selectively showed the film to right wing "intellectuals" like Peggy Noonan, Kate O'Beirne, and Linda Chavez as well as 10,000 pastors and other Christian leaders. Christian fundamentalists and ultrarightists, feeling the wind to their sails with this "Christian in Chief" in the White House waging civilizing wars and conquering pagan nations, are itching to mobilize their ranks to the movies to see "The Passion." Because this is THEIR movie, THEIR recruitment tool, THEIR best organizing weapon for the evangelical movement since Billy Graham, before he embarrassed himself with statements reflecting, uh, anti-Semitism.

More on that shortly, just for O'Reilly's sake.

A key component of Gibson's advance advertising campaign for "The Passion" was none other than his old friend, business partner, fellow culture warrior and blood brother on the right--Bill O'Reilly.

O'Reilly was stoking the fires of this controversy back in September 2003, which is when COSMOS LEFT began discussing "The Passion" in its essay, "Bill O'Reilly: Homophobe, Smut Peddler, and Losing the Culture War." From the beginning, O'Reilly was trying to make out Gibson to be the persecuted Christian facing hostility, censorship and vicious personal attacks from secularists and misguided Jews falsely accusing "The Passion" of being anti-Semitic.

O'Reilly knew exactly what he was doing. He knew his mass base consisted largely of conservative, Christian Republicans who would flock to theaters
to see a movie event perceived to be a sign of the Second Coming.

Combine all this with the fact that we're a nation of voyeurs,who, when bombarded with movie trailers and hype depicting a cinemagraphic orgy of sadomasochistic violence against the Lord Jesus Christ, and you've got an irresistible combination of sex, violence, religion, and dollar signs.

But O'Reilly's wrong on his second point, too. The box office bonanza for the movie does not translate into an endorsement of "religious traditionalism" on the part of the masses over the "secularism" of the liberal elites. For the reasons discussed above, the lure of this "sacred snuff film," as The New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier put it, made by a popular film star and director, attracted all kinds of people with a variety of politics, religious beliefs, and philosophical values. Many were curious, most were voyeurs drawn to the sadomasochism gore as rubbernecking automobile riders are drawn to a gruesome accident. Some loved the film for a range of reasons which we will get to; others hated the film for its relentless, manipulative, and gratuitous violence, among other valid objections.

The last thing the big box office sales represent is a rejection of secularism and a victory for the kind of religious traditionalism Bill O'Reilly peddles. As usual, that's O'Reilly trying to spin facts to fit his preconceived right wing agenda.

March 14, 2004--Earth to Bill O'Reilly and the rest of the ideologically motivated Mel Gibson supporters: Not every person who sees "The Passion" likes the movie, or endorses Gibson's version of the events, or pays the ten bucks to endorse traditional religious values, Christianity or Catholicism and to reject secularism.

Gibson's genius was to make a film that would attract everybody--Catholics, fundamentalist Christians, dissident Catholics, Jews, atheists, communists, fascists, religious scholars and students, history students, warmongers, peaceniks, working people who see elements of their own suffering on the cross, voyeurs, sadists, masochists, sado-masochists, slasher movie fans, even fans of homo-eroticism, if you can believe anything Christopher Hitchens has to say any more.

It's true that right wing Christian fundamentalists have been orchestrating a well organized, well financed campaign to ensure a huge commercial success for "The Passion"--the better to exploit it as the best recruitment tool that's come along in ages--some day delivered directly from Heaven itself.

Marxists need to know how to respond to this political movement of the ultraright by intelligently discussing the historical basis for the movie's plot and injecting a healthy dose of historical materialism into what has been at best a sketchy, raw, primitive attempt at recording history and at worst a fairy tale.

This is one reason why "The Passion" is an important work that needs to be seen and discussed. Gibson and his defenders are right when they say that some critics of the film don't have a problem with Gibson or the movie, they have a problem with the Gospels. And that's exactly right. We need a debate on the Gospels and the motivation driving those who rewrote and edited them years after Christ's death to reflect the improved relations with Rome. Pilate wasn't the monster who sentenced Christ to death. It was the bloodthirsty J ews who demanded the crucifixion.

Revolutionary Marxists must realize that not everyone who sees this movie, even the churchgoers, are automatically right wing religious zealots who can never be won over to the socialist side. During every revolutionary uprising in the epoch of imperialism, communist workers have fought alongside workers who still believed in the Second Coming. We don't have sectarian or Stalinist approaches to workers who have religious beliefs. That would only drive them away. We respect their freedom of conscience and democratic right to religious expression.

So it's vital that when we explain our criticism of a movie like "The Passion" we do so in a way that is respectful of their religious beliefs.

We point out that Gibson and the Gospels' version of the Passion is at best a primitive, sketchy, raw, unofficial version of what happened to a particularly charismatic guerrilla leader of the Jews suffering under the oppressive yoke of Roman rule. We inject a dose of historical materialism and explain the objective conditions that existed in Judea that would give rise to proletarian seditionists like Jesus.

This is another reason why "The Passion" is an important work relevant to our time. The film shows that then--as now--revolutionaries who organized the oppressed to fight their oppressors were often kidnapped on midnight raids, illegally detained, brutally beaten, convicted before phony show trials, and sentenced to death, often because a fink ratted them out.

MARCH 17, 2004--Marxists should not cower before the film's huge box office numbers or cede any ground to O'Reilly's anti-secular spin on this success. We should recognize the cultural and political impact of Gibson's work and embrace the opportunity to demystify and demythologize this literary figure lionized in the religious dogma of the Bible.

Gibson and O'Reilly keep saying that critics don't have a problem with Mel Gibson and his movie--they instead have a problem with the Gospels. Well, that's half true--we do have a problem with presenting the Gospels as the literal history of what happened during that time. It's a story cobbled together by the early congregation to spin the events to best suit their interests--most prominent of which was cozying up to Rome. Which explains the strange paradox contained in the Gospels--that the Jews, who greeted Christ as a liberator just days before, t urned into a vicious mob screaming for his murder; and the sadistic Pilate, who crucified so many Jews they ran out of crosses, turns into a wise, reasonable, thoughtful, and merciful man who had to be talked into executing Christ by the Jews who had been cheering Jesus days before.

So, yes, I have a problem accepting the Gospels as the literal truth about these events. But I also have a problem with Mel Gibson for adapting his movie from the Gospels and presenting it as factual history. And anyone who challenges the veracity of the Gospels is immediately accused of being anti-Catholic, a godless secularist or an anarchist.

And I have a problem with Bill O'Reilly's position that if you criticize Gibson or the movie, you're engaging in vicious personal defamation and trying to destroy the man for trying to inject a traditionalist religious movie into this increasingly decadent and secular society.

This is a classic O'Reilly tactic--covering his own censorship by falsely equating legitimate criticism with being censorship. No one ever said Gibson didn't have the right to make this movie. He has a right to make it, but we have a right to respond and criticize strongly and passionately because we feel it is a particularly wretched and reprehensible work that deserves to be condemned and debunked.

We have a right to inject a healthy dose of historical materialism into the events depicted in the film. We should counterpose our historical materialist explanation for the events surrounding the Passion to the spin-based religious dogma of the fairy tale presented as history in the Gospels. We should bring the story down to earth and explain that if there were an individual named Christ who was crucified, he was more likely a charismatic Jewish revolutionary and proletarian seditionist executed by the oppressive state rule of Rome.

Having seen "The Passion" last weekend, I can honestly say that anyone who claims that "The Passion" is not anti-Semitic is a liar or a fool, and, in Bill O'Reilly's case, both. Anyone who sees the film possessing no prior knowledge of the events depicted would walk out convinced that the primary responsibility for Christ's crucifixion rests with the Jews.

O'Reilly, as his his style, refuses to allow a serious debate about this issue. He says anyone who believes "The Passion" is anti-Semitic should be pitied. He tries to cover up the real evidence of Gibson's anti-Semitism by saying there were Jewish heroes in the film as well as villains, like Simon of Syrene, forced by the Romans to carry the cross when Christ no longer could. And sure there were Jewish villains--the powerful high priests who resented Christ's popularity with the people. "Any preacher straying from orthodoxy will be evilified, then and now."

Besides, is it a shock some Jews behaved badly? O'Reilly wonders. After all, the Islamic killers on Sept. 11 and the Catholic priest sexual molestation scandals proves people of all religions are capable of evil.

MARCH 18, 2004--Notice the precise scientific approach employed by O'Reilly in analyzing history. September 11 jihadists, Catholic priests, Jewish high priests, it all boils down to evildoers. O'Reilly consciously uses this tactic to throw dust in our eyes and keep us from seeing the events depicted in "The Passion" from the prism of the class struggle. He also displays an astonishing ignorance about the relations that existed in the first few centuries A.D. among Jews, Romans, and Christians.

The Jews were oppressed and enslaved and occupied by Imperial Rome. The Christians were a sect that split off from the Jews over the question of who was the Messiah that would deliver them from slavery. Early Christianity was a movement of slaves and freed slaves that had elements of primitive communism to it. Christianity, l ike the socialist workers movement that would develop centuries later, preached a future liberation from exploitation and oppression.

It is entirely possible that a charismatic Christian prophet, who was most likely a revolutionary proletarian seditionist, a Che Guevera from Nazareth, was executed by the Romans, just as many thousands were--political subservsives and common criminals alike.

It is also entirely possible that Jewish high priests collaborated with the Romans against the upstart Christ who was showing them up for their quisling ways, though it is far more likely that they were threatened by Christ's demeanor, which was probably closer to John Brown's than Martin Luther King, Jr.

But the Gospels--and Gibson---take it much further than slamming Caiphas and his colleagues in the Jewish hierarchy. The Gospels' editors present a frenzied mob so filled with hatred for Jesus they would rather see a vicious murderer released--Barabbas.

Keep in mind that t his was the same crowd that the day before greeted Christ as a king with shouts of hosannas and greeting him with joy. Perhaps this is why the Gospels tell of Jesus being arrested at night; to do so in daylight would have provoked resistance from the revolutionary's followers.

But a day later, this same crowd of admirers turns into a lynch mob screaming for the blood of a man they'd cheered 24 hours before and who was fighting to free the Jews from Roman tyranny.

As Karl Kautsky put it, "The Jewish mob in the Gospels exceeds the most infamous and idiotic stage villain in its stupid villainy. For without the slightest reason, without the slightest cause, it clamors for the blood of him who it venerated but yesterday."

Yes, we have a problem with the Gospels. But we also have problems with Gibson and O'Reilly.

O'Reilly dogmatically asserts that "The Passion" is not anti-Semitic, but as usual his spin deprives his viewers of critical information. As we've discussed elsewhere, Gibson belongs to a splinter Catholic sect that rejects the Second Vatican Council's 1965 renunciation of its previous position blaming Jews collectively for Christ's death. Gibson's father denies the Holocaust and has characterized the Second Vatican Council as a "Masonic plot backed by the Jews."

O'Reilly doesn't bother telling his audience that Gibson's approach to the movie was heavily influenced by the German Augustinian nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, a notorious anti-Semite whose "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ" embellishes the Gospels' version with descriptions of a "cruel," "wicked" and "hard-hearted" "Jewish mob."

"She supplied me with stuff I never would have thought of," Gibson said to the New Yorker.

It showed. In the movie, when the Jewish high priests saw that Pilate was showing doubts about executing Christ, they are even more determined to see blood. Listen to Emmerich describe the scene in "The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ": "The sight of Jesus' sufferings, far from exciting a feeling of compassion in the hard-hearted Jews, simply filled them with disgust, and increased their rage. Pity was, indeed, a feeling unknown in their cruel beasts."

Watching "The Passion of the Christ,"one can clearly see Emmerich's influence on Gibson's vision of the events.

O'Reilly never mentioned the centuries-long tradition of medieval Passion plays that depicted Jews as "Christ killers." He couldn't bring himself to report that when Hitler saw the Passion in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau, he had no trouble using it to justify his Final Solution for the Jewish "problem."

MARCH 19, 2004--No, "The Passion" is not anti-Semitic. That's why right after "The Passion" opened, a Pentacostal church in Colorado was adorned with this uplifting sign: "The Jews Killed our Lord Jesus."

Now where could they have gotten that idea from?

They got it from a movie that consistently and unequivocally shows the Jews as the prime movers behind the crucifixion of Christ, as they are in the Gospels. The high priests, led by the repulsive and bloodthirsty Caiaphas, label Jesus a blasphemer for proclaiming himself the king of the Jews. Caiaphas relentlessly demands that Roman governor Pontius Pilate sentence him to death, since there is evidence that Jewish custom prohibited capital punishment.

Pilate had quite a reputation as a sadistic tyrant who crucified thousands of Jews. But the Gospels and Gibson see things differently. Pilate seems like a just, rational, reasonable fellow who's reluctant to execute Christ. At one point he reminds Caiaphas that only the day before the Jews hailed Jesus as a hero. Now they're screaming for his blood.

"How are you to explain this madness?" Pilate inquires of Caiaphas.

Good question, Pontius, and one that neither the Gospels nor Gibson can answer. Because if they attempted to, they'd have to grapple with the glaring contradiction found in the Gospels and Gibson's production--Jesus had a mass following among oppressed Jews and had driven the moneylenders from the Temple, yet miraculously these same Jews turned on him and demanded their oppressor--Pilate--crucify the man they'd hailed as their king the day before.

So Pilate offers the bloodthirsty crowd of Jews the opportunity to execute Jesus. Christ is beaten and sent back into the crowd, who demand his crucifixion.
But Pilate decides chastising Jesus was sufficient, a task he orders his soldiers to carry out.

Listen to the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier:

"'The Passion of the Christ' is an unwitting incitement to secularism [can you hear O'Reilly screaming?], because it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find an other way of regarding the horror that you have just observed.This is unfair to, well, Christianity, since Christianity is not a cult of Gibsonesque gore. But there is a religion toward which Gibson's movie is even more unfair than it is to its own. In its representation of its Jewish characters, The Passion of the Christ is without doubt an anti-Semitic movie, and anybody who says otherwise knows nothing [O'Reilly], or chooses to know nothing [O'Reilly again], about the visual history of anti-Semitism, in art and in film. What is so shocking about Gibson's Jews is how unreconstructed they are in their stereotypical appearances and actions. These are not merely anti-Semitic images; these are classically anti-Semitic images."

We're talking classic anti-Semitic images--the sneering Caiaphas with his gray rabbi beard, draped in a shawl of money, manipulating the passive Pilate, lecturing him about how best to serve Rome, as if, as Weiseltier put it, "that Rome was a colony of Judea."

MARCH 23, 2004--We're talking archtypal anti-Semitic images--the sneering Caiaphas with his gray rabbi beard, draped in a shawl of money, manipulating the passive Pilate, lecturing him about how best to serve Rome, as if, as Weiseltier put it, "that Rome was a colony of Judea."

Gibson CHOOSES to place the primary responsibility for Christ's execution on the Jews. The Jews DEMAND that Pilate crucify Christ in this movie. So do the Gospels, O'Reilly and other Gibson defenders cry. But the Gospels are not accurate historical records. They are contradictory texts rewritten decades after the story's time period by a Christian sect that was now cozying up to Rome and hated the Jews from which they had broken from.

When Christ tells Pilate, "It is he who delivered me to you who has the greater sin," he's referring to the Jews. It is THEY who have the greater sin. Not Pilate.
He was reasonable, he had a conscience, he was forced into it by the bloodthirsty, savage Jewish mob.

Well, it didn't happen that way. Pilate was a prolific and sadistic executioner who thoroughly enjoyed his work--much like George W. Bush, who put to death more people than any other governor in US history. If there was a Jesus Christ, he was crucified by Pilate, no doubt for seditious activities. The Romans crucified so many Jews that they eventually ran out of crosses and out of space.

Gibson may have deleted the Matthew's notorious Jewish cry that "his blood be on us and our children" from the English translation, but with the blatantly anti-Semitic imagery and narrative tone of "The Passion," he didn't need it. Viewers, clear-thinking, open-minded viewers, that is, not fanatical Catholics like O'Reilly who won't let facts or history get in the way of their religious dogma, will get Gibson's message: Jews were the prime movers behind Christ's crucifixion.

Speaking of facts, history, and O'Reilly's disdain for journalistic professionalism and integrity, let's talk for a moment about the accuracy of "The Passion," something O'Reilly, in all of his pontificating, has not got around to.

First, Jesus scholars say Gibson's first mistake was his use of Latin and Aramaic as the primary languages in the film. Greek was the predominant language spoken in Jerusalem during the time of "The Passion," along with Aramaic and Hebrew. Jesus would not have spoken to Pilate in Latin, according to John Dominic Crossan, professor of religious studies at De Paul University in Chicago:

"Not in your dreams. It would have been Greek."

Reuters reports (Feb. 24, 2004, Megan Goldin) that Latin was reserved for official decrees or spoken by the elite, and that most Roman centurions spoke Green and Latin.

Scholars also doubt that Christ wore long hair, as actor James Caviezel did in the film. "Jesus didn't have long hair," said physical anthropologist Joe Zias. "Jewish men back in antiquity did not have long hair."

But these are minor points. Scholars have also criticized the film's lack of historical context, which we have also discussed here. Crossan has a problem with the movie opening not when Christ enters Jerusalem to a hero's welcome from the Jewish masses, but at night when he's arrested by the Romans after Judas' betrayal.

APRIL 7, 2004:

Since O'Reilly continues to hijack US history by falsely claiming America's bourgeois democratic revolutionaries intended the new republic to be a theocracy based on "Judeo-Christian values and philosophy," I thought it would be appropriate to inject a dose of Jeffersonian wisdom into the discussion about historical value of the Gospels:

"The whole history of [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man [Jesus]; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."

Thomas Jefferson (to John Adams, 1814)

January 2004--Sometimes, the "spin" in Bill O'Reilly's No-Spin Zone can be found in what he DOESN'T ask his guests. Four cases in point:

1) On a recent show, comedian Bill Maher gave a typically acerbic assessment of Bush and his Democratic challengers. During the interview, Maher called Bush a draft dodger for enlisting in the Texas National Guard instead of going to Vietnam. O'Reilly, predictably, took exception to this, demanding Maher back this accusation up with evidence.

Unfortunately, Maher dropped the ball, missing a golden opportunity to provide documented evidence in the mass media that Bush went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard in 1972. Instead, Maher's lack of political sophistication led him to charge Bush with the wrong offense--draft dodging, which lets Bush off the hook and allowed O'Reilly to seem logical. Wait a minute, O'Reilly countered, draft dodging is going to jail or Canada. Enlisting in the National Guard is an alternative way of serving your country, an argument that left Maher to equate National Guard service with avoiding Vietnam.

First, "draft dodging" is a loaded, perjorative term usually employed by pro-war forces, which Maher proudly counts himself among. Draft resistance took various forms--burning draft cards, risking arrest and jail, or going to Canada. Volunteering for the National Guard was a way of avoiding Vietnam, that's true. Millions chose this option.

BUT BUSH DID SOMETHING MORE. He enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard, BUT WENT AWOL from that duty, and used his father's connections to cover up the tracks.

Now, it's partly understandable that Bill Maher didn't respond with the facts to the correct accusation against Bush. He's a comedian. Bill O'Reilly is SUPPOSED to be a journalist (which Cosmos Left readers know he's not). The facts are out there on this story. As a journalist, he's supposed to know them and report them, so the people can decide.

O'Reilly should know that his current commander in chief never showed up for drills. General William Turnipseed and aide Kenneth Lott say that Bush never appeared for duty, which is a violation of the Texas Code of Military Justice carries a penalty of a court martial. [Boston Globe, 5/23/00]

O'Reilly should be reporting that Bush never showed up for his training at the 187th Tactical Recon Group at Dannelly ANG Base in Alabama. [On-Line Journal, 7/13/00]

If O'Reilly was a journalist worth his mettle, he would be telling his viewers about Bill Burkett,a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Guard, who said, "As the Sttae Plans Officer for the Texas National Guard, I was on full-time duty at Camp Mabry when [Bushaide] Dan Bartlett was cleansing the George W. Bush file prior to G. W.'s presidential announcement....The archives were closely scrutinized to make sure that the Bush autobiography plans and the record did not directly contradict each other."

O'Reilly didn't ask, and Maher didn't tell, that government records show that Bush's flying privileges were suspended for failure to take his annual medicial exam. Michael Dannenhauer, former chief of staff to Bush Senior, says that his son's cocaine and alcohol habit was "out of control" that landed him in "lost weekends in Mexico."

Bush engineered a transfer to an Alabaman reserve unit so he could work on a US Senate campaign, but when headquarters said he had to serve with a more active unit, Bush never bothered to show up. There are no records of Bush's military service from 1972-73. Apparently he returned to Houston, but not to his Air Force unit. Bush's commander in Alabama says he never saw Dubya.

In other words, Bush went AWOL. That's the charge, Maher, not "draft dodging." And it was up to Maher to speak up and inform a world audience, because spinmeister O'Reilly certainly wasn't about to. Bill O'Reilly? Report that his valiant commander in chief went AWOL from 1972-73? Sorry, that doesn't fit the spin. Hear O'Reilly report that Vice President Richard Cheney brazenly stated he "had other priorities" during the Vietnam war as he skipped out with a student deferment? That won't make it on the Factor, either.

2) On another January show, O'Reilly did a wretched puff piece on Laura Bush. His partner in crime was Washington Post reporter Ann Gerhart, author of a new book on Mrs. Bush entitled, "The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush." Positively awe-inspiring.

While O'Reilly and Gerhart beat around the bush regarding the president's notorious party twins and how how much privacy to accord them, not a word was said about the tragic choice in the life of 17-year-old Laura Bush when on Nov. 6, 1963, she ran her Chevrolet sedan through a stop sign in Midland, Texas, and crashed into a Corvair sedan, killing the driver, Michael Douglas, who just happened to be her boyfriend. No charges were ever filed.

No doubt Gerhart covers this little tidbit of news in her book, which a brief excerpt revealed to be somewhat tougher on Laura and her hard-drinking daughters than was revealed under O'Reilly's probing questions. Apparently, Mrs. Bush's bout with manslaughter is too sensitive a matter for O'Reilly's fairy-tale world.

3) The pattern continued when Richard Perle and David Frum showed up on the Factor to plug their latest collection of warmongering ravings, "An End to Evil: Strategies in the War on Terror." Frum is the former Bush speechwriter whose biggest contribution to humanity was feeding Bush the phrase "Axis of Evil" in one of his war propaganda speeches. There IS an Axis of Evil threatening the world today, but Frum had the wrong plot points--they're not Iraq, Iran, and North Korea but the US, Israel, and Britain.

O'Reilly was more than happy to provide Frum and Perle with a forum to spout their grim message--war, war, and more war. Shamelessly and cynically exploiting Americans' fears over 911, Frum and Perle use the "war on terror" as a euphemism for Washington's military campaign to reshape the world to its liking--global domination for US corporations. Bush was right to invade and occupy Iraq (despite no ties to Al Qaeda and no WMD); now he should demand regime change in Syria and Iran (which means invading them, if necessary) and impose a Cuban-style military blockade of North Korea as a prelude to preemptive strikes on its nuclear facilities.
Frum and Perle also talk tough against France and Saudi Arabia, laying the foundation for invading that country and seizing its oil fields.

This tough talk was music to O'Reilly's chauvinistic, Bonapartist ears, right down to the French-bashing and unrestrained US militarism. But once again, O'Reilly proved that he's pretty valuable as a propaganda minister for the Pentagon but absolutely worthless as a journalist. Because if O'Reilly were a journalist, he would have asked Perle about the scandals engulfing him involving Boeing, Hollinger Digital, Trireme Partners and Global Crossing, controversies that forced Perle's resignation as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon, and which have led to charges of conflicts of interest and war profiteering.

Richard Perle is one of the most corrupt scoundrels to ever disgrace the American political landscape. This cretin's got more conflicts of interests than Adolf Hitler at a human rights convention. Recently we discovered that the telecommunications conglomerate Global Crossing paid Perle almost a million dollars to help the firm sell its fiber optic operations to Hutchinson Whampoa, run by a Hong Kong billionaire and the Singaporean government. As part of Global Crossing's bankruptcy proceedings, Perle wrote an affidavit stating that his position as chairman of the Defense Policy Board gave him "intimate knowledge" of how the firm would close the deal.

Thanks to Seymour Hersh's reporting last year, we learned that Perle brazenly used his Pentagon and White House connections to entice Saudi billionaires to invest millions into Perle's venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, which just happens to specialize in homeland security and the military.

One of those Saudi businessmen was Adnan Khashoggi, the notorious arms dealer who was at the center of the Iran-Contra conspiracy and the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which Bush Sr. and the CIA used to funnel money to Osama bin Laden during the '80s to fight the pro-Moscow Afghan government.

While Perle talked tough on the Factor regarding the Saudi regime's support of terrorists, Hersh reported that Perle sought to win homeland security contracts with the Saudi royal family. Khashoggi's partner in this was Saleh Al-Zuhair, who tried to convince Perle not to invade Iraq. Perle associate Gerald Hillman sent Al-Zuhair a proposal stating that if Hussein owned up to having WMD and agreed to leave Iraq, the US would refrain from in vading. This letter was leaked to the Saudi press and described as a last minute attempt to avoid war.

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the US,Prince Bandar Sultan told Hersh that this scheme was actually an attempt to shake down Riyadh. Sultan said: "There is a split personality to Perle. Here he is, on the one hand, trying to make a hundred million dollar deal, and on the other hand, there were elements of blackmail--'If we get the business, he'll back off on Saudi Arabia.'"

Some patriot, that Richard Perle.

But he wasn't through with his war profiteering. In December 2003, we learned that Perle had lobbied on behalf of Boeing's bid to secure an $18 billion contract one year after the aerospace corporation invested $20 million in--you guessed it--Trireme Partners.

Perle's propensity for corruption, influence peddling, and serving Zionist Israel goes back decades. During the early 1970s, as an aide to Senator Henry Jackson of Washington, Perle was accused of giving classified information to the Israeli embassy. In 1983, while assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, Perle lobbied the Army to buy weapons from an Israeli company that had paid him $50,000 two years before.

These are serious charges that Perle should be forced to answer in whatever public forum he appears, particularly one he uses to plug his dishonest pro-war book that will fatten his wallet even more. If O'Reilly were a serious journalist, truly looking out for the common folk by taking on the powerful, he would have forced Perle to answer these allegations. Yet there was O'Reilly, giving a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil powder puff interview that would make Larry King blush. O'Reilly is a strong supporter of Bush and Perle's unbridled militarism. Providing a springboard for their propaganda was far more important than asking the tough questions that might shatter still more lies.

4) O'Reilly was on the defensive over former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill's bombshell revelations regarding the inner workings of the Bush regime revealed in Ron Suskind's new book, "The Price of Loyalty." O'Neill's book poses sensitive problems for O'Reilly, because it exposes the same Bush lies about weapons of mass destruction that O'Reilly echoed and bears responsibility for, and makes clear that Bush seized on September 11 as an excuse to wage a long-planned war. It also paints a most unflattering portrait of the sadistic cipher in the White House whom Bill O'Reilly greatly admires.

O'Neill is a reactionary capitalist and former CEO of Alcoa Aluminum who openly discussed abolishing Social Security and corporate income taxes. That's what makes his account so revealing. O'Neill was part of Bush's inner circle and attended every national security council meeting. The factual accuracy of his account has not been contradicted, and he brings reams of documentation to back up his assertions.

O'Neill revealed that the first order of business at the first National Security Council meeting on January 30, 2001, launching a war against Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

"From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out. [Note the casual use of gangster jargon.] it was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, "Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"

O'Neill told 60 Minutes: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein is a bad person and that he needed to go. From the very instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime."

And in an interview with Time magazine, O'Neill stated: "In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that would characterize as weapons of mass destruction . ... I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."

Of course you didn't, because they were all destroyed in the early '90s, and the Bush administration knew it.

And O'Neill wasn't through. Fired by Bush a year ago, O'Neill doesn't hold back his opinion of Bush's intellectual prowess.

"Disengaged" is how O'Neill sums up the demented Caesar, who chokes on pretzels while Baghdad burns. Bush was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection."
Cabinet policy decisions were made like "blind man's bluff."

A fitting statement reflecting the decay of US bourgeois democracy.

O'Neill recounts the first time he met with Bush to discuss in his capacity as Treasury Secretary. "I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought, to engage him on. I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."

O'Neill says after a while he couldn't tell if Bush was ignorant or indifferent. "I wondered from the first, if the president didn't know the questions to ask, or if he did know and just did not want to know the answers. It was strange."

The right wing is howling for O'Neill's hide. One Bush administration official said O'Neill's actions were the worst betrayal since the assassination of Julius Caesar, still another confirmation of the historical parallels between Rome and Washington. (See "On Empire, Ben-Hur, and the True Relevance of Benjamin Franklin," at www.cosmosleft.com/pages/1/index.htm)
O'Reilly the spinmeister tried to contemptuously dismiss these damning revelations as "Bush bashing," but you knew O'Reilly's Harvard brain would need help to counter O'Neill's devastating testimony. So who does O'Reilly trot in to bail him out? Why, none other than Linda Chavez, a conservative Republican ideologue bitterly opposed to affirmative action who served as director of Reagan's Commission on Civil Rights.

But no, O'Reilly's not a conservative.

He just turns to right wingers every time he's in a jam: Chavez, Newt Gingrich, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Family Council This, Family Values That.

Ideological allies O'Reilly and Chavez tried to deflect attention away from Bush's lies over weapons of mass destruction and his using 911 as a pretext to invade Iraq by claiming that since Hussein tried to kill Dubya's father when he visited Kuwait in 1991, it's only natural that Bush would want to invade Iraq and overthrow Hussein as an honorable act of familial revenge--one that the Cosa Nostra would be proud of.

Besides, there's good reason to doubt the veracity of those accusations that Hussein tried to assassinate Bush Senior.

But that's irrelevant. Bush's reasons for invading Iraq were WMD and ties to Al Qaeda. They've been definitively exposed as lies. Later he tagged on additional reasons--to overthrow a dictator and free the Iraqis who would greet US soldiers as liberators. That's clearly a lie too.

O'Reilly then tried to deflect responsibility for the Iraq disaster away from Bush by stating that Clinton bombed Iraq twice, to which Chavez quickly agreed.
And besides, O'Reilly whined, then Clinton, Blair, Gephardt, they were all wrong, too.

That's right, O'Reilly, they were all wrong, just like you were all wrong, and you've just demonstrated the bipartisan character of both the US and UK's imperialist war drive. Except there's something else O'Reilly's pulling here. Yes, Clinton sought regime change and bombed Iraq throughout the '90s, actually. But he relied primarily on the draconian economic sanctions that caused the deaths of approximately one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children, a price Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright said "was worth it."

Clinton's strategy of using UN weapons inspectors to destroy the remaining stocks of WMD succeeded in destroy 95% of those weapons, according to former inspector Scott Ritter, who's been right most of the time. It was Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Jeb Bush and Elliott Abrams who sent a letter to Clinton in 1998 urging him to ignore the UN and unilaterally invade Iraq. And it was the Bush administration that actually planned and executed an illegal, preemptive strike against the sovereign and defenseless nation.

But O'Reilly never lets the facts get in the way of his spin for his reactionary political agenda. Instead he continued to downplay the importance of O'Neill's book, predicting the story would fade within weeks. That may very well happen the way O'Reilly and the rest of the "elite media" are belittling the significance of O'Neill's story.

O'Reilly then saw fit to attack O'Neill's manhood, confirming again his moral depravity and insecurities about his own masculinity.

O'Reilly described O'Neill as a "prissy" because he objected to Bush calling him the "Big O." What's the big deal, O'Reilly wanted to know.

Bush's propensity for assigning condescending nicknames to members of the press, Congress, and his own staff is well known. It is also widely known that many don't appreciate this juvenile practice, precisely because it's done in a demeaning and degrading manner. Which is why it was no big deal to O'Reilly--a sadist well versed in the art of humiliation.

O'Reilly hates O'Neill because he views the former Treasury Secretary as a turncoat whose revelations gives credibility to all of Bush's opponents. Because he's an INSIDER. O'Neill's not some "far left loony Democrat" like Howard Dean. This is from the former CEO of Alcoa, a crony capitalist whom Bush CHOSE as his Treasury Secretary.

But it wasn't just O'Neill spilling the beans about Iraq that put O'Reilly on the defensive. It was the light he shed on the corporate gangsters' sitdown about Bush's tax cut plan that got too close for O'Reilly's taste, because now his wallet is involved, and when that happens, O'Reilly's facade that he's for working people collapses as he's revealed to be another greedy millionaire like Richard Cheney.

O'Reilly and Chavez--another multimillionaire who almost got to be Bush's Labor Secretary--didn't get into the messy details of what was discussed at those tax meetings. O'Reilly pointed out that O'Neill supported the first tax cut, but opposed the second round. Chavez joked that O'Neill sounded like a Democrat, and O'Reilly suggested that it was just O'Neill paying back Bush for firing him.

Once again, it was what O'Reilly DIDN'T say that reveals his ideological bias. Neither O'Reilly nor Chavez said a word about the meeting in which Bush asked: "Haven't we already given money to rich people? this second tax cut's gonna do it again. Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?"

Karl Rove, Bush's principal political strategist, kept repeating to Bush: "Stick to principle. Stick to principle." So much for O'Reilly's characterization of Bush as a "true believer." Rove is the true believer. Bush is the illiterate puppet manipulated by the true power in the White House, Rove, a ruthless and cunning operative of the capitalist class.

Millionaires O'Reilly and Chavez resent the fact that O'Neill opposed a second round of tax cuts and had the audacity to dissent from the true believers. When O'Neill articulated the classic conservative opposition to runaway deficits, Cheney shot back, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the midterms. This is our due."

O'Reilly and Chavez know exactly who the "we" and "our" are in Cheney's formulation--millionaires like them, a tiny minority of the population, who benefit most from Bush's massive tax cuts. O'Reilly and Chavez know who was watching their backs in those White House deliberations.

While O'Reilly and Chavez employed the soft cop approach of demeaning and trivializing O'Neill's comments as sour grapes from a disgruntled, off the wall prissy, their allies in the Bush administration wasted no time going after O'Neill in a more intimidating manner. The Treasury Department threatened to prosecute O'Neill for divulging classified documents during the 60 Minutes interview. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld twice called O'Neill and in no uncertain terms advised him to keep his mouth shut.

It's easy to see why Bush is angry at O'Neill for revealing some of those documents--they contained maps of Iraqi oil fields accompanied by memoranda with such titles as "Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq" and "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts."

O'Neill claims that he had procured permission to publish whatever he did in his book and interviews. Whether he did or not, and whatever his motivation for telling all, O'Neill should be applauded for having the honesty and courage to pierce the veil of secrecy and deceit and provide the public with a glimpse into the inner circles of the corporate gangsters and war criminals who have stolen an election, decimated constitutional rights, lied about and executed illegal, preemptive and brutal wars against two defenseless countries that have killed tens of thousands.

One can't help but notice the radically different approach taken by the Bush regime toward the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, by a senior White House official to right wing journalist Robert Novak.

This is another case which O'Reilly predicted would
fade away quickly, if only because he would do his best to ensure that eventuality (see "O'Reilly Cleans Outhouse at White House," below).

Wilson had gone to Niger at the request of Vice President Cheney to investigate the charge that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake in order to make uranium for its nuclear weapons program. While there Wilson learned the story was bogus and the result of forged documents, which he told the White House and CIA upon his return to the US. But after Bush went ahead and uttered his infamous "16 words" in last years State of the Union Speech suggesting that British intelligence had confirmed the story's veracity, Wilson felt compelled to set the record straight in the NY Times.

Days after Wilson's article appeared in the Times, Novak, claiming a senior Bush official as his source (Karl Rove is the lead suspect), leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press, a vindictive retaliation that was also a federal felony. Novak wrote that it was Plame's idea to send Wilson to Niger, suggesting an act of corrupt nepotism was at work here.

While O'Reilly and the rest of the elite media continue to cover up this scandal, a grand injury started hearing testimony on January 21. Time Magazine reports that the White House has been "extremely tight-lipped about the investigation--even internally. 'No one knows what the hell is going on, because the administration people are all terrified and the lawyers aren't sharing anything with each other either.'"

Let them be terrified. Make no mistake about it--the divisions within the ruling class over Bush's reckless militarism and repression are real. The CIA doesn't like being set up as the fall guy. And if the Bush gang is terrified over dissent within the capitalists' ranks, wait until they start feeling the wrath of the US working class when it realizes how it's been taken for a ride by these corporate criminals.

Wilson cites the testimony of a reporter who was called by Karl Rove and warned that Wilson's wife was "fair game." This is still another illustration of the gangster mentality in the Bush White House. O'Reilly's kind of people.

By the way, Robert Novak, another corrupt gangster journalist who belongs behind bars, is in the news again for similarly nefarious conduct. This time he's in the middle of an unfolding Capitol Hill scandal in which Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee spied on Democratic computer files that discussed strategies to defeat Bush's judicial nominees.

All of which conclusively shows that while functioning as US imperialism's chief minister of propaganda, Bill O'Reilly's spin is in what he does NOT report. Along this line, let's watch in the coming weeks how much light O'Reilly shines on:

1) the grand jury investigation of the Plame leak; 2) the suit brought against Attorney General John Ashcroft by Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar, who was kidnapped by US authorities at JFK Airport and deported to Syria where he was tortured; 3) Secretary of State Colin Powell's announcement that Iraq may not have had weapons of mass destruction; 4) US chief weapons inspector David Kay quitting the hunt for WMD in Iraq, declaring they no longer existed before the war; 5) the fact that Bush awarded Halliburton with a $1.2 billion contract to rebuild Iraqi oilfields AFTER learning that Cheney's firm had already overcharged Washington by $61million on an Iraq reconstruction contract and fired two Kuwait employees for taking $6 million in kickbacks; 6) whether Vice President Cheney is indicted for his role in bribing Nigerian officials for $180 million to convince the to award a multi-billion-dollar contract to a consortium headed by Halliburton subsidiary, Brown, Kellogg & Root; and 7) the case of courageous whistleblower Katherine Gun, the British translator accused of leadking details of a secret US "dirty tricks" operation to spy on UN Security Council members during the key votes before the war.

That is, if O'Reilly can tear himself away from parading lurid images of scantily-clad women and sado-masochism across the screen, and launching into vicious, ignorant tirades against rap music, Mexican workers, and secular humanists.