Le montage O’Hanlon-Pollack mis à jour et aisément mis en pièces

On sait que la récente relance à Washington de l’hypothèse “la guerre en Irakl est gagnable”, ou encore “le ‘surge’ lancé en janvier par GW Bush marche du tonnerre”, est essentiellement due à un article des experts O’Hanlon et Pollack dans le New York Times du 30 juillet (voir notre F&C du 8 août). Une très longue analyse de Glenn Greenwald dans Salon.com du 12 août fait définitive et prompte justice de cette affaire, — notamment à partir d’une longue interview de O’Hanlon où l’expert admet en toute candeur et sans la mmoindre réticence avoir été complètement manipulé par les officiels du DoD.

Il apparaît que les deux hommes, présentés comme des “critiques de la guerre” admettant brusquement que la guerre tournait à l’avantage des USA, ont en réalité été constamment partisans de la guerre. O'Hanlon détaille largement ses prises de position dans ce sens. Pollack apparaît comme faisant partie du “Saban Center for Middle-Eazst Studies”, ainsi décrit par Greenwald : «The above-the-political-fray Pollack is employed by the “Saban Center for Middle East Studies” at Brookings — so named because it is funded with many millions of dollars by billionaire Haim Saban, an Israeli-American neoconservative who was a 2004 supporter of George Bush, was a close associate of Ariel Sharon, and spent the 1990s persuading Bill Clinton (with millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic Party) to be more supportive of Israel.»

La visite d’une semaine qui s’est déroulée en Irak fut sollicitée auprès du Pentagone, organisée, contrôlée, dirigée de bout en bout par le Pentagone, selon des itinéraires minutieusement préparés par les services de relations publiques du même Pentagone, pour des rencontres également préparées avec des personnages également sélectionnés avec soin par ces mêmes services : «But the far greater deceit involves the trip itself and the way it was represented — both by Pollack/O'Hanlon as well as the excited media figures who touted its significance and meaning. From beginning to end, this trip was planned, shaped and controlled by the U.S. military — a fact inexcusably concealed in both the Op-Ed itself and virtually every interview the two of them gave. With very few exceptions, what they saw was choreographed by the U.S. military and carefully selected for them.»

L’article ayant eu l’écho considérable qu’on sait, personne ne s’intéressa vraiment de connaître la façon dont il avait été organisé et si O’Hanlon-Pollack étaient vraiment adersaires ou non de la guerre. Concernant l’organisaton, un seul journaliste, Wolf Blitzer de CNN, posa une question sur cet aspect de la visite (le 3 août).

«Blitzer: Was this part, though, of a U.S. military tour, if you will, that they took you around, you were escorted from location to location to location and they were the ones that took you to specific places? Or did you have the freedom to say I want to go here, I want to go there? Who organized, in other words, the stopovers, the visits that you were having?

»Pollack: It was — largely this was — it was largely organized by the military. We felt that was important because right now the big story is the military story.»

A part cela, aucun mot sur cette question. La façon dont l’article et ses auteurs furent examinés, interrogés, décortiqués, etc., relève d’un cas extraordinaire d’auto-censure et de l'acceptaton enthousiaste et complice d’un montage grossier par tout l’establihment d’information et de la politique à Washington. La complicité est absolument évidente, alors qu’une simple interview de O’Hanlon avec des questions normalement investigatrices aboutissent à la mise en évidence du montage.

Greenwald termine de cette façon son enquête:

«O'Hanlon and Pollack appeared on at least 10 major television news programs. Other than Blitzer, no interviewer even raised the issue of whether they were overly-dependent on the U.S. military for their information, none probed the basis for their claims, and Pollack and O'Hanlon never once even alluded to the questionable nature of what they had been shown (even though O'Hanlon “apologized” for not disclosing it in the Op-Ed when I pressed him on it). And from what I reviewed, not a single one ever identified either of them as having been pro-war and pro-Surge, and they themselves never bothered to mention that as they were hailed as hard-nosed “critics” of the administration — thus helpfully preserving the dramatic television storyline that “harsh critic of the Bush administration” went to Iraq and found Great Progress.

»These interviewers just all stood by, excited and oozing enthusiasm, as Pollack and O'Hanlon lavished tales on the country of the grand and glorious progress we are finally making in Iraq. The host on the very-very-liberal NPR began the Pollack interview by gushing: “If you've been searching the papers for good news from Iraq, we found a little on the Op-Ed pages!” Vapid, mindless and absurd.

»After all this time, and everything that has happened under the Bush presidency, nothing has changed. Michael Gordon and the NYT continue to publish one war-fueling story after the next on its front page based on nothing other than the unverified claims of government and military officials. Our “journalists” do not have even an iota of instinct to question or probe anything they hear from our war-mongering Serious Experts and Serious Political Leaders.

»And the Foreign Policy Community is led by highly revered propagandists whose “scholarship” violates the most basic and obvious principles of research and disclosure — all in the service of prolonging still further a war for which they bear profound responsibility. This, in turn, is driven by the overarching and self-absorbed fear that they will be forced to acknowledge their own wrongdoing and culpability. And thus we will remain occupying and waging war in Iraq, through the end of the Bush presidency and beyond.»

Mis en ligne le 14 août 2007 à 06H56