ГУЛаг Палестины

      Face of Freedom, it is evident that the story was false, my speculation being again
      that it advanced Israeli interests.
      North American News May be Particularly Susceptible to Corruption. We have
      three reasons for suspecting this, two of them coming from Reid's Washington Post
      article below: (i) Reid describes London journalism as "furiously competitive" where "a
      dozen newspapers and four TV networks regularly investigate - and savage - one
      another's reporting" and contrasts this with the United States where "newspapers and TV
      networks generally don't go on the attack against the other guy's story." (ii) The
      British government's Independent Commission requires TV news to demonstrate "a respect
      for truth," whereas in the United States, the accuracy of news reporting is not subject
      to any official review. (iii) We see Israel Shahak repeatedly offering the observation
      that North American news shows a unique degree of submission to Jewish control, as for
      example in the following statement:
      The bulk of the organized US Jewish community is totalitarian,
      chauvinistic and militaristic in its views. This fact remains
      unnoticed by other Americans due to its control of the media, but is
      apparent to some Israeli Jews. As long as organized US Jewry remained
      united, its control over the media and its political power remained
      unchallenged. (Israel Shahak, Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and
      Foreign Policies, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1997, p. 139).
      CBS News Does Not Investigate Itself. Although an admission from 60 Minutes seems
      imminent that its story of The Mule was fraudulent, CBS did not discover this fraud,
      and is not undertaking any investigation of its own. Rather, there appear to be a
      "series of investigations," possibly all British, including one by Carlton Television
      which originally financed and broadcast the documentary, and including a study by the
      British government. One may hypothesize, then, that CBS does not place high priority
      on the acknowledgement and correction of its own errors, and that it will do so only
      when forced to by public disclosure of these errors by some other agency. For this
      reason, the acknowledgement by 60 Minutes that its story The Mule was entirely
      fraudulent cannot be taken as offering hope that CBS is any closer to acknowledging
      that its story The Ugly Face of Freedom was entirely fraudulent.
      American Competence Gap? Mention has often been made in the Ukrainian Archive
      of the existence of competence gaps as these relate to brain drains and gains. The
      observation of a startling degree of credulity in the highest levels of the American
      Press constitutes one such competence gap, although in this case it is not a gap that
      leads to any brain theft from other nations, as the gap is largely hidden from the
      American public. Perhaps the American public has its own competence gap - one in which
      the people watching the news are as blind to incongruities as the people who are
      broadcasting it.
      Below are excerpts only. The complete Washington Post article is purchasable online
      from the Washington Post by anyone who cares to first set up an account with the
      Washington Post.
      Acclaimed Expose Questioned as Hoax
      British Drug Documentary Was Featured on "60 Minutes"
      By T.R. Reid
      Washington Post Foreign Service
      Saturday, May 9, 1998; Page A01
      LONDON, May 8 - That powerful expose on "60 Minutes" last summer about Colombian drug
      runners was [...] quite possibly, false.
      After a lengthy investigation, London's Guardian newspaper has charged that the
      award-winning documentary "The Connection" [...] was essentially fiction.
      The program featured dramatic footage of a drug "mule" said to be smuggling several
      million dollars' worth of heroin to London for Colombia's Cali drug cartel. The
      Guardian reported, though, that the "mule" actually carried no drugs, that his trip to
      London was paid for by the documentary's producers, and that many of the report's
      dramatic moments were faked.
      [...]
      When the report was shown on "60 Minutes," CBS reporter Steve Kroft said that the mule
      had "no problem" slipping past British customs with the heroin in his stomach.
      "Another pound of heroin was on the British streets," the "60 Minutes" report said.
      But the Guardian, which says it found the "mule," reports that he actually swallowed
      Certs mints, not drugs. It says the flight to London took place six months later, and
      was paid for by the filmmaker. And it says the "mule" was actually turned back at
      Heathrow because he had a counterfeit passport, and thus never entered Britain.
      [...]
      The documentary included a highly dramatized segment in which reporters under armed
      guard were taken to a remote location for an interview with a figure described as a
      high-ranking member of the Cali drug cartel. "60 Minutes" reported de Beaufort had to
      travel blindfolded for two days by car to reach the scene of this secret rendezvous.
      The Guardian [...] said the secret location was actually the producer's hotel room in
      Colombia.
      [...]
      The British government's watchdog group, the Independent Television Commission, has
      launched a study of its own. Unlike the United States, where government has no power
      to police the content of news reporting, there are official regulations here requiring
      that TV news demonstrate "a respect for truth."
      CBS has not undertaken an investigation of its own, but will report to its viewers on
      the results of the British investigations [...].
      HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1254 hits since 20Oct98
      Buzz Bissinger Vanity Fair Sep 1998 Old Liars, young liar
      Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories - in a
      breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern
      journalism.
      The topic of lying in the media is of central importance on the Ukrainian Archive
      because of the frequency with which the media uses the opportunity of reporting on
      the Slavic world in general, and on Ukraine in particular, to instead calumniate
      them. Three prominent examples are Jerzy Kosinski's career as Jewish-Holocaust
      fabulist and Grand Calumniator of Poland, TIME magazine's wallowing girl photograph
      of 22Feb93, and Morley Safer's 60 Minutes story The Ugly Face of Freedom, broadcast
      over the CBS network on 23Oct94.
      From such examples as the above, however, it is difficult to estimate the prevalence
      of misinformation and disinformation in the media. It may be the case that
      distortion and calumniation are limited to a few topics such as the Slavic world or
      Ukraine, and that otherwise the media are responsible, professional, and accurate.
      The value of studying the case of Stephen Glass, however, is that it suggests
      otherwise - that perhaps the media operate under next to no oversight, that they are
      rarely held accountable, and that only egregious lying over a protracted interval
      eventually risks discovery and exposure. Had Stephen Glass been just a little less
      of a liar, had he more often tempered his lies, more often redirected them from the
      powerful to the powerless, he would today not only still be working as a reporter,
      but winning prizes. Thus, the example of Stephen Glass serves to demonstrate the
      viability of the hypothesis that misinformation and disinformation in the media is
      widespread, and that the three examples mentioned above, and the many more documented
      throughout the Ukrainian Archive, may not be exceptional deviations at all, but
      rather the tip of an iceberg in an industry which is largely unregulated, which is
      largely lacking internal mechanisms of quality control, which is responsive not to
      truth, but to the dictates of ruling forces.
      Another question which may be asked is whether Stephen Glass is the product of some
      sub-culture which condones or encourages lying, or which even offers training in
      lying.
      The following excerpts, then, are from Buzz Bissinger, Shattered Glass, Vanity Fair,
      September, 1998, pp. 176-190. The quoted portions are in gray boxes; the headings in
      navy blue, however, have been introduced in the UKAR posting, and were not in the
      original. I now present to you Stephen Glass largely on the possibility that our new
      understanding of Stephen Glass will deepen our existing understanding of other
      record-breaking, media-manipulating liars that have been featured on the Ukrainian
      Archive, ones such as Yaakov Bleich, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon
      Wiesenthal.
      One precondition of exceptional lying may be an intellectual mediocrity which puts a
      low ceiling on the success that can be achieved through licit means. Thus, Stephen
      Glass, although performing well in high school, began to perform poorly in University,
      and when he began work as a reporter, was discovered to not know how to write:
      Glass began his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990 on a pre-medical
      curriculum. According to various accounts, he held his own at the beginning. But
      then his grades nose-dived. He apparently flunked one course and barely passed
      another, suggesting that he had simply lost interest in being on a pre-med track,
      or had done poorly on purpose to shut the door to any future career in medicine.
      Glass ultimately majored in anthropology. He reportedly did well in this area of
      study, but given his inconsistent performance in pre-med courses, his overall
      grade-point average at Penn was hardly distinguished - slightly less than a B.
      "His shit wasn't always as together as everyone thought it was," said Matthew
      Klein, who roomed with Glass at Penn when he was a senior and Glass a junior.
      There were indicators to Klein that Glass was not doing particularly well
      academically, but Glass never acknowledged it. "He always said he was doing fine,
      doing fine," said Klein. (pp. 185-186)
      Those familiar with his early work said he struggled with his writing. His
      original drafts were rough, the prose clunky and imprecise. (p. 186)
      A second precondition of exceptional lying may be growing up in a subculture which
      encourages lying, or merely condones it, or at least does not actively work to
      suppress it. The Bissinger article offers us next to no information on this topic, except
      for the following brief statement:
      Harvard educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot spent a good deal of time at Highland
      Park High School researching her 1983 book, The Good High School: Portraits of
      Character and Culture. She was impressed with the school's stunning academic
      programs but noted that values such as character and morality were sometimes
      little more than brushstrokes against the relentlessness of achievement. (p. 185)
      The first steps on the path to high achievement in lying will, of course, be timid and
      cautious, but when the lack of repercussions is discovered, will become bolder:
      At first the made-up parts were relatively small. Fictional details were
      melded with mostly factual stories. Quotes and vignettes were constructed to add
      the edge Kelly seemed to adore. But in the March 31, 1997, issue of The New
      Republic, Glass raised the stakes with a report about the Conservative Political
      Action Conference. Eight young men, Glass claimed, men with names such as Jason
      and Michael, were drinking beer and smoking pot. They went looking for "the
      ugliest and loneliest" woman they could find, lured her to their hotel room, and
      sexually humiliated her. The piece, almost entirely an invention, was spoken of
      with reverence. Subsequent to it, Glass's work began to appear in George, Rolling
      Stone, and Harper's.
      But challenges to Glass's veracity followed. David A. Keene, chairman of the
      American Conservative Union, called Glass "quite a fiction writer" and noted that
      the description of the Omni Shoreham room littered with empty bottles from the
      mini-bar had a problem. There were no mini-bars in any of the Omni's rooms. (p.
      189)
      The young liar next discovers, to his amazement, that the exposure, scandal, and
      punishment that he feared do not materialize. Questions concerning the veracity of
      his work can simply be brushed aside. The chief consequence of his lying is dizzying
      success:
      At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation's
      capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from The New Republic
      to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up - sources, quotes, whole stories
      - in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in
      modern journalism. (p. 176)
      Because this, after all, was Stephen Glass, the compelling wunderkind who had
      seeped inside the skins of editors not only at The New Republic but also at
      Harper's, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones.
      This was the Stephen Glass who had so many different writing contracts that his
      income this year might well have reached $150,000 (including his $45,000 New
      Republic salary). This was the Stephen Glass whose stories had attracted the
      attention not just of Random House - his agent was trying to score a book deal
      but of several screenwriters. (p. 180)
      There arrives a time when the young liar begins to feel himself invincible. He finds
      that no matter how big his lie, he is not exposed, and he extrapolates to imagine that
      he leads a charmed life and that his good fortune will continue forever. In view of his
      perceived impunity, he sees no need to moderate lying, and so he escalates it:
      Stephen Glass rode the fast curve of instant ordainment that encircles the
      celebrity age of the 90s; his reputation in the incestuous world of Washington
      magazine journalism exploded so exponentially after a few of his better-than-true
      stories that he could basically write anything and get away with it, regardless of
      the fact that his reporting almost always uncovered the near incredible and was
      laden with shoddy sourcing. His reports described events which occurred at
      nebulous locations, and included quotes from idiosyncratic characters (with no
      last names mentioned) whose language suggested the street poetry of Kerouac and
      the psychological acuity of Freud. He had an odd, prurient eye for a
      department-store Santa with an erection and evangelists who liked getting naked in
      the woods. And nobody called his bluff. What finally brought Stephen Glass down
      was himself.
      He kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his performance, going
      beyond his production of fake notes, a fake Web site, a fake business card, and
      memos by pulling his own brother into his fading act for a guest appearance.
      Clearly, he would have done anything to save himself.
      "He wanted desperately to save his ass at the expense of anything," said
      Chuck Lane. "He would have destroyed the magazine."
      The saga of Stephen Glass is wrenching, shameful, and sad. His actions are
      both destructive and self-destructive, and if there is an explanation for them,
      his family has chosen not to offer it. Repeated attempts to interview Stephen
      were rebuffed, and all his father, Jeffrey Glass, said in a phone conversation was
      this: "There's a lot unsaid. You can do whatever you want to do. There's no
      comment." (p. 182)
      But the result of such a course, at least in some perhaps rare cases, is discovery and
      discredit:
      Nothing in Charles Lane's 15 years of journalism, not the bitter blood of
      Latin America, nor war in Bosnia, nor the difficult early days of his editorship
      of the fractious New Republic, could compare with this surreal episode. On the
      second Friday in May in the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in the Maryland suburb of
      Bethesda, near Washington, nothing less than the most sustained fraud in the
      history of modern journalism was unraveling.
      No one in Lane's experience, no one, had affected him in the eerie manner of
      Stephen Glass, a 25-year-old associate editor at The New Republic and a white-hot
      rising star in Washington journalism. It wasn't just the relentlessness of the
      young reporter. Or the utter conviction with which Glass had presented work that
      Lane now feared was completely fabricated. It was the ingenuity of the con, the
      daring with which Glass had concocted his attention-getting creations, the subtle
      ease with which even now, as he attempted to clear himself, the strangely gifted
      kid created an impromptu illusion using makeshift details he had spied in the
      lobby just seconds earlier - a chair, a cocktail table, smoke from a cigarette.
      (p. 176)
      The New Republic, after an investigation involving a substantial portion of its
      editorial staff, would ultimately acknowledge fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined
      pieces that Glass had written for the magazine in the two-and-a-half-year period
      between December 1995 and May 1998. In Manhattan, John F. Kennedy Jr., editor of
      George, would write a personal letter to Vernon Jordan apologizing for Glass's
      conjuring up two sources who had made juicy and emphatic remarks about the sexual
      proclivities of the presidential adviser and his boss. At Harper's, Glass would
      be dismissed from his contract after a story he had written about phone psychics,
      which contained 13 first-name sources, could not be verified. (p. 180)
      Post-mortems of how so much lying had succeeded in entering the media paint an
      image of a cunning malefactor eluding stringent quality-control mechanisms.
      However, perhaps it is the case that such post-mortems serve to delude the public
      into imagining that Stephen Glass is a rare aberration, and not the tip of an iceberg.
      Perhaps the reality is that right from the beginning any intelligent and critical superior
      could have seen - had he wanted to - that Stephen Glass was a simple and
      palpable fraud, and not the cunning genius depicted below:
      For those two and a half years, the Stephen Glass show played to a captivated
      audience; then the curtain abruptly fell. He got away with his mind games because
      of the remarkable industry he applied to the production of the false backup
      materials which he methodically used to deceive legions of editors and fact
      checkers. Glass created fake letterheads, memos, faxes, and phone numbers; he
      presented fake handwritten notes, fake typed notes from imaginary events written
      with intentional misspellings, fake diagrams of who sat where at meetings that
      never transpired, fake voice mails from fake sources. He even inserted fake
      mistakes into his fake stories so fact checkers would catch them and feel as if
      they were doing their jobs. He wasn't, obviously, too lazy to report. He
      apparently wanted to present something better, more colorful and provocative, than
      mere truth offered. (p. 180)
      HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES 1017 hits since 9Dec98
      Jeffrey Goldberg Globe and Mail 6Feb93 Fabricating history
      Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
      761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
      most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the
      three men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
      McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
      761st."
      The Globe and Mail, Saturday, February 6, 1993, D2.
      FILM FRAUD
      The liberation
      that wasn't
      A PBS DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS A BLACK U.S. ARMY UNIT
      FREED JEWISH INMATES FROM GERMAN CONCENTRATION
      CAMPS. NICE STORY, BUT NOT TRUE, SAY THE SOLDIERS
      BY JEFFREY GOLDBERG
      THE NEW REPUBLIC
      NEW YORK
      It was a rare moment: Rev. Jesse Jackson, surrounded by white-haired Holocaust
      survivors, embracing Leib Glanz, a bearded Hasidic rabbi, on the stage of the
      Apollo Theater in Harlem. The occasion was a black-Jewish celebration of the
      Liberators, the PBS documentary about all-black U.S. Army units that, according
      to the film, helped capture Buchenwald and Dachau. The sponsors of the
      screening, Time Warner and a host of rich and influential New Yorkers, billed
      the film as an important tool in the rebuilding of a black-Jewish alliance.
      But the display of brotherhood turned out to be illusory. The next night
      Rabbi Glanz was nearly chased out of synagogue by angry Hasidim for the
      transgression of consorting with Mr. Jackson. More significantly, the film's
      backers and the press failed to point out that the unit featured most
      prominently in the Liberators had no hand in the capture of either Dachau or
      Buchenwald in Germany. "It's a lie. We were nowhere near these camps when
      they were liberated," says E. G. McConnell, an original member of the 761st
      Tank Battalion. He says he co-operated with the filmmakers until he came to
      believe they were faking material.
      Mr. McConnell, along with a Buchenwald survivor and a second member of the
      761st, was flown to the camp in 1991 to film what turned out to be one of the
      most moving - and most fraudulent - scenes of the documentary. As the three
      men tour the site, the narrator speaks of their "return" to the camp. Mr.
      McConnell now says: "I first went to Buchenwald in 1991 with PBS, not the
      761st."
      'It's totally inaccurate.
      The men couldn't have been
      where they say they were
      because the camp was 60
      miles away from where we
      were on the day of liberation'
      Nina Rosenblum, who co-produced the film with Bill Miles in association
      with WNET, New York's public television station, admits that the narration of
      the scene "may be misleading." But she says Mr. McConnell can't be trusted.
      "You can't speak to him because he's snapped. He was hit on the head with
      shrapnel and was severely brain-damaged." Mr. McConnell, a retired mechanic
      fro Trans World Airlines Inc., laughs when told of the statement. "If I was so
      disturbed, why did they use me in the film?" he asks.
      His claim is supported by a host of veterans of the 761st, including the
      battalion's commander, the president of its veterans' association, two
      sergeants and two company commanders, among them the black commander of C
      Company.
      Two of the company's soldiers assert in the film that they liberated
      Dachau. Yet a statement issued by historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
      Museum states they could find no evidence that the 761st Battalion helped free
      either camp.
      "It's totally inaccurate," says Charles Gates, the former captain who
      commanded C Company. "The men couldn't have been where they say they were
      because the camp was 60 miles away from where we were on the day of
      liberation."
      Paul Bates, the colonel who commanded the battalion, confirmed Mr. Gates's
      account. "In our after-action reports, there is no indication that we were
      near either one of the camps," Mr. Bates says. According to him, tanks of the
      761st were assigned to the 71st Infantry Division, whose fighting path across
      Germany was 100 to 160 kilometres away from the two camps. "The 71st does not
      claim to have liberated those camps," he says.
      Several Holocaust survivors are quoted in the film and in the companion
      book published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as saying they were liberated by
      blacks of these units. But Christopher Ruddy, a New York writer who has
      conducted extensive research on the film, says two of the survivors featured in
      the Liberators told him they were no longer sure when they first saw black
      soldiers.
      One of the survivors who appeared with Mr. Jackson at the Apollo confirmed
      that he too was unsure of what had happened at Buchenwald. "It's hard to say.
      I know there were black soldiers in the camp, but I don't know when exactly,"
      says the survivor.
      Ms. Rosenblum angrily denounces the film's critics as Holocaust
      revisionists and racists. "These people are of the same mentality that says
      the Holocaust didn't happen," she says. In the course of a telephone
      interview, she declares: "There's tremendous racism in the Jewish community.
      How people who have been through the Holocaust can be racist is completely
      incomprehensible. To think that black people are less, which is what most
      Jewish people think, I can't understand it."
      She adds that racism of the type exhibited by the film's critics is what
      kept all-black combat units from receiving proper recognition in the first
      place. "The 761st fought for 33 years to get the Presidential Unit Citation.
      People don't want the truth of our history to come out," she says. WNET says
      it stands by the film's veracity.
      The Liberators' focus on events that appear never to have occurred seems
      all the more perplexing considering the true achievements of the 761st. Among
      other accomplishments, it played an important role in the liberation of
      Gunskirchen, a satellite of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, and
      its performance at the Battle of the Bulge was exemplary.
      The documentary approaches accuracy, the veterans say, when it focuses on
      the unit's heroic battles both against Germans and discrimination in its own
      Army. But the unit citation eventually awarded to the veterans by president
      Jimmy Carter does not list the liberation of either Buchenwald or Dachau as an
      achievement of the unit.
      "It's no great accomplishment to liberate a concentration camp, not
      compared to fighting the German army," says Philip Latimer, president of the
      761st veterans' organization. "What we're concerned about is our combat
      performance. The unit has a lot to be proud of ... and I don't want to see it
      blamed for this documentary. I don't want the unit to be hurt."
      Questions have also been raised about the 183rd Combat Engineer Battalion,
      which the filmmakers say played a role in the liberation of Buchenwald. The
      unit's commander at the time, Lawrence Fuller, a former deputy director of the
      Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 183rd only visited Buchenwald after its
      liberation, when General George Patton ordered units in the sector to see proof
      of German atrocities. Mr. Fuller says the documentary's producers never
      contacted him to discuss the unit's history.
      Leon Bass, a retired school principal who served in the 183rd, calls
      himself a liberator in the film and in the frequent lectures he gives on the
      Holocaust. But Mr. Bass says he does not remember exactly when he entered the
      camp. "I don't know whether we were first or second ... We didn't go in with
      guns blazing," he recalls. "There was just a handful of us. I was only there
      for two or three hours. The rest of the company came later."
      The Liberators, fuelled by the public-relations success at the Apollo, is
      gaining momentum. The Rainbow Coalition is sponsoring a similar gala in Los
      Angeles in March. Ms. Rosenblum tells of a packed calendar of showings with
      co-sponsors ranging from the Simon Wiesenthal Center to the American Jewish
      Committee.
      Copies of the documentary will be distributed to all New York City junior
      and senior high schools, according to board spokeswoman Linda Scott. The cost
      of the schools project, Mr. Rosenblum says, is being picked up by Elizabeth
      Rohatyn, the wife of investment banker Felix Rohatyn, who co-sponsored the
      Apollo showing, although Ms. Scott says that several philanthropists are vying
      for the honour of buying the tapes for the schools.
      According to a memorandum on the documentary circulating at school-board
      headquarters, the film will be used to "examine the effects of racism on
      African-American soldiers and on Jews who were in concentration camps ... to
      explain the role of African-American soldiers in liberating Jews from Nazi
      concentration camps and to reveal the involvement of Jews as 'soldiers' in the
      civil-rights movement."
      The documentary continues to be supported by a number of influential Jews.