by gg3 » Fri 11 Feb 2005, 10:02:35
Gannon/Guckert was clearly a fraudulent journalist with faked credentials (his "journalistic education" consisted of a two-day $50 seminar produced by one of the cofounders of the Moral Majority).
The fact that he got White House press credentials, when he couldn't even pass the background check to get press access to Congress, is incredible. Under any normal circumstances, the heightened security in the present era should and would have denied access to someone who was using a fake name and had a shady background that included running an "escort" (i.e. prostitution) website.
If you look over old tapes of press conferences, what you see is that this guy was generally used as a means by which the White House press guy could call on him and get a "softball" question in order to get out of having to answer a preceding "hardball" question from a legitimate journalist.
I don't personally have a problem with him reprinting quotes verbatim from White House press releases; however I do have a problem with him failing to note attribution of source on those. By failing to attribute source, it would make it appear as if those words were his own writing. That makes him a "mouth piece."
I smell a rat, and the rat's name is Karl Rove. Gannon/Guckert will turn out to be basically a fall-guy who could be used and then jettisoned at the appropriate time.
I cannot recall a time in the last half-century when an administration engaged in such an enormous degree of covert propaganda and manipulation of the media, which are also illegal.
Here's another thing, and this is important:
In a matter of one day or two at most, ALL of his previous writings, and ALL of his previous websites, were instantly sanitized, scrubbed, deleted, and taken off the air. Some of the business entities that he was involved in changed their names or ownerhship or other legal details.
There is no way one man alone could have done that amount of cleaning-up in such a short time, any more than one man alone could sweep up all the confetti on the street after a parade.
He had help, plenty of help, to shove all that stuff down the "memory hole" so quickly and effectively. Question is, who...?
(Though, you can still find it under the "cached" settings in Google or other major search engines, and in other internet archive respositories. Better go look quick before those places start getting hit with weird viruses or whatever.)
Speaking of viruses:
Some of Gannon/Guckert's web sites and some of the affiliated ones such as GOPUSA, have got some very weird viruses on them which are getting into computers that try to access these sites. BEWARE! If you're using Windows, make sure you're behind a damn good firewall. Linux too, apparently there was one report of a desktop Linux machine going down after accessing one of those sites. No reports of it hitting Macintoshes yet.
Question is, who created and deployed those viruses or whatever-they-really-are...? Once again, highly unlikely that Gannon/Guckert by himself, did all that cleanup and ass-covering in a matter of 48 hours.
This affair stinks to high heaven. It needs to be thoroughly investigated, exposed, and where relevant, criminal charges brought.