Zarate: Career imperialist tool. Naturally, much in demand.
Patrice Greanville
The following exchange caught my eye the other day. I’d like to share it with you. CBS News seemed to be asking, in good faith,
Why should the U.S. care about violent Venezuela protests?
The official description read:
|Flash Points: CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan talks with CBS News Senior National Security Analyst Juan Zarate about the anti-government protests in Venezuela and why the U.S. has an interest in resolving the unrest.
Turns out the question was only bait to feed the public a quick poison pill regarding the difficult situation in Venezuela.
A look at the participants in the exchange was not reassuring. The main reason is that CBS was again tapping Juan Zarate to educate its audience.
Who the hell is Juan Zarate?
The first thing you need to know about this guy is that he’s a proud and even arrogant neocon, the same breed of policy and propaganda malefactor as another repugnant creature in the same employ, Elliot Abrams. His ilk is numerous in the American corporate-governmental establishment.
A well educated corporate imperialist—to be precise the kind of military-industrial-media vermin that abound in the official punditocracy—Juan Zarate was a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Combating Terrorism during the George W. Bush administration. As our readers will recall, George W Bush remains a war criminal at large, and perhaps (until Obama) one of the worst presidents in recent memory. Zarate—according to the Wiki profile—serves as Senior Adviser at the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, Transnational Threats Project. This is where these assholes go to get big bucks as they await more gigs in the government and other cushy highfalutin assignments throughout the corporate sector, as his current job with CBS attests. The Wiki adds, “In his previous role, Zarate was responsible for developing and overseeing the effective implementation of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism strategy.”[1][2]
No, by no means reassuring.
It’s of course indecent to be putting a critical question about a crisis flashpoint with enormous implications for world peace not to mention political justice to a man deeply embedded in the corporatist apparatus, one with long and unapologetic service to the Bush regime, but the American media suffers from no such ethical qualms. This squalid fact is compounded by the servilism and imbecilic ignorance of many of their on-camera talent, a fact painfully demonstrated by the softball leading questions pitched by the CBS zombie du jour, oops, I mean State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan. (Oh, never be impressed by their titles, just pure hot air to impress each other, part of the deceit that runs deep in corporate corridors.)
Judge for yourselves.
Media critic Patrice Greanville is founding editor of The Greanville Post.
