John Sugg on why won’t the Tampa Trib tell you what people in Nashville know about Steve Emerson?

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/2010/11/02/john-sugg-on-why-won’t-the-tampa-trib-tell-you-what-people-in-nashville-know-about-steve-emerson/#more-113010

November 2, 2010 at 7:49 am by Mitch Perry

John F. Sugg was editor of the Weekly Planet in the 1990s, and group senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers until he retired in 2008.  In his tenure, he reported extensively on the Sami Al-Arian story.  After recent negative news broke about terrorism “expert” Steven Emerson, Sugg contacted CL about filing this post.

Steven Emerson, a self-styled terrorism expert, is a guy who had a profound and caustic impact on Tampa for more than a decade. Emerson has had much less of an impact on another city, Nashville, although his corrosive brand of often-inaccurate smear jobs recently slithered into Tennessee.

Still, Nashville’s citizens know a whole lot more about Emerson than folks in Tampa, despite his relatively recent arrival on the Tennessee hate-Muslim soapbox, where he jostles for the limelight with loopy religious fanatics and just plain old-fashioned Southern bigots.

Why that imbalance of knowledge about Emerson? The answer lies in a horrible miscarriage of journalism committed over many years by The Tampa Tribune, a series of atrocities the Trib could easily correct by just providing a dash of fair and accurate reporting, something history indicates the newspaper won’t do. Nashville should be grateful that it has a newspaper, The Tennessean, which unlike the Trib will fearlessly dig out the truth.

In tandem with his vassal reporter at the Tampa Trib, Michael Fechter, Emerson waged a decade-long jihad against a professor at the University of South Florida, Sami Al-Arian, accused by Emerson and Fechter of being a terrorist mastermind. Emerson and Fechter were backed by a shadowy network of former federal agents and foreign spooks, notably a disinformation specialist for Israel’s ultra-right Likud party named Yigal Carmon and a controversial ex-FBI official named Oliver “Buck” Revell – and a lot of money whose origins have never been revealed.

However, where their information came from was clear. As the great Israeli newspaper Ha’aretzexplained before Al-Arian’s 2005 federal trial: “Israel owns much of the copyright for the case; a well-informed source termed the prosecution an ‘American-Israeli co-production.’ The Americans are running the show, but behind the scenes it was the Israelis who for years collected material (and) transmitted information…” How did they transmit information? In part, via “secret evidence” slipped to our federales, evidence and accusers Al-Arian wasn’t allowed to confront (who needs that nasty old Sixth Amendment?). But reporters were also conduits for scurrilous “intelligence” claims. Fechter himself wrote that “former and current senior Israeli intelligence officials” loaded his stories with information. Those allegations, many ludicrous on their face, were rejected by a federal jury, despite a highly prejudiced judge and rulings that, if they had been issued against Martin Luther King Jr. would have prevented him from mentioning Jim Crow in his defense.

Over the years, while a Weekly Planet and Creative Loafing editor, I had a great deal of fun exposing Emerson, and the prevarications by Fechter and the federal government. I tried to put into contextwhat the anti-Muslim crusaders were up to. I joined a rather elite cadre of journalists that had tangled with Emerson – including famed investigative reporters Seymour Hersh, Robert I. Friedman and Robert Parry, who provided me with insight into Emerson’s real agenda.

Emerson filed two bogus lawsuits against me, the Weekly Planet (AKA Creative Loafing) and an AP reporter who had told me about questions he had had over the provenance of a document Emerson gave the news service. We obtained a court order that would have forced Emerson to produce real proof of his allegations – and he knew we were digging into who he really was and who paid his bills – so he ran away from the fight he started; the good guys (me, for example) prevailed.

It’s noteworthy that a number of dispassionate analysts had observations similar to mine. New York University scholar Zachary Lockman, for example, (as quoted on “Right Web”) wrote in 2005: “[Emerson’s] main focus during the 1990s was to sound the alarm about the threat Muslim terrorists posed to the United States. By the end of that decade Emerson was describing himself as a ‘terrorist expert and investigator’ and ‘Executive Director, Terrorism Newswire, Inc.’ Along the way, critics charged, Emerson had sounded many false alarms, made numerous errors of fact, bandied accusations about rather freely, and ceased to be regarded as credible by much of the mainstream media . The September 11 attacks seemed to bear out Emerson’s warnings, but his critics might respond that even a stopped clock shows the right time twice a day.”

Again, it’s sadly significant that the Trib never even provided such mild doses of context about its primary source, Emerson, in its inflammatory, intentionally erroneous and misleading, and often racist diatribes against Al-Arian. The Trib still gives Emerson ink – never questioning his claims and guilt-by-association-and-innuendo tactics, and never vetting his background, associations, financing and motives.

Some insight on Emerson’s millions has now been provided by The Tennessean, Nashville’s daily newspaper. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, citing the Tennessean’s reports, on Oct. 26 awarded Emerson his nightly “Worst Person in the World” citation. Olbermann expressed regret that the network had previously used Emerson as a chattering head on terrorism topics. (Similarly, CBS did not renew its contract with Emerson after he claimed that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had “a Middle Eastern trait” because it was carried out “with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible.” That was a big “Oops.”)

The Tennessean reported that Emerson collects money through a non-profit, the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, and then funnels that money to his for-profit SAE (as in Steven A. Emerson) Productions. Quoting Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group, the Nashville paper reported: “Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit. It’s wrong. This is off the charts.”

That little bit of information on Emerson, contained in one report, is far more than the Trib told you about Emerson over a decade – despite Emerson using the Trib to provoke a legal firestorm that is still ongoing.

You do recall the firestorm, right? Emerson and Fechter launched a series of series of attacks on Muslims. No amount of hyperbole and vitriol-spewing was considered excessive by the Trib or Emerson. Fechter, for example, darkly hinted that the FBI found documents about MacDill Air Force Base among Al-Arian’s papers, insinuating some dastardly design. Nope. Al-Arian had twice been invited to speak to large groups of military and intelligence officers, and the sinister documents were, well, just the hand-out materials. Fechter, following the lead of his guru, Emerson, also tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Arabs, an egregiously false story the Trib has never seen fit to correct. Emerson, meanwhile, said in February 1996 that Palestinian advocates at USF were involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Emerson promised proof “in the near term.” The proof never came, and the Justice Department said it had no records supporting the allegation.

You think the Trib might have called Emerson on that one? Hahaha.

The former head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Tampa, Robert O’Neill, twice concluded during the 1990s there was no evidence to prosecute Al-Arian, according to my multiple sources in the Justice Department. I don’t like quoting anonymous sources so I’ll be clear: O’Neill, now the U.S. Attorney for Florida’s Middle District, himself told me he had looked at the evidence and found no reason to prosecute. In 1998, the then FBI counterterrorism chief Bob Blitzer also told me “no federal laws were broken” by the Tampa Muslims.

Yet, after 9/11, propelled by hate-Muslim diatribes from Bill O’Reilly (who had been funneled highly slanted information by Fechter) and the fear by Jeb Bush that the University of South Florida would conclude a settlement with Al-Arian that would prove embarrassing to the Bushite regimes in Washington and Tallahassee, the federal government indicted Al-Arian. The trial concluded with the government failing to win a single guilty verdict against Al-Arian or his co-defendants, an immense disaster for the Bush Justice Department.

Al-Arian later plea bargained in order to preclude another trial on counts on which the jury didn’t reach a verdict – although notably no more than two jurors felt he was guilty on even those “hung” counts.  Al-Arian’s plea bargain stipulated that he had had no involvement in terrorist activities. Rather, he had provided some minor support to people who might have become terrorists, although it’s clear from the trial that any such activities by Al-Arian occurred when they were legal. The plea agreement supposedly ended all business between Al-Arian and the federal government. However, due to legal chicanery by a rogue federal prosecutor in Virginia, Gordon Kromberg – who has been called a doppelganger of Emerson – Al-Arian remains entangled in federal courts and on house arrest.

According to my federal sources, the Al-Arian case cost our government at least $50 million, and, no, the Trib and Emerson didn’t offer to pay part of the bill (you and I had that honor). And, with so many FBI agents chasing a guy whose “guilt” was mostly in exercising his First Amendment rights, the FBI missed another fellow flitting around Florida, a real terrorist with blood on his mind, Mohammed Atta.

The final chapters in the Trib’s pogroms against Muslims had a sadly humorous angle. Fechter, who had long been a tool of Emerson’s, finally got slightly honest and went to work for his mentor. And Fechter dumped his wife and children and shacked up with one of the federal prosecutors who tried Al-Arian. I don’t recall where Fechter got his journalism training, but he must have skipped the classes on journalistic objectivity and not sleeping with your sources.

So, The Tennessean’s articles might have provided an excellent opportunity for the Trib to revisit and maybe heal a terrible wound it was complicit in inflicting in Tampa. On Friday, I asked TribManaging Editor Richard “Duke” Maas if he had such an inclination – heck, I inquired, aren’t you interested in what The Tennessean wrote about a guy who had so much impact on Tampa and your newspaper? Well, not really, Maas responded, sounding more irritated than journalistically curious. He added that Fechter had left the newspaper, which I gather meant he felt the Trib was thereby absolved of responsibility.

If you happen to have a spare backbone, you might send it to the pathetic folks at The Tampa Tribune.

John F. Sugg was editor of the Weekly Planet in the 1990s, and group senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers until he retired in 2008.

 

Steve Emerson called ‘world’s worse person’

"World's worse person": Anti-Muslim bigot Steve Emerson

MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” last night named Islamphobe Steve Emerson as the world’s worse person for “stoking profits” as a so-called counter-terrorism expert.

“Steve Emerson’s Jihad Racket” has been the buzz of the blogosphere after an article appeared two days ago in the USA Today, which exposed his lucrative jihad against mainstream Muslims and their organizations.

Emerson, who erroneously ascribed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to terrorists with a “Middle Eastern trait” has also been blacklisted by NPR for his anti-Muslim bigotry.

HuffPost has must read article about anti-Muslim smear machine

*This article introduced me to Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and a new website, which exposes the tactics of Islamophobes and what it calls the “Dirty Dozen”, some of America’s most notorious bigots.  Among the un-American bigots featured and exposed are pseudo-academic and fraudulent “terrorism experts” Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson as well as the religious radical and caller to political murder Pat Robertson. 

A couple of the names on there weren’t worthy mentioning because of their limited influence and lack of credibility, even among neo-conservatives. I would have placed Rep. Tancredo (R-CO) and John Hagee on the list before a couple of them.  The list is so long and the hatred is so vast, it’s truly hard to choose America’s top 12 anti-Muslim bigots.

Either way, very nice job by FAIR.  Please circulate their website – www.smearcasting.com.

***

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/isabel-macdonald/the-anti-muslim-smear-mac_b_133695.html

The Anti-Muslim Smear Machine Strikes Again?

Written by Isabel Macdonald

In the midst of remarkably cynical election-time mud-slinging, the Obsession campaign is truly in a class of its own.

Over the past weeks, 28 million copies of the anti-Muslim propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West have been delivered to the doors of newspaper subscribers in swing states. The 2006 documentary, which has been a mainstay of David Horowitz’s “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” describes “radical Islam” as a menace comparable to Adolf Hitler that, according to the film’s website, “is threatening, with all the means at its disposal, to bow Western civilization under the yoke of its values.”

For the groups behind the film’s distribution, the goal seems pretty clear: Scare the holy hell out of millions of voters in swing states about a possible Muslim takeover of the U.S. It’s hard to see the targeting of electoral battlegrounds as anything other than an attempt to help John McCain get elected — perhaps by capitalizing on the widespread whispering campaign that Obama is a “secret Muslim.”

And one has to admit that the Obsession campaign’s marketing plan has been quite slick. After all, what better way to disseminate hate propaganda than under the unassuming guise of a documentary film delivered in Americans’ daily newspapers? A plan that, sadly, many newspapers were all too happy to go along with for the sake of corporate profits. While a handful of newspapers — the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record, the Detroit Free Press, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch — have taken the ethical stance of refusing to carry the DVD (the News & Record called it “fear-mongering and divisive”), some 70 papers, including the New York Times, have delivered it to their subscribers as a paid advertising supplement.

There has really just been one small glitch in the plan: The public doesn’t seem to be buying it. Newspapers that carried the DVD have faced floods of complaints from readers, and the past week has seen protests and press conferences denouncing the film.

The problem, it would appear, is that many readers simply do not accept the notion their newspaper should provide a cover for hate propaganda. As one Durham, N.C., News & Observer reader put it, “I cannot believe that I was sent the hate-inflaming, fear-mongering video disk Obsession in my newspaper! What will you enclose next? KKK robes?”

The public, it turns out, is a much a tougher sell than the corporate media. Major corporate media outlets have for years been citing the anti-Muslim pundits featured in Obsession as “experts.”

For example: Steve Emerson has been invited regularly on NBC and described as an “anti-terror expert,” despite the fact his research has been repudiated many times over. This is an “expert” who initially blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on Middle Eastern terrorists, and who is now going around claiming that the Bush State Department is collaborating with extremists.

And then there’s Daniel Pipes. While he’s repeatedly been cited by the media as an “expert” on Islam and the Middle East, he has warned that “the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims” entail “true dangers” for American Jews, and led a witch hunt against a public school official who was slated to run an Arabic-language charter school in New York City.

Just a month before a critical election, there are no signs that the anti-Muslim mud-slinging campaign is going away. In fact, the secretive nonprofit called the Clarion Fund behind the Obsession campaign just came out with a brand new DVD, The Third Jihad, featuring Mark Steyn — who, as FAIR’s new report documents, has warned of the “demographic decline” posed by Europe’s emerging Muslim population, and suggests there are lessons for Europeans in the Balkan example of ethnic cleansing.

You can read all about Emerson, Pipes and Steyn in a new report that’s just been released called “Smearcasting: How Islamophobes Spread Fear, Bigotry and Misinformation” . The report profiles 12 top anti-Muslim pundits, including prominent talk show hosts Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

The media’s long record of failing to challenge (and often enabling) anti-Muslim smears should leave us quite worried about how this final leg of election ’08 will play out: Will the media continue to provide a platform to the anti-Muslim smear machine, or will they uphold standards of responsible journalism?

Steve Emerson dissed in the Huffington Post

Mr. William Fisher gives a very simple and clear explanation of the tactics used by the “self-proclaimed anti-terrorist ‘expert'” Steve Emerson and those of his ilk, who use Islamophobia in an attempt to sideline the mainstream Muslim community.

Bravo!

***

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-fisher/by-very-afraid-its-good-f_b_118190.html

By Very Afraid. It’s Good for Business!

By William Fisher

I never thought I’d find myself defending Karen Hughes, so this is a big deal.

Ms. Hughes, you will recall, is the Good Friend of Bush (GFOB) who was one of Dubya’s closest confidantes in Texas and later in the White House. After taking a sabbatical from playing Karl Rove in Drag, she returned to Washington to become Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy.

Now I am not exactly Ms. Hughes’ biggest fan. I remember writing at the time of her nomination to be America’s image-maker to the world that I couldn’t think of a less qualified person to take on this arguably impossible job. And over time she unfortunately proved me right.

But now, departed again from Washington, here she is being attacked by a guy with even less credibility.

That guy is Steve Emerson, the once-ubiquitous self-proclaimed anti-terrorist “expert,” who sees Islamic militant bomb throwers under every rock and describes Islam as a faith that “sanctions genocide, planned genocide, as part of its religious doctrine.”

In an article in my favorite hysterical neocon rag, NewsMax, Hughes is accused of funneling “millions of dollars in U.S. government grants to radical Islamist organizations, many of whose leaders have been convicted or indicted in terrorism cases in the United States.”

When I noticed the byline on this piece, I should have known it wouldn’t pass the smell test. It was written by one Kenneth R. Timmerman.

Timmerman, of course, is the author of one of the truly wonderful pieces of disinformation published by Insight Magazine of the right-of-Genghis-Khan Washington Times in 2002. In that gem, Timmerman confirmed Saddam Hussein’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The source of his “intelligence”? None other than Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. The headline read: “How Saddam Got Weapons of Mass Destruction: Saddam Hussein’s War Machine Is Being Built Systematically to Strike At the United States With New Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons Designed to Kill Millions.”

Awesome scoop, Ken!

So in his latest riff, Timmerman reports on Emerson’s testimony to a Congressional committee.

Emerson told the House International Relations Committee: “When Ms. [Karen] Hughes was appointed as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, she set the tone to continue a disastrous policy of outreach with Islamist partners.” Many of the leaders of these “radical Islamist organizations” have been “convicted or indicted in terrorism cases in the United States.”

Well, just who are these “many”?

Emerson cites but one — the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which he describes as “a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization, [which] was an unindicted co-conspirator in last year’s terrorist financing trial against the Holy Land Foundation,” Emerson told Congress. What he neglected to tell the lawmakers is that the Justice Department designated just about everyone except Adam’s housecat as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in that case – and that a jury exonerated the Foundation.

Emerson also charges that State Department grants went to the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), which he described as a group that has “publicly challenged the designation of Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations” (a canard often repeated by Islamophobics that has yet to be substantiated by any facts).

MPAC was but one in a long catalog of organizations Emerson accused of supporting terrorist causes. He said, “A number of groups that the State Department has funded or collaborated with have links to entities such as al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, all of which are designated as terrorist organizations by the United States government.” But he was a bit light on citing a single fact to support this claim. Like none.

He declared that the outreach policy championed by Hughes “legitimizes Islamism to the world and sends mixed messages to our allies, while sending a terrible message to moderate Muslims who are thoroughly disenfranchised by the funding.”

Emerson’s charges were not without predictable allies in Congress. Citing earlier warnings by Emerson and other “experts,” Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jon Kyl of Arizona wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last month, demanding that she instruct the State Department to cancel all outstanding grants to “radical Islamist groups.”

Well, it might just be worth noting that many of the groups cited by Emerson as “radical” are the very same ones the FBI, CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies have been courting since shortly after 9/11 in their efforts to recruit agents and language experts. And that some of them meet regularly with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to provide insights into the attitudes of American Muslims.

To be sure, these organizations frequently disagree with U.S. government policies, particularly regarding the Middle East. They believe the U.S. has wasted precious years in the effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. They assert that the U.S. does little to apply pressure on Israel to rein in the building of new settlements in the West Bank. They think the invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder. And they regularly complain about ethnic profiling and other official government discrimination against Americans of Arab descent and other American Muslims.

But so do big chunks of the American foreign policy community. Like those bomb-throwers at the Council on Foreign Relations!

Anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda is daily fare throughout the Middle East. Much of it comes from the press controlled by the very authoritarian rulers the U.S. has been propping up for decades with billions in military and economic assistance. And much of the opposition to these autocratic regimes today is coming from the very organizations Steve Emerson tags as radical Islamists.

As for what Emerson calls our “disastrous policy of outreach” to Islamic partners, someone ought to remind him that outreach is at the very heart of America’s public diplomacy. The problem is not that we’re spending hundreds of millions on outreach. The problem is that, given George Bush’s Middle East policies, our outreach is not very effective at “winning hearts and minds.”

OK, forget hearts and minds. To be totally cynical, outreach and dialogue are probably our most effective means of obtaining intelligence.

But, to self-designated “terrorism experts” like Steve Emerson, keeping fear alive is Priority One. The good news is that we are no longer seeing Mr. Emerson’s talking head every time we turn our TVs on. And we aren’t seeing many of his op-eds in the responsible mainstream press anymore – except perhaps in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Times.

Pity it’s taken the media so long to begin to question his value as an authentic source of reliable information. Should have happened after he became one of the first on-air pundits to say the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City had all the earmarks of Middle Eastern terrorism.

Makes you wonder how long it will take Congress to get it!