John Sugg is "silly," pouts Michael Fechter, who has worked an overlapping 17 years for The Tampa Tribune and 13 years for Steve Emerson, a propagandist for extremist, no-peace-at-any-price Likudniks and neocons in Israel and America. Fechter gave up the minor facet of his vocation, his Tribune desk, earlier this month.
I was hilariously silly a decade ago when I asked Fechter why one of his first articles about Sami Al-Arian had tried to pin the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing on, and only on, Palestinian and Lebanese groups. The article, via Fechter's (and Emerson's) trademark guilt-by-association, made it clear that ONLY Arab groups were suitable suspects in the terrorist attack.
Fechter's response to my question was that Arabs were the sole "plausible" perps, based on his "sources."
Those sources? Chanting "Arabs, Arabs" as the smoke rose over the Oklahoma City federal building, they included Emerson (in his most famous and glaring error), Daniel Pipes (who believes the only solution to the Middle East is to utterly crush, kill and subjugate Palestinians) and Oliver "Buck" Revell, a rogue ex-agent for the FBI who has teamed up with a Likud spy, Yigal Carmon, in a "consulting business." That outfit's main purpose seems to be to lead cheers for Emerson, and members emerged last week to hooray Fechter's change of paychecks, if not mentors.
The heavy innuendo in the article was that Palestinian and Lebanese groups were organizing in America — to attack America. An especially noteworthy omission in the article was that the Arab groups Fechter put in his gun sights had never waged violence outside of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, and still haven't. Palestinians have made bellicose statements against America, not an earth-shaking surprise consider our enabling of Israeli policies, but haven't attacked American targets.
By weaving the name Sami Al-Arian into the mix, Fechter let readers know who the likely Oklahoma City mastermind was. That story, never retracted or clarified by the Trib, still floats around far-right websites, such as the John Birch Society's. Timothy McVeigh, according to Fechter's fans among delusional fascists, was merely Al-Arian's pawn.
Despite such fiction-passing-as-reporting, the Trib's editor, Janet Coats, joined her predecessors over the last decade in proclaiming" "I don't feel there is anything in the stories that needs to be re-examined."
Nor has the Trib bothered to tell you almost anything about Emerson. I agree with two Associated Press reporters who snubbed Emerson as a source in 1997, dismissing him from a terrorism investigation. They told me the real story should have been: Who is Steve Emerson, and for whom does he work?
The Trib never gave a hint of such questions regarding Emerson — but you can find my documentation about him online. Fechter told me once that it wasn't his job to report on Emerson, belying the journalist's credo to tell as much about the accusers' motives as the accused.
Al-Arian never posed a threat to America. The onslaught against him was merely an attempt to silence an emerging voice that differed with the only politically correct narrative on the Middle East.
Fechter breathlessly hinted Al-Arian might be plotting something sinister against MacDill Air Force Base. "Agents found a variety of records pertaining to the U.S. Central Command," Fechter reported. Were spies or saboteurs unmasked? Hardly. Al-Arian spoke at two conferences at Central Command, and the ominous material was merely the confab handouts. The Trib, of course, never clarified its reporting.
Fechter beat his chest about vindication following the 2003 indictment of Al-Arian. It simply was another lie. Nothing that Al-Arian did before Fechter's reporting began was illegal; it was First Amendment protected. So many of Fechter's alleged specifics turned out to be bogus and overwrought, yet the Trib declines to go back and reexamine the record.
That's not just silly — it's an outrage.
