Asper and Black, conspiracy theorists!

There are those who speak of massive media conspiracies to unleash great waves of artificial protest against targeted individuals. And then there are those—usually the professional reporters and columnists in the media—who poo-poo such nonsense, saying the whole notion of a media conspiracy is rubbish flowing from the troubled minds of paranoiacs.

Who’s right? Reasonable middle-class public opinion sides usually with the latter.

But in a revealing private correspondence released in court in connection with the Conrad Black trial in Chicago, we find two of Canada’s most prominent media owners showing themselves comfortable with the notion of media conspiracies drummed up to target selected individuals for the purposes of destroying them in the public mind.

“I assume that the Post’s conduct,” the late Israel Asper, then in control of CanWest, the biggest media company in Canada, wrote to Conrad Black, then publisher of national newspaper The National Post, in 2000, “and the firestorm its staff helped unleash across the media was caused by your personal orchestration or done with your acquiescence and approval.” The “firestorm” in question involved then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s apparent arrangement of a loan from a federal agency to help a hotel in Shawinigan he partly owned.

Black replied, “I understand the concerns expressed in your letter,” he says, meaning the allegations of a media conspiracy, “but I am not the author of them.”

What Black doesn’t do is attack Asper’s belief in the possibility of media conspiracies—the more usual response of media figures to such charges when raised by those outside the media. But Black knows his correspondent, Asper, is very much involved in the media (in fact telling Asper in another letter “you are very far along in building up an astonishing media company by international standards,”) and the usual defence, that media companies simply do not conspire to start up firestorms to destroy individuals, would not pass with Asper: Asper knows better. In fact, both men come across in this private correspondence as breezy on the subject of artificial media-orchestrated scandals as the most paranoid café dwellers. The difference is, they are the two most prominent owners of media and speak with considerable authority on the subject—more authority than even the reporters and columnists who so consistently deny any possibility of such conspiracies.

Also of interest to us is how both Asper and Black rest easy with the allegation that an owner of media property would be engaging with the editorial content of their property to the point of being guilty of personally orchestrating the media “firestorms.” The usual response by media and its defenders is that owners don’t have the inclination or the means to exert such influence over their editorial staffs. If it had been anyone besides Asper making the allegation—that is, anyone who wouldn’t know the truth—Black would have responded by saying the media’s reporters and columnists won’t and can’t engage in such conspiracies, and that owners of media don’t have the desire or the means to make them even if they wanted to.

He doesn’t make that defence with Asper because he knows that Asper knows better. Asper also has no trouble raising the “crazy” allegation with Black, because he knows that Black knows better too.

Remember these private letters between two media barons next time someone tells you the corporate media won’t or can’t engage in conspiracies to destroy targeted individuals, or that owners of mainstream media, or their minions, wouldn’t be inclined to engage in such minutiae or can’t make their media staff do it for them if they wanted to. They can and they do, as these letters show, and the staff at their media companies routinely do the dirty work for them. Neither Asper nor Black have any doubt of it, so why do any of us?

The tangled webs they weave

The job that World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz arranged for his “intimate partner,” Shaha Riza, 54, was to work in the US State Department office of Liz Cheney, eldest daughter to Dick Cheney, US Vice-President. Prior to Wolfowitz’s appointment to the World Bank, Riza, a graduate of both the London School of Economics and Oxford, worked in the Middle East division of the bank. When Wolfowitz became her new boss, the potential conflict of interest was resolved by moving Riza over to the Middle East division of the State Department, directly under the second-highest ranking US ambassador in the region, Liz Cheney. Wolfowitz was previously deputy Secretary of Defense, and had been nominated to the post at the beginning of George W Bush’s first term by Dick Cheney, Liz’s dad.

Riza’s Libyan-born father was a close confidant to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, where Riza grew up. Following the controversy at the World Bank, she left Cheney’s State Depart

ment office and now works at the Foundation for the Future, founded in Bellevue, Washington in 1996 by Swiss-born inventor Walter Kistler. Liz Cheney also left the State Department and was last seen on May 9 accompanying her father, Dick, on a hasty and unannounced trip to Baghdad where explosions during dinner with the Iraqi Prime Minister forced him, and presumably her, to scramble to a secure location in the basement for half an hour. An undisclosed secure location.

The blurb to Riza’s new boss Walter Kistler’s most recent book says, “Along the way are intellectual surprises—for example, the juxtaposition of Jesus, Darwin, and Heisenberg, three giants Kistler credits for shaping his understanding of the world. The implications of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle for physics, philosophy, and even humankind’s comprehension of reality exceed, he believes, even those of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity.” The Foundation “was established with the mission to increase and diffuse knowledge concerning the long-term future of humanity,” its website says.

Wolfowitz’s estranged wife, Clare Wolfowitz, was credited by Laurie Mylroie, author of the long-titled The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge, first published in early 2001, with having spawned the “basic idea” behind the book which is the first published link between Hussein and al Qaeda. About that book, Paul Wolfowitz said it ". . . argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was actually an agent of Iraqi intelligence.” Former CIA Director, R James Woolsley, wrote the foreword to the book, praising it for revealing the “truth” no one else would admit. In conversation with The Republic, Clare Wolfowitz suggested that the idea linking Iraq to the World Trade Center and 9/11 evolved around her kitchen table with Mylroie, with whom Clare shared information gleaned from her then-husband Paul.