Washington Post ‘Conservative’ Blogger Aligned With the Pro-Israel Far Right
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on February 6th, 2011 5:36 am by HL
Washington Post ‘Conservative’ Blogger Aligned With the Pro-Israel Far Right
Our guest blogger is Eli Clifton, a New York-based journalist who blogs daily on U.S.-Iran relations at LobeLog.com.
Jennifer Rubin, who authors The Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, claims that her blog offers coverage of “politics and policy” for “conservative readers.” But you’d be excused for thinking that her foremost interest is Israel’s conservative politics and policy.
Rubin, a prolific blogger, has published 415 posts since she started at The Washington Post at the end of November. Her blog categorizes her posts by topic and shows that: 29 were about “Israel;” 11 were about “American Jews,” and 16 were about “Iran.” In just the past few weeks, she attacked the signatories of a letter calling for the Obama administration to support a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction in the Occupied Territory. Rubin also attacked HSBC for an advertisement which the bank was running to call attention to the high number of female filmmakers in Iran.
Now, her hard work on behalf of the Israel right has earned her a free trip. “In the interest of full disclosure,” she revealed yesterday, her trip to Israel’s Herzliya Conference, an Israeli strategic confab, will be paid for by the Bill Kristol front group, The Emergency Committee For Israel (ECI).
The ECI first came to attention in July 2010 when it began running attack ads against politicians who it deemed insufficiently tough on terrorism or who had dared to criticize Israel. The group is directed by neoconservative upstart Noah Pollak and board members include: Kristol, Rachel Abrams, and Gary Bauer. Former Bush White House official Margaret Hoover has registered the ECI’s domain name. ECI was briefly housed at Orion Strategies, a consultancy which has advised Sarah Palin and served as the home of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group which played a key role in pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and promoting Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.
The Washington Post’s claim that she is representative of the conservative movement is deeply misleading. Her close relationship with ECI, her gleeful promotion of the “military option” against Iran’s nuclear facilities, and her proclivity towards smearing her opponents as “Israel-bashing” show that Rubin represents the interests and ideology of the hawkish, pro-Israel right-wing. While the Post claims that her blog is representative of conservative politics and policy, her posts have shown a very different focus.
Kucinich Requests To See Bradley Manning, Soldier In Solitary Confinement For Alleged Leaks
Last May, the military arrested Private First Class Bradley Manning, a military intelligence officer who had served overseas in Iraq, over charges that he was involved in leaking numerous classified documents and videos to the Wikileaks whistleblowing group, including a video of a U.S. attack helicopter killing numerous unarmed journalists.
Since his arrests, numerous civil liberties groups and investigative journalists have protested the conditions under which Manning is being held, noting that he has been kept in solitary confinement and is denied even access to a pillow or bed sheets. This is particularly shocking in light of new information revealed that Manning was suspected of having poor mental health before he was deployed to Iraq, with some superiors even requesting that he not be given firearms. Yet despite this press coverage of Manning’s treatment, the military has offered very limited access to him and has refused to address the concerns of human rights and civil liberties advocates.
Now, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates inquiring about Manning’s condition, protesting the Army’s treatment of him and requesting a visit with the imprisoned solider. In the letter, Kucinich writes that, if Manning is need of mental health treatment, the “Army must end the extreme conditions of” his confinement or at the “very least…explain the justification” for taking such extreme measures during his imprisonment:
Now, reports indicate that the Army has taken Pfc. Manning, a soldier with documented mental health problems, and confined him under conditions that are almost guaranteed to exacerbate his mental health problems. If true, the Army’s treatment would obviously constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
If these reports are true, the Army must end the extreme conditions of Private Manning’s confinement, and provide him with the mental health treatment that the Army recognized he needed even before his deployment to Iraq. At the very least, the Army must explain the justification for confining someone with mental health problems under conditions that are virtually certain to exacerbate those problems and explain the danger he now presents that only these extreme conditions of confinement can avoid.
While Manning’s treatment has made waves in the media, it is important to remember that solitary confinement is a practice that is common in America’s prison system. A 1999 report by the Department of Justice found that some states locked up as many as 20 percent of their prisoners into penal systems that placed them under solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.
Last month, leading human rights groups Amnesty International and the Physicians for Human Rights both sent letters to the Department of Defense protesting Manning’s treatment; they noted that solitary confinement is widely used across the United States, it is almost unheard of for it to be used against a prisoner like Manning who has yet to even be convicted of a crime.
