When Scaife News Sources Collide

First there's the Scaife-Funded Heritage Foundation on the "connection" between the killing of Osama bin Laden and the "enhanced interrogations" of the Bush Administration:

A senior official who briefed the press early this morning explained that “detainees in the post-9/11 period flagged for us individuals who may have been providing direct support to bin Laden and his deputy, [Ayman al-] Zawahiri, after their escape from Afghanistan.”

He continued: “One courier in particular had our constant attention. Detainees gave us his nom de guerre, or his nickname, and identified him as both a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11, and a trusted assistant of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, the former number three of al-Qaeda who was captured in 2005.” The United States obtained this information four years ago, the official stated.

One more crucial fact: According to the “detainees” (note the plural), this individual was “one of the few al-Qaeda couriers trusted by bin Laden.”

Think about that: This lead was developed during the Bush Administration, most likely from al-Qaeda associates picked up and transferred to Guantanamo and subject to interrogations that critics have repeatedly deemed to be pointless in terms of intelligence value. Whether these detainees remain at Guantanamo is an open question.

And then, a paragraph later:

For years, we have heard that strategic interrogation of detainees at Guantanamo was worthless, that the information is (at best) stale and almost certainly of dubious reliability. The most strident call such interrogations illegal.

So, yes. Torture led to the intel that led to the bullets that killed Osama bin Laden.

Then there's Salena Zito, columnist at the Scaife-owned Tribune-Review:

Commandos killed bin Laden in a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that began with the intelligence community identifying his courier last year and tracking his movements in the months leading up to Sunday.

In the past decade, critics assailed the CIA for not connecting the dots before the 9/11 terror attacks, for failing to capture bin Laden and for using enhanced interrogation techniques.

Remember, the "enhanced interrogation" was water boarding. Though Zito is unsure what connection there is between Abbottabad and waterboarding:

It is unclear whether interrogations played a role in identifying the bin Laden courier whose trail led to the terror leader's door.

Then there's the Scaife-owned Newsmax, interviewing none other than Don Rumsfeld himself:

Asked if harsh interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay played a role in obtaining intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts, Rumsfeld declares: “First of all, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay. That’s a myth that’s been perpetrated around the country by critics.

“The United States Department of Defense did not do waterboarding for interrogation purposes to anyone. It is true that some information that came from normal interrogation approaches at Guantanamo did lead to information that was beneficial in this instance. But it was not harsh treatment and it was not waterboarding.”

So which is it? Waterboarding led to Abbottabad or didn't it? They really should get their stories straight.

Waterboarding's still illegal, though.

Oh. My. God.

David Horowitz is such a liar.

First, who's David Horowitz?

Take a look at this from today's Trib:

Write a book about leftist billionaire George Soros? Been there, done that for David Horowitz. But he's revisiting the topic in a form whose time he thinks has come again -- a pamphlet.

The onetime radical who became a conservative firebrand and founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Students for Academic Freedom wrote "The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party" (Thomas Nelson) with Richard Poe. A best-seller in 2006, the book drew renewed attention this fall when Glenn Beck featured it on TV.

Now, Horowitz is at work on the pamphlet "George Soros: Puppet Master of the Obama Regime," soon to be available through FrontPage Magazine's website (frontpagemag.com).

We'll get to it in a minute, but remember these four words:

David Horowitz Freedom Center

And this is what he said in a recent interview with Richard Mellon Scaife's Trib:

First, there is no George Soros of the right. There just is not. What Soros has done is he's put together a radical coalition of billionaires, communists of the ACORN variety -- ACORN is part of this coalition -- and has inserted it into a brain center of the Democratic Party, the Center for American Progress, and he's understood that politics is not what happens every two years, which is what Republicans think; politics is trench warfare that goes on every day, every week, and then, at the end, when the election cycle comes around, all the people who've been recruited by the left through this trench warfare will then vote for the Democratic Party.

No George Soros of the right?

Let's look at who funds the David Horowitz Freedom Center, then. According to Mediamatters:

• The Allegheny Foundation gave a cool $1 million to the David Horowitz Freedom Center between 2000 and 2009.
• The Carthage Foundation gave a neat $625,000 to the David Horowitz Freedom Center between 1993 and 2003
• The Sarah Scaife Foundation gave a hefty $5.55 million to the David Horowitz Freedom Center between 1989 and 2009 (including $25,000 in "start up funds" in '89)

By my count, that's $7.175 million all from foundations controlled by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

I normally don't include the Scaife Family Foundation in my blog postings about the Trib circle jerk, as Richard Mellon Scaife reportedly hasn't controlled that foundation since 2001. With that caveat, it should be noted that:

• The Scaife Family Foundation gave a cute $1.15 million to the David Horowitz Freedom Center between 1993 and 2001 (the year Richard Mellon Scaife gave up control of the foundation - there have been no grants since)

If you include those grants, then we're up to $8.325 million.

And not one of those eight million plus dollars made it into Horowitz' rant about how there is "no Soros of the right."

Horowitz said Soros talked about how Soros formed a coalition of billionaires and communists and inserted it into the Center for American Progress. Change a few details and you have Scaife's funding of the "brain center" of the Republican party, the Heritage Foundation.

Setting aside the rightwing paranoia about George Soros, to declare that there's "No Soros of the right" is simply a lie.

What Must My Friend Scaife Think?

From thinkprogress:

The hard-right Heritage Foundation, one of the pillars of the conservative movement, made defeating START one of its top institutional priorities. Yet 13 Republican Senators ended up bucking Heritage and voted to ratify the START treaty. Heritage ended up so far to the right that it was unable to convince any significant number of Republicans to follow its nonsensical substantive attack on START that the treaty would lead to massive nuclear proliferation and eventually to a nuclear war.

Heritage fellows held event after event, wrote article after article, report after report, blog post after blog post, attacking the treaty.

And then:

Yet despite all this effort, a quarter of the Republican caucus bucked Heritage’s advocacy campaign and its lobbying efforts to support the treaty. As the facts came out and it became increasingly clear that none of their anti-treaty arguments held any water, Republicans increasingly relied on process complaints to oppose the treaty, rather than substance. In the end, few Senators, with the exception of Jim DeMint, really embraced the Heritage line. The pressure they exerted on Republican members was in the end outdone by the coalition of progressive groups that pressed to ratify the treaty.

Let's not forget the closely intertwined political and financial relationship between Heritage and the Tribune-Review's owner, Richard Mellon Scaife.

So how was START treated in the fine pages of the Trib?

As you'd expect. December 21:

Harry Reid sure has a warped sense of Christmas gifts.

If the Democrat Senate majority leader gets his way today, the upper chamber will vote to end debate on the abomination known as New START -- a successor nuclear arms treaty with Russia -- and then, likely on Thursday, vote to saddle the United States with a hand-tying, national-security-threatening "deal."

It's this simple, as stated by Reagan administration Defense official Richard Perle and Heritage Foundation defense scholar Kim Holmes: "(A)rms-control treaties should serve our security interests now and in the longer term. New START does neither."

Yea, that's this Richard Perle:

Perle contended before the invasion that the US could topple Saddam without a sizable military effort. On PBS, he said, "I would be surprised if we need anything like the 200,000 [troops] figure that is sometimes discussed in the press. A much smaller force, principally special operations forces, but backed up by some regular units, should be sufficient." And in May 2002, he told me, "The Army guys don't know anything" about the number of troops necessary for success in Iraq. Perle said that only 40,000 soldiers would be required. After the war, it was clear that the 200,000 or so troops deployed by the Bush-Cheney administration was not a large enough force for the mission.

David Corn in the above piece also reminds us that despite what Perle asserted, Iraq was not "on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons."

So he's not much of an expert on nuclear arms (obviously) so tell me again why he's so nobly quoted by the Trib?

How The Right Wing Noise Machine Works

I guess this may have to be an ongoing series.

It's long been known that Richard Mellon Scaife has funded large swaths of the right wing media - from the Heritage Foundation to his ownership of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He funds the think tanks and then his paper reports on what those think tanks say - and all with no mention whatsoever about the Scaife money funding both sides.

A few days ago, it was about Ilya Somin. Today, it's about Paul Kengor:

Paul Kengor's new book, "DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century," is a masterful history of how many progressives have unwittingly aided some of America's most dangerous adversaries. However, history is a process and the same dynamic is at work today among our most powerful leaders. Fortunately, we now have an active universe of commentators and media outlets that seek to inform and educate us about the perils we now face with power in the hands of modern-day "dupes."

So who's this "Paul Kengor? He actually had a piece in the Trib recently. It was on Juan Williams and touched on NPR's "hypocrisy" for not firing Nina Totenberg "for wishing AIDS upon the family of the late Jesse Helms." (Actually the piece is a reprint from The American Thinker - where the author of the piece, Ed Lasky, is the news editor.  Small world, huh?)

From this blog post we learn some context of Totenberg's "wish."  It was from 1995 and Helms was at that point holding up the reauthorization of the Ryan White Act because he was disgusted by the image of men having anal sex.  How much more human suffering would have happened had he succeeded in stopping the reauthorization?  Totenberg catches flack for her rather inartful statement but Kegnor is silent on the disgusting Helms himself and the pain and death the Senator from South Carolina was himself wishing on a lot of other human beings.

Interesting.

Back to Paul Kengor and the right wing noise machine.

If you do just a little digging, you'll find the connections.  For instance Kengor is on the "Board of Advisors" of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.  About 87% of that institute's funding comes from none other than Richard Mellon Scaife.

The book itself is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.  And what's the ISI?  According to the mediamatters.org:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) is an educational organization based in Delaware. Founded in 1953, ISI strives to educate for liberty and promote a set of principles deemed the principles of freedom. These principles include limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, rule of law, free market economy, and Judeo-Christian moral norms.

The ISI has received about $10.4 million over the last 25 years or so from the foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife.

Media Matters has more:

ISI sponsors the Collegiate Network, an organization that supports right-leaning publications on many prestigious college campuses. The organization also has its own publishing imprint, ISI Books, which has published the work of more conservative authors like William F. Buckley, Michael Barone, and L. Brent Bozell. The organization is chaired by Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., who is also president of the Heritage Foundation. Major donors include the Castle Rock, Carthage Scaife, Olin, and Bradley Foundations. [emphasis added.]

Again, small world, huh?  Paul Kengor, advisee to the Scaife-funded Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, has a book published by the Scaife-funded Intercollegiate Studies Institute and now he's getting some free publicity for the book on the pages of the Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

There's some more minor stuff here, as well.  Ed Feulner, president of the Scaife-funded Heritage Foundation has a weekly column at the Scaife-owned Tribune-Review and is the former chairman of also Scaife-funded ISI, the institute that published Kengor's book.

Which makes me wonder, would any of this have happened without Richard Mellon Scaife's philanthropic largess?

I dare say, very little.

This is how the right wing media noise machine works.

The circle-jerk continues.