Michael Rubin is one of those neocon writers who revel in trying to excuse American and Israeli ill-doing in order to damage control the exposed excesses of their policies and goings-on.
In his latest piece in Commentary, Rubin complains of ‘double standards’ comparing the criticism of George W. Bush over the abuse at Abu Ghraib, which Rubin says quite rightly was “both horrendous and inexcusable”, with the recent massacre of civilians in Afghanistan which Rubin says, also quite rightly, was “tragic”. The problem, however, is that Rubin can’t just leave it at that; he needs to put some kind of other spin on this and stories like it. They either get embellished for propaganda purposes or are used for some other ulterior motive. Read his piece – it’s very short – to see what I mean; you don’t need me to explain it to you.
I always wonder what it is about propagandists like Rubin that they should go to such extraordinary lengths to defend the indefensible knowing full well that in doing so they are only digging an even deeper hole in which to bury themselves.
In this piece written in 2004, Rubin attempts to smear one of the whistleblowers who exposed the goings-on at the Office of Special Plans (OSP) at the Pentagon during the run up to the war against Iraq as the neocons fed false intelligence up to a gullible President Bush via the very hawkish Vice-President Dick Cheney. In his story, Rubin is not acting merely as a neoconservative propagandist attempting to realign history using Orwellian methods, but he is also actually one of the actors in the screenplay – and in classic Orwellian doublespeak, Rubin titles his piece Web of Conspiracies when, in reality, the only 'web of conspiracies' that existed during this period were the ones being spun by the OSP!
As usual, Rubin goes over the top. He truly does protesteth too much.
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski is the whistleblower Rubin is trying to smear. She worked on the Near East and South Asia (NESA) desk at the Pentagon from May 2002 through to February 2003. Prior to that she worked at the Pentagon as an analyst on sub-Saharan Africa policy and was in the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.
During her time on the NESA desk, which came under the auspices of Doug Feith as did the OSP, Kwiatkowski was in a position to observe the goings-on at the OSP. During her time there she wrote of what she observed. In 2004 they were published as the New Pentagon Papers. The article exposed how the ‘evidence’ of Saddam’s WMD’s was being fabricated and used for propaganda by the neoconservatives to justify invading Iraq.
Knowing, of course, what we know now about the lies that were told to justify the invasion and destruction of Iraq, Rubin’s 2004 article demonstrate the extent to which he and his fellow travellers are prepared to go in order to perpetuate the lies and defend the indefensible.
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