MP3 of an informative interview with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of
http://www.invisiblehistory.com/">Invisible History Afghanistan's Untold Story can be downloaded here:
http://www.monksmedia.com/tvnewslies/7-8-09.mp3Invisible History Afghanistan's Untold StoryThe Real Story Behind the Propaganda
* How an invasion of Afghanistan by the American-backed Shah of Iran was being prepared years before the Soviets invaded.
* How Afghanistan was used as a calculated pretext for the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup.
* How Afghanistan became a covert launch-pad for the greatest heroin smuggling racket in history as the CIA looked away.
* How Afghanistan is being used as a vehicle for Saudi Arabian colonization and control of Central Asia - blessed by the United States.
http://www.invisiblehistory.com/ An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow about AfghanistanJune 24, 2009 By Paul Fitzgerald
and Elizabeth Gould
It was when Dan Rather told Rachel Maddow on her January 27th show, "We are not seeking to colonize Afghanistan. The Soviets made no bones about it. They were coming in to take over the country. They wanted to run the country. They wanted to be there 100 or 1,000 years from now. That is not the case with what we‘re trying to do,.." we held our breath. There has been a controversy over the authenticity of Rather's coverage of Afghanistan going back to 1980. Now in 2009 Rather was building on the his own Cold War disinformation campaign from the 1980's and taking it to an absurd new level. We had hoped that Maddow was up to the challenge. Unfortunately, she allowed Rather's disinformation to go unchallenged. We assumed that Maddow must not have known that Rather's views of Soviet motives in Afghanistan and the American role were propaganda from another era. We assumed that Maddow, along with most Americans, must not have known that Rather's reports on Afghanistan were tainted and have been challenged by many journalists.
So in response we sent a letter to Rachel Maddow regarding her January 27th interview with Dan Rather on Afghanistan summarized here.
________________________________
Dear Rachel Maddow;
Our personal involvement with Afghanistan and the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather began in 1981. We were the first journalists to gain access to Kabul through diplomatic channels at the United Nations following the expulsion of 1135 western journalists one month after the Soviet invasion. Contracted to CBS what we found in 1981 was in stark contrast to the picture that Rather was playing on the evening news.
The war in Afghanistan was a civil war between progressive modernists who advocated women's rights and a secular state versus extremist Islamists backed by the United States, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia who wanted to turn back the clock to the medieval era. Women's rights had been a spark in that war.
Since then we have pieced together the complete story of how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was miscast in the US media in order to intentionally reflect the political position of the new right and the neoconservatives who were just then coming into power through the Carter and Reagan years. There are now reams of first hand material available that we have incorporated into our book Invisible History Afghanistan's Untold Story, that contradict the child-like Reagan era/good vs. evil approach to the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan promoted by CBS and Rather at the time. The Soviets tried to avoid invading Afghanistan for months prior to December of 1979. They warned the Marxist party in Kabul in no uncertain terms that they were not a broad enough political party to govern Afghanistan. The KGB recommended that they step aside and help in the formation of a broad based coalition government including conservative Islamists. Moscow wanted to return the King to the throne in the summer and fall of 1979 and informed the United States of it. Even secretary of defense Robert Gates and former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski have both publicly boasted that they intentionally set out to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam quagmire. According to Gates in his 1997 book From the Shadows, there was no downside to having the Soviets trapped in Afghanistan.
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21781
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