[NYTr] Bashing Gore #2 - Alex Cockburn in Full Outrage

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[As Cockburn says, the winners of Nobel Prizes (especially the peace
prize) are such a mixed lot as to be a joke. But this is old news.
Cockburn is in full outrage here -- a bit surprising, since the
politicization of the prize is hardly new. Likening Gore to Goebbels
seems just a tad extreme.  And a bit surprising because of Cockburn's
own recent, stubborn, tedious contretemps with George Monbiot on global
warming. (Cockburn arguing against the position of scientists who
contend increased use of CO2-producing fuels is responsible.) Monbiot
quit the debate in disgust when Cockburn refused to supply any
reasonable peer-reviewed scientific references.

It's all on many sites, including Cockburn's Counterpunch and Monbiot's
own, and a bunch of others. Here's a sample from a google search:
http://tinyurl.com/ynob9d but the entire exchange is archived at ZNet
here: http://www.zmag.org/debatesglobalwarming.html

Finally in a LINK-TV special this week, Gore's co-winners of the
prize, members of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), were interviewed and gave details on how their study was
completed, and why it took so long: Every section, at every step was
peer-reviewed by an enormous panel of environmentalists, physicists,
chemists, etc. etc. And only when all items that were open to any
dispute had been resolved was the study published. It seems to be one
of the most heavily peer-reviewed, if not THE most, that any nay-sayers
still out there really should probably keep their opinions to
themselves. But here's Cockburn calling them "hucksters and falsifiers"
on telling us Gore is tantamount to the Goebbels of our time. -NYTr]

Counterpunch - Oct 13, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10132007.html

Al Gore's Peace Prize

It's as Ridiculous as If They'd Given Goebbels One in 1938

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Put this one up on the shelf of shame, right next to Henry Kissinger's,
or the peace prize they gave to Kofi Annan and the entire UN in 2001,
sandwiched between the UN's okay for the bombing of Serbia, the killing
of untold numbers of Iraqis, many of them babies and children in the
years of sanctions, and its greenlight for the bombing of Baghdad in
2003. In 1998 the Nobel crowd gave the prize to Medecins Sans
Frontieres, whose co-founder Bernard Kouchner is now France's foreign
secretary urging the bombing of Iran. Like Gore, Kouchner was a rabid
advocate of the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia and onslaughts
on Serbia.

The UN often has an inside track on the "Peace" prize. The UN
Peace-Keeping Forces got it in 1988. In 1986 another enthusiast for
attacking Iraq and Iran, Elie Wiesel, carried off the trophy. Aside
from Kissinger, probably the biggest killer of all to have got the
peace prize was Norman Borlaug, whose "green revolution" wheat strains
led to the death of peasants by the million.

When Gore goes to get the prize he shares with the pr hucksters and
falsifiers at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Gore
should be forced to march through a gauntlet of widows and orphans,
Serbs, Iraqis, Palestinians, Colombians, and other victims of the
Clinton era.

Back in Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign Gore was told to earn his
keep with constant pummeling of George Bush Sr for having been soft on
Saddam. Gore duly criss-crossed the country yoking Saddam and Bush in
fervid denunciation, his press aides passing out speeches flatteringly
footnoted with references to the work of the journalists covering his
campaign. Gore charged that Bush had given Saddam "one of those
milquetoast routines George Bush is so famous for". "The cover-up of
Bush's arming of Saddam was", Gore shouted, "bigger than Watergate ever
was." Right before the 2000 election Gore called for expansion of the
no-fly zones in Iraq and said that any Iraqi plane venturing into such
zones should be shot down.

In early January, 1993, Thomas Friedman interviewed president elect
Clinton and asked about Saddam. Clinton amiably responded, "I always
tell everybody, I'm a Baptist. I believe in deathbed conversions. If he
wants a different relationship with the US and UN, all he has to do is
change his behavior." This elicited cries of outrage from the national
security establishment, and its prime respresentative,vice
president-elect Gore, who announced that there could never be normal
relations with Iraq so long as Saddam remained in power. He reiterated
the call for a coup, if not by the Iraqi military then by the CIA
(which in point of fact had been in receipt of a 'presidential finding'
from Bush, three months after the guns of the Gulf War fell silent,
authorizing it 'to create conditions for the removal of Saddam Hussein
from power').

Vice president Al Gore was then given authority in the Clinton
Administration for Iraq policy. On April 14, 1993, Bush went to Kuwait,
whose regime duly arrested 17 people charged with plotting to kill Bush
with a bomb placed in a Toyota Landcruiser.

Again the national security establishment mustered in support of a plan
to hold Saddam accountable and bombard Baghdad, a plan hotly advocated
by Gore and his national security advisor, Leon Feurth. The two
individuals most reluctant to endorse this plan were Bill Clinton and
George Bush Sr. "Do we have to take this action?" Clinton muttered to
his national security team as the cruise missiles on two carriers in
the Persian Gulf were being programmed.

Eight of the 23 missiles hit the residential Mansour suburb of Baghdad,
one of them killing Leila al-Attar, a prominent Iraqi artist. According
to Clinton's pollster Stan Greenberg, the bombing of Baghdad caused an
uptick of 11 points in Clinton's popularity, a lesson Clinton and Gore
did not forget. Years later, in the 2000 campaign, Gore out-hawked
George Bush Jr on the subject of finishing the job in Iraq.

On June 29, 2000, Gore was in Chicago to talk about "energy policy
incentives for cities". Danny Muller of Voices in the Wilderness went
to Navy Pier, where the event was being held. Gore was at the podium
amid wild ovations. Muller remembers the scene: "I raised my voice and
asked 'Mr. Gore, why should anyone vote for an administration that
kills 5,000 innocent children a month through sanctions in Iraq?' Gore
stopped. And he laughed. He actually laughed. He said he would discuss
this later in the day. I responded by saying that every ten minutes a
child dies in Iraq due to sanctions and we do not have the time to
wait."

Muller was still protesting as Gore's security goons hauled him off.

The specific reason why this man of blood shares the 2007 Nobel Peace
Prize with the IPCC is for their joint agitprop on the supposed threat
of anthropogenic global warming. Bogus science topped off with toxic
alarmism. It's as ridiculous as as if Goebbels got the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1938, sharing it with the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his
work in publicizing the threat to race purity posed by Jews, Slavs and
gypsies. (The peace prize actually went that year to the Nansen
Committee for Refugees. Gore certainly played his part in creating
Iraq's current 4 million refugees, among the greatest displacements of
the past hundred years.)

The notorious "man-made" greenhouse gasses comprise about .26 per cent
of the total greenhouse gas component of the earth's atmosphere and the
influence of this component remains entirely unproven, as I have
pointed out on this site many times,and will be doing so again in
reflections that will be published early next year in my forthcoming
book, A Short History of Fear. Gore's contribution to the debate has
been an appalling mishmash of cooked statistics, demagoguery about
"scientific consensus" and New Age hocus pocus about spiritual renewal.
Anyone who has studied the antics of his co-winner of the peace prize,
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will know that the
IPCC's prime role every three years has been to ignore the work--some
of it respectable scientific research--of its expert panels and issue
entirely mendacious and to issue alarmist press releases designed to
win headlines in the New York Times.

Of course Al Gore has been a shil for nuclear power ever since he came
of age as a political harlot for the Oakridge nuclear laboratory in his
home state of Tennessee. The practical beneficiary of the baseless
hysteria over "anthropogenic global warming" is the nuclear power
industry. This very fall, as Peter Montague describes at length in our
current CounterPunch newsletter, this industry is reaping the fruits of
Al Gore's campaigning. Congress has finally knocked aside the
regulatory licensing processes that have somewhat protected the public
across recent decades. The starting gun has sounded, and just about the
moment Gore and his co-conspirators at the IPCC collect their prizes,
the bulldozers will be breaking ground for the new nuclear plants soon
to spring like Amanita phalloides--just as deadly--across the American
landscape.

Toothless in Babylon

The way things are headed, in two or three months we'll have 95 percent
of the American people wanting a pullout from the war in Iraq and 95
percent of Congress obediently voting funds to keep the troops there.
At the start of October, only 27 percent of Americans wanted Congress
to greenlight the $190 billion Bush has requested to go on fighting in
Iraq and Afghanistan. The Washington Post summed up its latest poll,
conducted with ABC TV, thus: "Most Americans do not believe Congress
has gone far enough in opposing the war."

Here we are in the gray dawn of the twenty-first century, but only a
handful of senators and reps dare stand up to be counted on matters of
war and peace. The Kyl-Lieberman bill recommending that Iran's
Revolutionary Guards be placed on the US government's blacklist as a
"terrorist organization" was clearly hatched as a way for Bush to
attack Iran without seeking Congressional approval. It cantered through
the Senate with only twenty-five opposing. The House approved a similar
measure with only sixteen no's, jusy 12 of them Democrats. Notoriously,
Hillary Clinton voted for Kyl-Lieberman, then amid a hail of criticism,
tried to fix up a fudge vote for the record, sigining on to an amended
version drafted by Senator James Webb.

The day before the Senate vote, in the Democratic debate at Dartmouth
College candidates Clinton, Obama and Edwards all refused to commit to
having all US troops out of Iraq by the end of their first White House
term-December 2013. The shortest timeline for withdrawal is offered in
Senator Russell Feingold's bill, which requires troops to be out of
Iraq by June 30, 2008. That bill has only twelve Senate co-sponsors,
Clinton and Obama conspicuous by their absence.

The Petraeus hearings showed us the feeble state of the anti-war forces
on the Hill. A few senators grandstanding for their one-liners to be
flashed up on CNN doesn't add up to anything more than popgun combat.
No one laid a glove on Petraeus, and that failure is very significant.
Winslow Wheeler worked on the Hill for thirty-one years as a staffer
for various senators from both sides of the aisle, also for the GAO.
These days he's the director of the Straus Military Reform Project at
the Center for Defense Information in Washington. As CounterPunchers
well know, his regular bulletins on defense matters, particularly
military budgets and appropriations, are always knowledgeable and
succinct. He really knows how the system works.

In the wake of Petraeus's easy victories in both the Senate and House
hearings, Wheeler looked back at the 1972 hearings of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, taking testimony from Secretary of State
William Rogers on the war in Vietnam. The committee's chairman, William
Fulbright, took Rogers apart, exposing time after time the Secretary's
evasions and lies. Fulbright, Wheeler recalled, See:
http://www.counterpunch.org/wheeler10032007.html.

"knew all the facts, uncovered by an assiduous professional staff that
discovered a whole lot more than what the Defense and State departments
wanted them to know." As the bruised Rogers and his entourage filed
out, Wheeler heard one of the Secretary's staff hiss angrily to an
underling, "Find out how that son of a bitch found all that out."

Petraeus endured no such relentless interrogation. There were no angry
hisses, only smiles at the conclusion of his claims for the success
thus far of his Surge. Yet the facts that the senators and
representatives could and should have thrown at him were all available,
many of them supplied to the relevant Congressional staffers by
Wheeler's organization in the form of body counts, information from the
United Nations and other sources, plus polling data from the people
best qualified to assess whether their security had been enhanced by
the Surge-namely, Iraqis.

But the senators and reps didn't use the material as Fulbright would
have done. Beyond a few brief interrogatory flurries, they mostly stuck
to their scripted speeches. As Wheeler concludes,

    "All that was politicking, not oversight. Oversightmeans finding out
exactly what the executive branch is doing and what is going on in the
world. Only that, not posturing, provides a sound foundation for
competent legislation and the political coalitions needed to enact it.
Put simply, if you do not know with some precision what the problem is,
you are not going to solve it. And if you don't have the data, mere
rhetoric will not always save you, especially when you fail to refute
the opposing case."

How good is the staff work on the Hill these days? Ideally, in the
battles that matter, it should be a blend of savage investigative zeal
and experience in what stones to turn over and where to dig out the
paydirt. How many battle-scarred oldtimers are there, like Wheeler or
Jake Lewis, who remember how it was done? How many eager reporters are
there for them to leak to? The Clinton era did dreadful damage to
conscientious and effective oversight. The Democrats were out of power
on the Hill for a decade, until 2007. I know of one 50-year-old who
recently and successfully applied for a good staff job on an important
committee who thinks he got the job partly because there weren't that
many applicants.

And even if you have a terrific staff rustling up devastating data, you
still need a senator or rep with the wits and moxy to turn the material
into an effective interrogation. These days you can sit and watch
C-SPAN all year long and rarely see anything beyond camera-preening by
the likes of Chuck Schumer. Arlen Specter can take out the razor when
he wants to. So can Feingold. So can a can few of the Republican
ex-prosecutors. Not many others. You can chart Ted Kennedy's decline in
effectiveness by the decline in the quality of his staff. Dig out a
clip of Jack Brooks of Texas Roasting someone in the witness chair, to
see how it used to be done. The place just isn't what it used to be.

[Footnote: The history of Al Gore's warmongering on Iraq is laid out in
Al Gore: A User's Manual co-written by your CounterPunch co-editors,
Cockburn and St Clair. A shorter version of the second item, Toothless
in Babylon, first ran in print edition of The Nation.]