Newsweek Assault Is A Government Coverup

By James Donahue

May 2005

We have never seen so much cowering among writers and editors of major news outlets as is now going on in the United States mostly due to assaults by the Bush public relations people.

You wouldn’t think an illiterate little squirt like George W. Bush would have enough political clout to force somebody as influential as former CBS News anchorman Dan Rather into early retirement.

And how are the Washington numbskulls managing to get the editors of Newsweek Magazine to retract a story, make public apologies, and take the abuse they are getting this week over a report that many believe might just be true.

Actually, Bush isn’t the brains behind the media smear campaign going on in the country just now. We believe it probably is the real boss behind the president, Bush Advisor Karl Rove. Rove is a brilliant but dirty player who specializes in dirty tricks. And, as usual, there is method in his trickery.

There is no doubt in my mind that Rove was behind the “leaked” tidbit of false information about President Bush’s National Guard days that got dangled like a tasty carrot in front of Rather’s nose during those key pre-election weeks. Rather, a known opponent of the Bush Administration’s policies, took the bait and got caught in a clever snare that cost him his career and his reputation.

The snippet of a story in a recent issue of Newsweek, about guards at Guantanamo Bay POW camp tossing a copy of the Quran, the Moslem sacred book, into a toilet, should not have been enough to touch off deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Yet from all of the media hype and statements coming out of Washington, and the editorial decision to cave in and apologize, it appears that the magazine is going down in flames over the story.

Is Rove behind this strange twisted saga as well? Has he found a way to take the heat off the Bush Administration for the REAL reason the Afghanistan people are rioting?

You haven’t heard this story in the American news, but if you do your research on the web, you will learn from mostly foreign news stories that US forces are threatening and may have even destroyed this year’s poppy crop in Afghanistan.

The poppy crop, as we all know, is the source of the opiate drugs and narcotics. An estimated 80 percent of the poppies grown come from this region of the world.

The United States, in its ongoing war on drugs, wants to destroy this major source of income for the Afghanistan people, most of whom are farmers. The opiates also are a drug commonly used among the people. Consequently the Afghans are very conscious of the U.S. soldiers occupying their territory. As the threats to their crop get louder, the more the anti-American sentiment builds. Our presence there threatens a way of life that has prevailed in that country for hundreds of years. They want us to get the hell out of their country.

There were reports early in the year that mysterious unmarked aircraft were flying over the farms, spraying a powder that not only killed the poppies, but other crops and made farmers and animals sick.

The United States was blamed.

Government horticulturalists are attempting to convince the Afghan farmers to grow broccoli in their fields instead.

This appears to be the real reason for the riots in the streets of Afghanistan. It has nothing to do with a Newsweek story about the desecration of a holy book. Such an act, if someone made sure it was well publicized however, would surely be fuel for an already hot fire blazing in the Moslem world.