71 search results for "Lara Logan"

According to Lara Logan, President Zelensky is a puppet who has been linked to a satanic musical group and can be seen wearing leather pants and going shirtless on the internet.

If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, here’s a taste:

What Russia has done from the very beginning has been very strategic. They didn’t go straight to Kyiv. They went to all those bioweapons laboratories that are scattered all over the country. Some of them they built. So they know where they are. They’ve known where they are since the Soviet Union, because under the defense threat reduction program, we went in after the fall of the Soviet Union, and supposedly they turned those facilities from bioweapons labs into public health labs. Although, you know, these days, it’s hard to believe anything that our leaders tell us because they’ve lied about COVID. They lied about Russia collusion. They lied about the Ukraine impeachment trial.

And there’s so much more going on in Ukraine that nobody is talking about. You see such dishonesty when it comes to the history of Ukraine. You see dishonesty when it comes to the Azov Battalion, which is funded by the U.S. and NATO. I mean, you can find pictures of them online holding up the NATO flag and the swastika. And at the same time, their own emblem contains the black sun of the occult, which was a Nazi SS emblem. And it also contains the sideways, you know, lightning insignia of the SS. I mean, this is on throughout the Ukrainian military you can see that black sun of the occult on their body armor, even on the female soldiers who are paraded in front of the world as being, you know, such an example of Ukraine’s independence and spirit and nobility. Even they are wearing the black sun of the occult. And, you know, we want — the White House wants you to believe, well, this doesn’t matter; it’s just a small number of troops. It’s not true. The Azov Battalion has been murdering its way through eastern Ukraine.

HENRY: Yeah.

LOGAN: We don’t want to admit this. This was why Crimea voted for independence. This is why Crimea wanted to be with Russia.

HENRY: Sure.

LOGAN: Because we in the media, in the western media and in the west, won’t acknowledge the reality of what’s gone on: Western Ukraine backed the Nazis. It was a headquarters for the Nazis SS. The CIA under Allen Dulles actually gave immunity from prosecution to the Nazis of Ukraine from the Nuremberg trials. So there’s a long history of the United States and our intelligence agencies funding and arming Nazis in Ukraine. These are not, like, new neo-Nazi groups that sprung up. These are the actual Nazis. From the second World War who, if you go back to the Nuremberg trials, said that they were planning for a thousand-year reich. And so you have to really wonder as you look at this, when you know that the CIA sponsored the color revolution in Ukraine in 2013 and ’14, that they selected Ukraine’s leaders; go to Victoria Nuland’s leaked phone conversation where she and the U.S. ambassador are deciding who can lead Ukraine.

HENRY: Right.

LOGAN: I mean, there’s as much interference here as you could possibly imagine, before we even get to Hunter Biden, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Mitt Romney and all of their children who are employed — who earn millions — from Ukrainian gas companies.

Note disgraced former CNN and Fox News anchor Ed Henry, saying “yeah, sure, right” through that whole demented diatribe.

By the way, if you haven’t heard of this “network” Real America’s Voices” here’s a story from the Washington Post from a while back:

Two years after being cast out of the White House, Stephen K. Bannon spoke from a steep, dusty hill outside El Paso, asking for donations. The former investment banker and Hollywood producer wanted cash in 2019 for his latest quest, to privately build President Donald Trump’s stalled border wall.

Not many news outlets were paying attention — except for one focusing on his every word.

It wasn’t Fox News or Newsmax. It wasn’t even Breitbart News, the far-right website Bannon once led, using it to help remake the GOP and elect Trump.

The coverage came from an upstart network run by a little-known media mogul in Colorado, a felon with a record of unpaid taxes and a family history marked by tragedy and violence. The mogul, Robert J. Sigg, found news value in Bannon’s mission to the desert, which ultimately resulted in fraud charges.

When Bannon launched his own talk show in the fall of 2019, calling it “War Room,” he quickly handed over its distribution to Sigg.

More than two years later, the arrangement has paid off for both men. Sigg used “War Room” as a springboard for an expanded network of conservative hosts — bringing him the commercial opportunity he sought.

The network, Real America’s Voice, helped sustain Bannon despite his removal from YouTube, Spotify and other mainstream platforms. It brings his show into as many as 8 million homes hooked up to Dish satellite television, many in rural, conservative areas without reliable cable coverage.

The rise of Real America’s Voice, built around Bannon and distant from the traditional power structures of cable television and talk radio, reveals how the country’s fractured media landscape has empowered unconventional actors following market incentives toward more and more extreme content.Advertisement

“We were told fairly regularly we were Trump propaganda,” said a former Real America’s Voice producer, who, like about a dozen other current and former employees of Sigg’s business, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. “That is what our role was. That was the message from the top: ‘We’re a Trump propaganda network.’ That’s where the money was.”

Here’s a little bit more on Robert Sigg’s sordid past:

48-year-old Robert Sigg, has a long criminal history dating back decades.

He now lives in a sprawling Parker mansion on a hilltop overlooking the city.

We have learned he is in Mexico on business. He is the owner of Performance One, a  media company in Centennial.

Robert Sigg’s trouble with the law includes a federal conviction for bank fraud in 2004.

He was also arrested for first degree burglary and assault in Jefferson County.

The rap sheet goes on: Driving under the influence in Evans, selling and distributing dangerous drugs in Weld county, as well as assault and battery in Aurora.

Denver police arrested him for obstructing, and resisting arrest and disturbing the peace.

Robert Sigg was charged as an habitual traffic offender in Thornton.

Parker police arrested him for domestic violence and driving under the influence of drugs.

Cool, cool. Oh, and by the way, in 2012 his son Austin was convicted of murdering a 10 year old girl when he was 17. He’s currently serving a life sentence.

Very Fine People, all of them.

Wow Lara has issues pic.twitter.com/tXAUwaAdgA

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 9, 2020

https://twitter.com/Kris_Sacrebleu/status/1269847708958777345

Logan suffered a very serious attack in the Tahrir Square protests and one might be inclined to forgive her for being affected by that. But the truth is that she was a right winger long before that happened. And she’s not just a right winger, a right wing propagandist.

No one can be surprised by Logan spreading disinformation. Back in 2013 when she perpetrated an egregious Benghazi hoax on 60 Minutes and CBS News took months to properly deal with it. She even stayed at CBS until 2019!

I’m very surprised she didn’t end up on Fox News as a regular a long time ago. According to Wikipedia, “in 2019, she joined the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a conservative media company. In January 2020, she joined Fox Nation, a subscription streaming service run by Fox News.” And apparently Hannity has been pushing for her to be hired for the big show.

If you need reminding of her outrageous Benghazi hoax and the comments she made for years about “taking out” Pakistani Taliban sympathisers and showing the world that America is not to be trifled with etc, I wrote a bunch about it at the time. She’s a real piece of work, always has been.

Lara Logan remains in good standing at CBS News

by digby

… despite the fact that she is an overrated, hawkish stenographer for the military:

CBS News chairman and ’60 Minutes’ EP Jeff Fager held a meeting with CBS News staff on Tuesday and took questions about the fate of Lara Logan and Max McClellan, the journalists currently on a leave of absence in the wake of the controversial ’60 Minutes’ report on Benghazi, POLITICO has learned.

In the meeting, held with ‘CBS This Morning’ staffers, Fager said he did not know how long Logan and her producer would be on leave, and made no indication that they would be asked to resign in the wake of the now-retracted report, according to sources familiar with the meeting. Those sources said that Fager defended Logan as a valuable member of the ’60 Minutes’ team even as he acknolwedged the erroneous nature of the report.

“He did not throw her under the bus,” one source said of Fager’s remarks about Logan.

That’s nice. I guess it was a good thing she didn’t fall for a hoax about something that happened 30 years ago or she would have been in big trouble.

You can’t help but think of this:

In an effort reportedly intended to repair relations with the White House in the aftermath of CBS’ publication of unauthenticated memos concerning President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS president Andrew Heyward met with then-White House communications director Dan Bartlett in January 2005. According to Broadcasting and Cable magazine: “Heyward was ‘working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,’ our source says, ‘and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced.’ “

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Lara Logan’s slap on the wrist

by digby

Lara Logan has been asked to take a leave of absence due to the Benghazi hoax. The press release doesn’t say for how long.  This is the “internal report” that led to the request:

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

My review found that the Benghazi story aired by 60 Minutes on October 27 was deficient in several respects:

–From the start, Lara Logan and her producing team were looking for a different angle to the story of the Benghazi attack. They believed they found it in the story of Dylan Davies, written under the pseudonym, “Morgan Jones”. It purported to be the first western eyewitness account of the attack. But Logan’s report went to air without 60 Minutes knowing what Davies had told the FBI and the State Department about his own activities and location on the night of the attack.

–The fact that the FBI and the State Department had information that differed from the account Davies gave to 60 Minutes was knowable before the piece aired. But the wider reporting resources of CBS News were not employed in an effort to confirm his account. It’s possible that reporters and producers with better access to inside FBI sources could have found out that Davies had given varying and conflicting accounts of his story.

–Members of the 60 Minutes reporting team conducted interviews with Davies and other individuals in his book, including the doctor who received and treated Ambassador Stevens at the Benghazi hospital. They went to Davies’ employer Blue Mountain, the State Department, the FBI (which had interviewed Davies), and other government agencies to ask about their investigations into the attack. Logan and producer Max McClellan told me they found no reason to doubt Davies’ account and found no holes in his story. But the team did not sufficiently vet Davies’ account of his own actions and whereabouts that night.

–Davies told 60 Minutes that he had lied to his own employer that night about his location, telling Blue Mountain that he was staying at his villa, as his superior ordered him to do, but telling 60 Minutes that he then defied that order and went to the compound. This crucial point – his admission that he had not told his employer the truth about his own actions – should have been a red flag in the editorial vetting process.

–After the story aired, the Washington Post reported the existence of a so-called “incident report” that had been prepared by Davies for Blue Mountain in which he reportedly said he spent most of the night at his villa, and had not gone to the hospital or the mission compound. Reached by phone, Davies told the 60 Minutes team that he had not written the incident report, disavowed any knowledge of it, and insisted that the account he gave 60 Minutes was word for word what he had told the FBI. Based on that information and the strong conviction expressed by the team about their story, Jeff Fager defended the story and the reporting to the press.

–On November 7, the New York Times informed Fager that the FBI’s version of Davies’ story differed from what he had told 60 Minutes. Within hours, CBS News was able to confirm that in the FBI’s account of their interview, Davies was not at the hospital or the mission compound the night of the attack. 60 Minutes announced that a correction would be made, that the broadcast had been misled, and that it was a mistake to include Davies in the story. Later a State Department source also told CBS News that Davies had stayed at his villa that night and had not witnessed the attack.

–Questions have been raised about the recent pictures from the compound which were displayed at the end of the report, including a picture of Ambassador Stevens’ schedule for the day after the attack. Video taken by the producer-cameraman whom the 60 Minutes team sent to the Benghazi compound last month clearly shows that the pictures of the Technical Operations Center were authentic, including the picture of the schedule in the debris.

–Questions have also been raised about the role of Al Qaeda in the attack since Logan declared in the report that Al Qaeda fighters had carried it out. Al Qaeda’s role is the subject of much disagreement and debate. While Logan had multiple sources and good reasons to have confidence in them, her assertions that Al Qaeda carried out the attack and controlled the hospital were not adequately attributed in her report.

–In October of 2012, one month before starting work on the Benghazi story, Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the US Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the US should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story.

–The book, written by Davies and a co-author, was published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, part of the CBS Corporation. 60 Minutes erred in not disclosing that connection in the segment.

Al Ortiz
Executive Director of Standards and Practices
CBS News

That’s nice. But there’s more to it than that. Logan has a very distinct worldview and it shows in the stories she covers.

Remember, it wasn’t just the Benghazi story. She did several big 60 Minutes “exposés” on Afghanistan. And this is what she said to Marvin Kalb at the National Press Club about that war in 2011.

LARA LOGAN: What it means, what we originally– go back to your original aims when you invade– well, it wasn’t an invasion. The Afghans are very quick to point out that they were actually the ones that toppled the Taliban with U.S. help. There were less than several hundred U.S. personnel on the ground at the time. But the original aim was to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to insure that they were never able to threaten the national security interests of the United States ever again. That clearly is not the case.

And when you’re sitting down and you’re avoiding the hypocrisy of not putting the Taliban on the terror list because you want to preserve the right to sit down and negotiate with them and they’ll bring out every academic in Washington that they can find who will tell you that every insurgency in history has been won through negotiation and settlement, you don’t win it on the battlefield. Well, tell that to the Sri Lankans. I believe they just won their insurgency on the battlefield.

So, I mean for me, if you’re not– people think when I say this, that I’m advocating for war, I’m not advocating for war. I think if you’re going to go to war, you better go to war and you better win. But if you’re not, if you’re just going to loiter on the battlefield and mesaround with one disastrous political strategy after another, then get the hell out because you have no right to ask people to go and fight in your name because you’re lying to them.

The best analogy I can give you, what you’re doing to your U.S. troops on the ground, line up all hundred thousand or so of those troops, handcuff them behind their backs, give them a shove, send them straight into the Taliban guns. Because that’s effectively what you’re doing. The enemy is not in Afghanistan. The low hanging fruit, the expendable people, are in Afghanistan. The real enemy is across the border in Pakistan, and I’m not advocating for war in Pakistan. But there are a thousand things you could do to address that. As long as you are not going after the command and control and the true source of the enemy– and by the way, we have the capacity and the information to do that and we have not because of our foreign policy towards Pakistan– then you have no business being in the fight.

And when people say Karzai is not a strategic partner and he’s corrupt, really? So 30, 40 guys will strap on suicide bombs and they’ll go and blow themselves up in an attack on a U.S. base because they’re pissed off that the government’s corrupt? Give me a break. This is not about corruption. This is not about whether Karzai is a reliable strategic partner. That’s an excuse. That’s all it is.

MARVIN KALB: Cut it down to the chase. What do you think is really at the heart of the American effort now in Afghanistan?

LARA LOGAN: Get the hell out. That’s all we care about. It’s costing too much. We don’t want to pay for it, we don’t think the Afghans are worth a fight, it’s their problem and we want to get out of here.

MARVIN KALB: And at this particular point, if the U.S. were to work out a way of getting out without having accomplished its original purpose, then it sounds to me that you think it’s just been a waste?

LARA LOGAN: Yeah, it has, it’s been a waste. I mean, you have the locations. The Quetta Shura runs the Afghan war from the city of Quetta inside Pakistan.

MARVIN KALB: But to go in there, you’re crossing a national border.

LARA LOGAN: You don’t have to go in there, there’s plenty of ways. If you’ve got their phone numbers, as I know we have had for years, you don’t need to go across the border. 

MARVIN KALB: What do you do?

LARA LOGAN: You take them out the same way you took out al-Loki and Nek Muhammad and all the others that have been killed that way.

MARVIN KALB: Well.

LARA LOGAN: And you do it, you target not just the Quetta Shura, you target the Miran Shah Shura, the Peshawar Shura, the Haqqani Network. 

You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

Here is what she said a year later on America’s lily-livered policy in Afghanistan:

Which is very similar to the comments she made about Benghazi in her speech a month later:

I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.

If CBS thinks her comments about Benghazi show a bias, her comments about Afghanistan and Pakistan show exactly the same one.   She thinks that powerful “dark forces” are trying to destroy our way of life and evidently believes they are capable of doing it.  She believes that the US should be sending in “clandestine warriors” and drones to “take people out” to send messages and exact revenge. She has a particular hang-up about Pakistan and apparently wants the US government to “teach them a lesson.” She identifies very closely with the military brass and her work seems to be aimed at criticizing the pusillanimous politicians in Washington who refuse to allow the Generals to take the gloves off and do what needs to be done.  That is a pretty immature worldview which I doubt the Generals she so admires share, even if they find her a useful political tool. (Generals tend to be a little bit more sophisticated than that.)

In other words, she’s a hardcore, but somewhat shallow, warhawk and her work needs to be seen through that filter. Perhaps 60 Minutes doesn’t care about that and is willing to label her as an advocate for a particular point of view within the military. But she must be labeled that way because that is what she is.

You can watch the whole 60 Minutes piece on Afghanistan here.
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Lara Logan in her own words 10/12/2012

by digby

Here are her comments on Benghazi from that speech to the Better Government Association’s annual luncheon October 12, 2012, one month after the Benghazi attack:

When I look at what’s happening in Libya, there’s a big song and dance about whether this was a terrorist attack or a protest. And you just want to scream, for God’s sake, are you kidding me? The last time we were attacked like this was the USS Cole which was a prelude to 9/11. And you’re sending in the FBI to investigate? I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.

Here’s the whole speech which is mostly about journalism and her recent report from Afghanistan in which she asserted that al Qaeda and the Taliban were stronger than ever, the US was “surrendering” and that “our way of life is under attack” among many other very interesting observations. You really must watch the whole thing to get a sense of where she’s coming from.

Considering the current situation, this comment stands out:

There is a distinction between investigating something to find out what the real situation is and trying to prove something that you believe is true. And those are two very different things. The second one is the enemy of great journalism. And it’s a trap that is very easy to fall into. In fact it was my boss Jeff Fager who kindly reminded me of that fact at a certain point in the process and he was absolutely right about that.

I think it’s fine that Logan  truly believes that Islamic terrorism is an existential threat to the US and that we are all in mortal danger because of it.  She’s clearly got a strong point of view and that’s her privilege.In my view, she sounds like a right wing warblogger circa 2002 and therefore has very little credibility, but nonetheless, I’m not going to criticize her for believing what she believes and doing journalism based on those beliefs.

What isn’t acceptable is that her employers present her as a neutral observer, which she clearly is not. In fact, by her own admission, her bosses had to rein her in on that earlier story and remind her that she had an obligation to follow the evidence where it led. And yet they continued to show her as an unbiased journalist following the evidence in this Benghazi story even though she publicly made these very aggressive comments back in October of 2012.

Needless to say, the fact that she fell for such a clearly ridiculous hoax was due to her biases. She shows in that speech that she had already made up her mind about what happened. And 60 Minutes should have been professionally skeptical of her story because of that. Logan’s agenda blinded her to the fact that she was being played.

It’s a cautionary tale for any advocacy journalists. But that’s why putting your worldview on the table and having your editors and others around you know up front where you’re coming from is essential.  They can then openly challenge your biases and make sure you aren’t looking for proof where none exists. I think they were all trapped by the pretense that Lara Logan is an objective beat journalist. Had they properly categorized her as an aggressive military hawk who only one month after the event was already saying that the United States should “exact revenge” for the attack on Benghazi, they might have known that they needed to go to extra lengths to verify her “blockbuster” story on the subject.

I also think there’s something very odd about this speech.  Logan is talking to the “Better Government Association” not CPAC.  And her affect suggests that she thinks her views are commonly held conventional wisdom, which might have been true in 2003, but seems weirdly out of time ten years on.

It’s an odd speech and it was noted at the time as an odd speech:

[T]he foreign correspondent and 60 Minutes star skewered American policy in Afghanistan and Libya, called for a ramped-up military campaign against terrorists, and criticized the Obama administration and others for both underestimating the Taliban’s strength in Afghanistan and for tolerating Pakistan’s obvious coddling of terrorists killing American soldiers.

The Taliban and al Qaeda, she made clear, “want to destroy the West and us,” and we must fight fire with fire, She appeared to leave the assembled alternatively riveted and just a bit troubled by a critique with interventionist implications clearly drawn from her reporting.

As one nonprofit executive, a former magazine editor, put it the next day when asked to describe her speech: “Shoot ’em, bomb ’em, fuck ’em. They will kill your children.”

There is a rich history of foreign correspondents being outspoken and passionate in offering political commentary, especially those who have been caught in harm’s way. Logan herself was a victim of brutality; in 2011 the South Africa native was beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square while she covered the demonstrations prompted by President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. Such a harrowing experience would surely impact even the most politically cautious of journalists. Still, the sharp advocacy from such a prominent network reporter caught some in the Chicago crowd by surprise.

I have no idea if any of this was prompted by her horrible attack. But I do recall that even before that awful event, she was very critical of Michael Hastings’ “betrayal” of General McChrystal. She has revered the military for a long time and even her critical reporting on Iraq earlier in the decade was criticism for failing to unleash the military in order to “win.” I think she has always held these beliefs.

Update: Here’s Fox News’ Howard Kurtz on the story.

His guest James Pinkerton says this is not as big a deal as the Dan Rather national guard hoax because Dan Rather was obsessed with the Bush family.(“It will be a blip not a shipwreck.”) Because a hoax about an old story about the president’s youth is so much more important than one that is ongoing, has relevance to current foreign policy and national security and is even spilling over into domestic affairs since Lindsay Graham has put a hold on all presidential nominations in the wake of this bogus story.

It looks as if the Village is circling the wagons.

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It’s always a fool’s game trying to keep up with the latest right-wing outrage. Theirs is a profit-making enterprise — and the customer base is in a buying mood. In the last month or so, we’ve seen an unusually high volume of vomitous rhetorical spew coming from both elected Republican politicians and conservative media figures. I guess it’s their way of celebrating the holidays.

First, we had Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar distributing a noxious anime video depicting the killing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and attacking President Joe Biden. The Republican leadership shrugged their shoulders and it was left to the Democrats to take action, which they did by stripping Gosar of his committee assignments and censuring him.

In her floor speech on the subject, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., saying “The Jihad Squad member from Minnesota has paid her husband, and not her brother husband, the other one, over a million dollars in campaign funds.” A few days later Boebert was caught on camera joking around with laughing supporters about Omar being a suicide bomber. She did apologize on Twitter to “anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment,” but then accused Omar of anti-American rhetoric in a phone call.

Boebert and her bestie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., then exchanged insults with another Republican, Nancy Mace R-S.C., with Green calling Mace “trash” for criticizing Boebert and Mace saying, “bless her f–king heart,” leading Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker to dub them “The Plastics” after the nasty high school clique in the movie “Mean Girls.”

But despite the obvious immaturity of all those involved, that trivializes the issues involved.

This is the U.S. Congress we’re talking about, not WWE wrestling. The Islamophobia openly expressed by Boebert and Greene has a toxic effect on our culture at large. As Li Zhou of Vox reported:

Researchers have indeed found that Islamophobic rhetoric by politicians has real-world consequences and has been directly linked with hate speech targeted toward Muslim Americans. If Congress doesn’t impose more penalties regarding this incident, lawmakers could — whether they mean to or not — further normalize anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment, affecting not only Muslim lawmakers but millions of Muslim Americans as well.

Of course, it’s too much to expect Republicans to take any action against these people.

Rhetorical bomb throwers like Boebert and Greene raise huge amounts of money from their fans and are favorites of Donald Trump. In fact, Greene even went running to him during her spat with Mace apparently expecting him to take action against her — which he probably will. It remains to be seen if the Democrats will sanction Boebert as they have done with Green and Gosar but in an interview on Sunday, Omar said she is very confident that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will take “decisive action” this week.

But for all this bigotry and nastiness among GOP elected representatives, they’re amateurs compared to what’s happening in the conservative media.

There’s no need to recapitulate the ongoing horror that is the nightly Fox News Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham insult hours. Just know that they aren’t alone. Last week, we saw an act of character assassination that goes beyond even their worst. Fox Nation host Lara Logan said that people all over the world are comparing NIH scientist Anthony Fauci to the Nazi Joseph Mengele:

Fox host Lara Logan says that people tell her that Dr. Fauci doesn't represent science, but represents Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor known as the "Angel of Death" for performing medical experiments at Auschwitz: "I am talking about people all across the world are saying this" pic.twitter.com/fF2DAWfG7d

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) November 30, 2021

It’s a truly stunning statement and one which you would think would instantly garner a response from the network. But so far, crickets. She hasn’t appeared on the network but they haven’t said anything either. And people are asking, “what happened to Lara Logan?” the former glamorous foreign correspondent :

Brian Stelter: "By all appearances, she’s been secretly sidelined. Fox is yet to comment or denounce her remarks. This week’s awfulness raises another question, one that people ask me all the time. What happened to her? What happened to Lara Logan?" pic.twitter.com/bwex4Fm4gx

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 5, 2021

Actually, nothing happened to Laura Logan.

She may have joined the ranks of full-blown Fox News trolls but it was clear she was a right-winger for years when she was working for CBS. Logan had very strong opinions about America’s handling of terrorism, the military and war and she didn’t hide it. For instance in 2011, she appeared with Marvin Kalb at the National Press club and suggested that the US needed to get tough with Pakistan:

You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

In another speech to the Better Government Association in Chicago, after the attack on the embassy in Benghazi, she said this:

I hope to God that you are sending in your best clandestine warriors to exact revenge and let the world know that the United States will not be attacked on its own soil, its ambassadors will not be murdered and the United States will not stand by and do nothing about it.

It was more than obvious that Logan had a strong right wing point of view and that she was prone to bloodthirsty hyperbole. So it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise when in 2013 she was caught in a major scandal over a big blockbuster story on Benghazi for 60 Minutes which turned out to be a hoax. She relied on a contractor who went by the name “Morgan Jones” who said he was an eyewitness to the attack and told her that the American government was slow to respond and totally unprepared. He even claimed that he climbed the wall and fought off the terrorists in hand-to-hand combat and Logan hailed him as a hero.Advertisement:

It turned out this man, whose real name is Dylan Davies, was nowhere near the compound that night. In the investigation that followed it was revealed by the rest of the news media that all the facts were easily debunked but Logan failed to check them out. 60 Minutes had to pull the story and issue a retraction and Logan apologized. But she wasn’t fired. In fact, she remained with the network for five more years. When she finally left she immediately started caterwauling about “the liberal media” and ran first to the far-right broadcast network Sinclair and then signed on with Fox.

Her reporting was taken as face value for years when she worked at CBS and even the Benghazi hoax scandal wasn’t seen as a matter of her bias but rather a mistake even though it was right in front of them. Her show on Fox Nation today is unironically called “Lara Logan Has No Agenda.”

Comparing Dr. Fauci to Joseph Mengele and calling Ilhan Omar a jihadist suicide bomber is now just mainstream right-wing rhetoric, rewarded with tons of money and attention from the base of the Republican party. And it’s the natural consequence of allowing people like Lara Logan to shape the mainstream media narratives that have defined our politics for years. 

Salon

Logan got more than the DaviesMorgan story wrong

by digby

Did Lara Logan have an agenda? Readers of this blog know that I think she does.  (I also believe she is a mediocre journalist with an excessively dramatic worldview that makes her reporting very suspect.) The following comments alone, made just a month after the Benghazi attack, leave little doubt in my mind about where she’s coming from:

And now McClatchey has helpfully dug into the rest of the 60 Minutes Benghazi story (aside from their hilariously unbelievable source) and have found a whole lot of misleading information:

Logan’s mea culpa said nothing about other weaknesses in the report that a line-by-line review of the broadcast’s transcript shows. McClatchy obtained the transcript from LexisNexis, a legal research service.

The report repeatedly referred to al Qaida as solely responsible for the attack on the compound, and made no mention of Ansar al Shariah, the Islamic extremist group that controls and provides much of the security in restive Benghazi and that has long been suspected in the attack. While the two organizations have worked together in Libya, experts said they have different aims – al Qaida has global objectives while Ansar al Shariah is focused on turning Libya into an Islamic state.

It is an important distinction, experts on those groups said. Additionally, al Qaida’s role, if any, in the attack has not been determined, and Logan’s narration offered no source for her repeated assertion that it had been…

Logan claimed that “it’s now well established that the Americans were attacked by al Qaida in a well-planned assault.” But al Qaida has never claimed responsibility for the attack, and the FBI, which is leading the U.S. investigation, has never named al Qaida as the sole perpetrator. Rather it is believed a number of groups were part of the assault, including members and supporters of al Qaida and Ansar al Shariah as well as attackers angered by a video made by an American that insulted Prophet Muhammad. The video spurred angry protests outside Cairo hours beforehand.

That clip above shows that she “knew” it was al-Qaeda just a month after the attacks. And it appears that she never questioned her assumption.

Another questionable assertion in the “60 Minutes” report was Logan’s unsourced reference to the Benghazi Medical Center as “under the control of al Qaida terrorists,” an assertion that McClatchy correspondents on the ground at the time and subsequent reporting in Benghazi indicates is untrue.

Around midnight, after the attack on the diplomatic compound, looters who descended on the site discovered Stevens in a safe room and took him to the medical center, where a doctor tried to revive him for 45 minutes before pronouncing him dead.

In the “60 Minutes” report, Davies, the discredited security contractor, claimed to have snuck into the hospital, where he saw Stevens, even though the hospital was “under the control of al Qaida terrorists.”

On the night of the attack, the medical center, whose compound includes several building in addition to the relatively modern, multi-story hospital itself, was being guarded by Ansar al Shariah. Libyans residents McClatchy spoke to said the group’s guards never stopped patients from entering but were there primarily to protect the nurses and doctors inside.

The Libyan Herald, an English language news outlet, reported just three days before the diplomatic compound was attacked that the Libyan health minister and the French Ambassador to Libya, Antoine Sivan, had visited the facility to break ground on an expansion. Had the hospital been under al Qaida control, it is unlikely doctors could have spent nearly an hour trying save Stevens’ life or that the health minister of the government it seeks to undo would have been allowed to enter the hospital.

Read more here. It goes on. And on.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that Logan has very strong beliefs about the al-Qaeda threat and believes she’s doing something important. But being an advocacy journalist, as she obviously is, (although undeclared and misrepresented as “objective” by 60 Minutes) does not relieve you of an obligation to get the facts straight and tell the whole truth. This piece clearly failed to do that on almost every level.

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Logan: “I would give up a toilet and a hot meal and a bed any day for a story that’s real”

by digby

I think we may be getting past he point where anyone can say that CBS didn’t know that Logan is a major hawk. Here she is at the National Press Club talking to Marvin Kalb.

Here she tells it like it is on Afghanistan in her inimitable way:

LARA LOGAN: What it means, what we originally– go back to your original aims when you invade– well, it wasn’t an invasion. The Afghans are very quick to point out that they were actually the ones that toppled the Taliban with U.S. help. There were less than several hundred U.S. personnel on the ground at the time. But the original aim was to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to insure that they were never able to threaten the national security interests of the United States ever again. That clearly is not the case.

And when you’re sitting down and you’re avoiding the hypocrisy of not putting the Taliban on the terror list because you want to preserve the right to sit down and negotiate with them and they’ll bring out every academic in Washington that they can find who will tell you that every insurgency in history has been won through negotiation and settlement, you don’t win it on the battlefield. Well, tell that to the Sri Lankans. I believe they just won their insurgency on the battlefield.

So, I mean for me, if you’re not– people think when I say this, that I’m advocating for war, I’m not advocating for war. I think if you’re going to go to war, you better go to war and you better win. But if you’re not, if you’re just going to loiter on the battlefield and mesaround with one disastrous political strategy after another, then get the hell out because you have no right to ask people to go and fight in your name because you’re lying to them.

The best analogy I can give you, what you’re doing to your U.S. troops on the ground, line up all hundred thousand or so of those troops, handcuff them behind their backs, give them a shove, send them straight into the Taliban guns. Because that’s effectively what you’re doing. The enemy is not in Afghanistan. The low hanging fruit, the expendable people, are in Afghanistan. The real enemy is across the border in Pakistan, and I’m not advocating for war in Pakistan. But there are a thousand things you could do to address that. As long as you are not going after the command and control and the true source of the enemy– and by the way, we have the capacity and the information to do that and we have not because of our foreign policy towards Pakistan– then you have no business being in the fight.

And when people say Karzai is not a strategic partner and he’s corrupt, really? So 30, 40 guys will strap on suicide bombs and they’ll go and blow themselves up in an attack on a U.S. base because they’re pissed off that the government’s corrupt? Give me a break. This is not about corruption. This is not about whether Karzai is a reliable strategic partner. That’s an excuse. That’s all it is.

MARVIN KALB: Cut it down to the chase. What do you think is really at the heart of the American effort now in Afghanistan?

LARA LOGAN: Get the hell out. That’s all we care about. It’s costing too much. We don’t want to pay for it, we don’t think the Afghans are worth a fight, it’s their problem and we want to get out of here.

MARVIN KALB: And at this particular point, if the U.S. were to work out a way of getting out without having accomplished its original purpose, then it sounds to me that you think it’s just been a waste?

LARA LOGAN: Yeah, it has, it’s been a waste. I mean, you have the locations. The Quetta Shura runs the Afghan war from the city of Quetta inside Pakistan.

MARVIN KALB: But to go in there, you’re crossing a national border.

LARA LOGAN: You don’t have to go in there, there’s plenty of ways. If you’ve got their phone numbers, as I know we have had for years, you don’t need to go across the border.

MARVIN KALB: What do you do?

LARA LOGAN: You take them out the same way you took out al-Loki and Nek Muhammad and all the others that have been killed that way.

MARVIN KALB: Well.

LARA LOGAN: And you do it, you target not just the Quetta Shura, you target the Miran Shah Shura, the Peshawar Shura, the Haqqani Network. You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

I’ve spent several hours now perusing her comments in various forums. And her worldview is eccentric. She’s not political at least in partisan terms. What she is, is contemptuous of all academics, politicians and diplomats in the way I have often observed the military brass to be contemptuous of their civilian leadership. That’s who she seems to identify with most closely. (At least certain members of the military — she’s critical of Petraeus.) And frankly at least half of what she says sounds like utter bullshit although she offers it up with such conviction I can see why people might back off questioning her.

But she is ideological, there’s no doubt about it. In fact, she’s right out of the cartoon Frank Gaffney school of Muslim fearmongering:

When I say an American perspective, I really mean from a western perspective because the world has been quick to divide this fight into American and non-American. And I don’t believe in that division. I think the division is between western and non-western. I don’t want to put simply a religious name on it. It’s for people who believe in the way of life that we believe in, and people who believe in an alternative way of life that goes back centuries to what I call a very dark time.

She also believes there are white hats in the middle east but it’s hard to tell if they change places or if she has an idiosyncratic way of identifying them. One thing is quite clear, she believes that we could “defeat” the Taliban, al Qaeda (and apparently Pakistan) if we had the will to do it with the only kind of ultra violence they can understand. We just haven’t killed enough of them (and attached enough cheap movie dialog threats to go with them) to get our message across.

I think my biggest takeaway from all this is just how insufferably arrogant and conceited this person is, with a flair for drama that would make even Clair Danes in Homeland blush with embarrassment if asked to deliver these lines without laughing:

MARVIN KALB: How do you see that yourself? Do you find yourself more comfortable doing the war than the summit?

LARA LOGAN: Yes, without question, and more invested in it. It requires more of you, it asks you to find out who you are and it asks you what’s truly important. I would give up a toilet and a hot meal and a bed any day for a story that’s real. I can’t stand to dabble in things that are not real. They don’t mean anything. I mean, politics is critically important, but it doesn’t burn that fire in the way it does to be out there in the most impossible situation doing something that is truly the difference between life and death.

Oy …

Lara Logan is obviously a very brave person. She likes being in dangerous situations and she’s good on TV. So I get why she’s so successful. But from what I’ve been seeing and reading these past few days I think she’s probably always been a pretty mediocre journalist with an ego the size of Jupiter. She’s not the first “foreign correspondent” to fall in love with herself and be convinced that  time in the war zone gives her unique strategic insight. (It doesn’t.) But her little “error” on the Benghazi story should make everyone go back and reevaluate her work.

It’s interesting that while she compliments Richard Engel for his work she says she disagrees with his analysis. I’ve always thought Engel was one of the best of the TV guys. I’d be curious to know exactly what they disagreed about. And she thinks Dexter Filkins is great, which is true. But honestly, I don’t Logan can hold a candle to either one of those reporters. She’s not nearly as good as she thinks she is and probably never has been.

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On Logan

by digby

I’ve been asked several times today why I’m “shying away” from the Lara Logan story, as if I have something to hide or am ambivalent about it. For the record, as a woman this story is particularly awful for me, since when I was a young teenager I was molested by a male mob in a large crowd, although it sounds as if I got off very easy compared to Logan. More importantly, as a human being, this kind of thing is so disturbing and dark that it makes you lose faith in your fellow man altogether.

Without knowing who the perpetrators were or what their agenda was, it’s hard to know how to think of this in light of all the talk of freedom and democracy talk in Tahrir Square over the past month. But regardless, I think it’s fairly clear that the idea of universal human rights for women isn’t yet at the top of the agenda — anywhere. I’ve been told by some American feminists that it’s wrong to question that — “cultural interference” or something. But I don’t know why that should be. Women make up half the world’s population so why their position in society should be ignored when people are celebrating liberty and democracy eludes me.

And anyway, judging from the comments about this awful event, America isn’t much better so I don’t think we can attribute this to “cultural” differences at all. Echidne has a rundown here. It’s enough to make you puke. This is a species problem.

Update: Media Matters has more on disgusting reaction to Logan’s assault, here. Ugh.

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I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.)

Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic:

In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

The article isn’t about that, however. It’s about a secret communications back channel among current American right wing players. There is documentary evidence and it’s chilling:

I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

Among the topics are the “Biden Regime” which they think is in an alliance with Islamic terrorists, hostility to democracy, hatred for Palestinians, Iran among other things, all of which are expressed in especially violent, nihilistic terms.

The author points out that while there are many conspiracy nuts (such as Lara Logan) there are also a lot of people who you might ordinarily consider to be establishment players:

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”

Collectively, Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right. The roster of invitees includes:

-Icons of the MAGA ecosphere such as Tucker Carlson, the most revered figure among group chat participants, with the exception of the Supreme Leader himself; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.; and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser. Flynn has participated, Carlson only minimally, and Guilfoyle not at all.

-Current and former lawmakers and aides, such as Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus; Vish Burra, who was director of operations for Congressman George Santos; and Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 who was arrested last November after harassing an Egyptian halal street cart vendor in New York City for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

These are not harmless cranks. They are “of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” Many of them will be influential in a new Trump administration.

Read the whole thing if you can.