In a MASTERPIECE of UNDERSTATEMENT HYPCOCRISY, the New York Times notices... the Bush administration "PUMPING OUT A FOG of FEAR and DISINFORMATION" to push its agenda through Congress (and against the American people) this year.
YA THINK??! Just to set the record straight, ARTHUR SULZBERGER, owner/publisher of the New York Times, gave FREE REIGN to Right-Wing Likudnik chickenhawk WILLIAM SAFIRE - FORMER, UNREPETENT NIXON SPEECHWRITER - to TRASH the Clinton-Gore administration, Safire's callow columns including his infamous "INDICTMENTS WILL BE HANDED DOWN THIS WEEK" (against, Mr. Safire assured us, Bill or Hillary Clinton, for any of 1,000 pre-Monica offenses), or Safire's even more assinine column, headlined thusly in Mr. Sulzberger's Times, "HILLARY IS A CONGENITAL LIAR." (Note: "congenital" implies a genetic defect apparent at birth. This editorial smear of Mr. Safire's echoes the Nazi propaganda smear that "all Jews are born 'congenital liars'.")
Speaking of, ILLEGAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE (SPYING, with NO OVERSIGHT, by the dictators of government over the entire American populace) is only the half of it. Today's great op-ed by one of the Times' handful of honest commentators, Frank Rich, finally gets to the crux of the matter: that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the US government are demanding KGB / GESTAPO powers to round up, detain, torture, and/or kill any "detainees" they so desire, merely by labelling said detainees "terrorist suspects!" and making the documents regarding their arrest/torture/execution into "STATE SECRETS". America has been truly "DUMBED DOWN" - made incredibly stupid - if we don't realize that Bush-Cheney are requesting exactly those GESTAPO/SS DEATH CAMP/KGB death camp powers.
Well, at least the TIMES, and their AIPAC (Likud/neo-con warmongers) cohorts, FINALLY NOTICE that ANN COULTER likes Jews no more more than she like Muslim terrarists, female voters, 9-11 widows, or anti-war Iraq combat veterans.
Maybe there is hope for the New York Slimes after all - better late than never in the race to the Right-Wing Apocalypse!
-------------------------------------------
FRANK RICH, nyt op-ed: "THE GOOD GERMANS AMONG US"
14 October 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14rich2.html
Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing torture. President Bush gave his standard response: “THIS GOVERNMENT DOES NOT TORTURE PEOPLE" [Bush lied.] Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago
=========================================
Spies, Lies and FISA
New York Times unsigned (editorial board) Editorial
Published: October 14, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/opinion/14sun1.html
As Democratic lawmakers try to repair a deeply flawed bill on electronic eavesdropping, the White House is pumping out the same fog of fear and disinformation it used to push the bill through Congress this summer. President Bush has been telling Americans that any change would deny the government critical information, make it easier for terrorists to infiltrate, expose state secrets, and make it harder “to save American lives.”
There is no truth to any of those claims. No matter how often Mr. Bush says otherwise, there is also no disagreement from the Democrats about the need to provide adequate tools to fight terrorists. The debate is over whether this should be done constitutionally, or at the whim of the president.
......Ever since 9/11, we have watched Republican lawmakers help Mr. Bush shred the Constitution in the name of fighting terrorism. We have seen Democrats acquiesce or retreat in fear. It is time for that to stop.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Washington Post LEADS the media WHORES in Snarky TRASHING of Al Gore...
THEY'RE AT IT AGAIN! The LIARS, TRAITORS, THIEVES, and COWARDLY CHARACTER ASSASSINS of the WASHINGTON WHORE POST are out there LYING for fun and profit... continuing the Right-Wing march to turn America into an electorally disenfranchised, economically segregated third-world Banana Republic dictatorship.....
MSNBC's ALEX WITT
joins the Gore trashing: first she snidely tries to tease up the SNL spoof of Vice President Gore's "trophy awards" as being THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS about Gore's Nobel Prize, and then she makes conversation with CNN's reporter at the Bush residence in Texas, making CHAT seem more important than General Sanchez's recent media accusations that Bush's Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, ORDERED SYSTEMATIC TORTURE and abuse of Iraqi prisoners WHEREVER they were captured and held by US forces in Iraq, and that the Bush-Cheney White House was guilty of INCOMPETENCE in planning, executing, and overseeing that war.
Ms. Witt - you are a CHEAP TALKING BIMBO BLONDE NEWS ANCHOR of the exact sort that musician Don Henley wrote about in his song about media whores, Dirty Laundry
In a related story, Jeffry Feldman at HuffingtonPost catches this NY Times Bob Herbert commentary, Herbert noticing the grim truth: that the American media TRASHED Al Gore in 2000 based on Gore's personality, not policies or leadership, even though Texas Governor George W. Bush had far more "character" and personality shortcomings than the Vice President who actually went to Vietnam as a war correspondent (Mr. Bush infamously ducked out of his Vietnam war era Texas Air National Guard duty, never even reporting for a make-work assignment outside of Texas at an Alabama ANG station, after then Lt. Bush _refused_ to take an Air Force flight physical exam as ordered as part of his million-dollar F-102 flight training.)
=====================================
Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again
By Robert Parry
October 13, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101307.html
When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.
That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.
But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.
Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure English judge.
Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a news story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR2007101102134.html [by Post minion Mary Jordan]
quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.”
Burton ruled that English schools could show the film but only with a cautionary advisory for students.
Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN, quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.
Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three words together.
Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found “nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”
For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who “started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”
Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]
However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as the “Inconvenient Untruth.”
Who Is Judge Burton?
Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase “nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on Gore’s lectures about the topic.
Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice, he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”
Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said, “This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]
Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more like quibbles than anything “significant.”
At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”
Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.
But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth” claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.
While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.
The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]
Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe. [See report from Friends of the Earth International.]
Evacuation Begun
Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.
“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75 Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …
“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves. Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater, which expands when heated.
“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau, Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island, Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before they slip off the map for good.”
Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be finicky at best.
Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.
“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.
But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea level would occur quickly or even at all.
Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.
“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of west Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.
While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with what Gore actually said.
Gulf Stream
Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.” For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.
Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow down.
Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.
Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.
Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”
But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words “an exact fit”?
In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,” although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.
Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”
While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.
Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans.
But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.
Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.
Disappearing Snow
Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.
Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph reported.
While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point of view.
Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.
Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of climate change from other problems, such as pollution.
[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.), Oct. 11, 2007.]
In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease, even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.
That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can make little controversies big and big controversies little.
Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to fall into line.
The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces, calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”
It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.
MSNBC's ALEX WITT
joins the Gore trashing: first she snidely tries to tease up the SNL spoof of Vice President Gore's "trophy awards" as being THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS about Gore's Nobel Prize, and then she makes conversation with CNN's reporter at the Bush residence in Texas, making CHAT seem more important than General Sanchez's recent media accusations that Bush's Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, ORDERED SYSTEMATIC TORTURE and abuse of Iraqi prisoners WHEREVER they were captured and held by US forces in Iraq, and that the Bush-Cheney White House was guilty of INCOMPETENCE in planning, executing, and overseeing that war. Ms. Witt - you are a CHEAP TALKING BIMBO BLONDE NEWS ANCHOR of the exact sort that musician Don Henley wrote about in his song about media whores, Dirty Laundry
I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something, something I can use
People love it when you lose, they love dirty laundry
Well, I could've been an actor, but I wound up here
I just have to look good, I don't have to be clear
Come and whisper in my ear, give us dirty laundry
The Bubble headed bleach-blonde, comes on at five....
She will tell you about the 'plane crash, with a gleam in her eyes."
In a related story, Jeffry Feldman at HuffingtonPost catches this NY Times Bob Herbert commentary, Herbert noticing the grim truth: that the American media TRASHED Al Gore in 2000 based on Gore's personality, not policies or leadership, even though Texas Governor George W. Bush had far more "character" and personality shortcomings than the Vice President who actually went to Vietnam as a war correspondent (Mr. Bush infamously ducked out of his Vietnam war era Texas Air National Guard duty, never even reporting for a make-work assignment outside of Texas at an Alabama ANG station, after then Lt. Bush _refused_ to take an Air Force flight physical exam as ordered as part of his million-dollar F-102 flight training.)
In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds. Mr. Gore was taken to task for his taste in clothing and for such grievous offenses as sighing or, allegedly, rolling his eyes. It was a given that at a barbecue everyone would rush to be with his opponent. We've paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn't seem to know up from down. He's hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He's blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt. I could go on.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13herbert.html
=====================================
Smearing Al Gore: Here We Go Again
By Robert Parry
October 13, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101307.html
When people wonder how the United States ended up in today’s nightmarish predicament, a big part of the answer is that the right-wing message machine and the mainstream U.S. news media distorted reality at key moments about key people, perhaps most notably Al Gore during Campaign 2000.
That ability to twist reality has been a major focus of our reporting at Consortiumnews.com over the years [See, for instance, “Al Gore v. the Media” or “Protecting Bush/Cheney.”] Much of this work is reprised in our new book, Neck Deep.
But even now – when the consequences of the news media’s earlier “war on Gore” can be measured in the horrible death toll that has followed the Bush presidency – it appears that little has changed.
Lies and distortions about Al Gore remain an easy political commodity to sell, as we have seen in the renewed assault on Gore in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
As the news spread about the Nobel Committee’s recognition of Gore’s work publicizing the threat from global warming, both the right-wing media and major news outlets geared up to hype criticism of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in a ruling by an obscure English judge.
Hours before the Nobel Prize announcement, the Washington Post ran a news story
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR2007101102134.html [by Post minion Mary Jordan]
quoting High Court Judge Michael Burton as detecting “nine errors” in the documentary and asserting that the alleged mistakes “arise in the context of alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.”
Burton ruled that English schools could show the film but only with a cautionary advisory for students.
Burton’s ruling became a cause celebre for the American Right’s powerful media, which used it to discredit both Gore and the movement seeking to stop global warming. Mainstream news outlets, such as CNN, quickly fell into line, citing Burton’s ruling almost every time Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was mentioned on Oct. 12.
Right-wing Internet postings soon added the word “significant” between the words “nine” and “errors,” albeit without quotes around those three words together.
Lo and behold, on Oct. 13, the Washington Post ran a snarky editorial about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize claiming that Burton’s ruling had found “nine significant errors” – now put together in quotes. The editorial faulted Gore for “factual misstatements and exaggerations.”
For his part, Gore has sought to play down the significance of Burton’s ruling, much as he tried to finesse press misstatements about him during Campaign 2000. Rather than confronting false quotes then about him claiming to have “invented the Internet” and to be the one who “started” the Love Canal clean-up, Gore tried to make light of the misunderstandings so he wouldn’t be further bashed as “defensive.”
Similarly now, Gore’s spokesman Kalee Kreider cited the positive side of Burton’s ruling, saying Gore was “gratified that the courts verified that the central argument of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is supported by the scientific community.” [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2007]
However, like the “invented the Internet” canard and the press misquotes about Love Canal, Burton’s ruling quickly became the supposedly definitive judgment in dismissing the Gore documentary as the “Inconvenient Untruth.”
Who Is Judge Burton?
Yet, regardless of where the Post editorial writers lifted the phrase “nine significant errors” – clearly not from their own news story – the more significant question should be: Why is Judge Burton suddenly the arbiter of truth on the complicated subject of global warming and on Gore’s lectures about the topic.
Burton, in his early 60s, is best known as an “employment appeal tribunal judge.” Though his career has attracted little public notice, he earned praise from the far-right, anti-immigrant British National Party for issuing a ruling in 2005 that applied the nation’s Race Relations Act “to cover the racial rights of White people.”
Hailing what it called Burton’s history-making ruling, the BNP said, “This now means that any organisations or companies that discriminate against a member of the British National Party are guilty of anti-white racism.” [BNP statement on Aug. 10, 2005]
Burton’s criticisms of Gore’s power-point presentation also read more like quibbles than anything “significant.”
At one point, for instance, Gore shows a photo of flooding on a Pacific island and in reference to rising sea levels states, “That’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand.”
Gore’s brief remark doesn’t spell out exactly which islands he was referring to or whether the evacuations were permanent or temporary.
But Burton took Gore to task over the sentence. As recounted by the Telegraph (U.K.), Burton’s ruling states that “An Inconvenient Truth” claims that low-lying Pacific atolls “are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming” but that there is no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.
While Gore’s single sentence could be criticized as imprecise or confusing, Burton is not entirely correct either.
The leaders of Tuvalu, a string of islands between Hawaii and Australia, announced in 2001 that they had no choice but to abandon their island-country because of rising sea levels and asked permission to relocate all 11,000 inhabitants to New Zealand. [See article by the Earth Policy Institute, Nov. 15, 2001.]
Since then, New Zealand has agreed to a plan for the gradual evacuation of Tuvalu and other Pacific islands facing environmental catastrophe. [See report from Friends of the Earth International.]
Evacuation Begun
Contrary to Burton’s ruling, the evacuation of Tuvalu already has begun, according to travel reporter Janine Israel in a 2004 story about the expected loss of these picturesque islands to potential tourists.
“Over recent decades, the remote Pacific nation [of Tuvalu] has been beset by frequent floods, cyclones, and rising sea levels.” Israel wrote. “Tuvalu’s 10,500 inhabitants have already begun the dreaded process of evacuating to New Zealand, which has agreed to accept 75 Tuvaluans per year as environmental refugees. …
“Tuvalu has been given 50 years before it sinks beneath the waves. Although the melting of glaciers and icecaps is partly responsible for the rise in sea level, it is also due to the warming of the seawater, which expands when heated.
“And it isn’t alone. Other low-lying island nations are at the frontline of climate change. Kiribati, the Cook Islands, Palau, Vanuatu, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Republic of the Marshall Island, Tokelau, and the Republic of Maldives are all gearing up for a Noah’s Flood. For intrepid travelers, these are the countries to visit before they slip off the map for good.”
Given this unfolding tragedy, Burton’s querulous point would seem to be finicky at best.
Judge Burton also blasts Gore for supposedly suggesting that “in the near future” a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by the melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland.
“This is distinctly alarmist,” the judge wrote, arguing that sea levels may indeed rise that much “but only after, and over, millennia” and the idea that the melting would occur “in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus,” the Telegraph reported.
But in “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore never said the 20-foot rise in sea level would occur quickly or even at all.
Referring to Antarctica’s giant ice cap, Gore said, “If this were to go, sea levels world wide would go up 20 feet.” A similar rise could result from the complete thawing of Greenland’s ice cover, Gore said.
“If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of west Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida,” Gore said as slides showed what a 20-foot rise in sea levels would do to coastlines around the world.
While Burton’s ruling fits with the characterization of Gore’s comments as popularized in the right-wing news media, it doesn’t match up with what Gore actually said.
Gulf Stream
Judge Burton also puts words in Gore’s mouth in other alleged “errors.” For instance, he notes that Gore’s documentary refers to the danger of global warming “shutting down the Ocean Conveyor,” which powers the Gulf Stream that moderates temperatures in Western Europe.
Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. agency which shared the Nobel Prize with Gore, Burton said it’s “very unlikely” that the Ocean Conveyor would shut down, though it might slow down.
Again, however, Burton is adopting a contentious interpretation of Gore’s comments. Gore refers to the shutting down of the Ocean Conveyor in a historical context, when a vast reservoir of North American ice melted and flooded into the North Atlantic, causing a disruption of the Gulf Stream and an ice age in Europe.
Gore’s description of this historic event suggests that something similar could occur if the Greenland ice cap melted, but again Burton is exaggerating Gore’s comments before attacking them.
Similarly, Burton asserts that Gore claimed that two graphs – one representing CO2 levels and the other global temperatures – showed “an exact fit.” The judge ruled that while there is general scientific agreement that there is a connection, “the two graphs do not establish what Mr. Gore asserts.”
But what did Gore actually assert and where did the judge get the words “an exact fit”?
In that segment of the film, Gore doesn’t use the phrase “exact fit,” although he does joke that a sixth-grade classmate who once asked a teacher if the continents of Africa and South America ever “fit together” might have a similar comment about the two graphs.
Gore then states, “The relation is actually very complicated but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others and it is this, when there is more carbon dioxide the temperature gets warmer because it traps more heat from the sun.”
While there are legitimate questions about the precise correlation between past changes in CO2 and earth temperatures, Burton ignores Gore’s admission that “the relation is actually very complicated” and instead puts the words “exact fit” into Gore’s mouth.
Judge Burton plays a similar trick regarding Gore’s references to the destruction from Hurricane Katrina and other powerful storms. Burton claims that there is “insufficient evidence” to support Gore’s supposed claim that global warming caused Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans.
But Gore never makes that direct connection. He does show footage of extreme weather from around the globe, which many scientists believe has been made worse by rising temperatures, but Gore never specifically attributes Katrina or the other examples of flooding to global warming.
Again, Burton has set up a straw man and knocked it down.
Disappearing Snow
Burton faults Gore, too, for attributing the disappearance of snow caps on Mt. Kilimanjaro and the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The judge ruled that scientists haven’t established that the receding of ice and the worsening of droughts are primarily attributable to human-caused climate change.
Regarding Lake Chad, Burton said “it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability,” the Telegraph reported.
While Burton is entitled to his scientific opinions, Gore’s concern that warming temperatures have reduced snow cover and contributed to faster evaporation of water is not a particularly controversial point of view.
Burton’s other cited “errors” are even more trivial. Gore is taken to task for saying that polar bears have been drowning because they face swims of up to 60 miles through open ice. Burton asserts that the confirmed cases show four bears drowning during storms, though he acknowledges that it makes sense to expect future drowning-related deaths of bears if ice caps continue to melt.
Gore’s last “error” supposedly was to warn that coral reefs were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. While agreeing with Gore that rising temperatures could increase coral bleaching and fatality, Burton ruled that it was difficult to separate the impact of climate change from other problems, such as pollution.
[For the full list of Burton’s alleged “errors,” see Telegraph (U,K.), Oct. 11, 2007.]
In other words, Burton appears to be a quirky judge who is prone to quibbling over minor nuances. But the larger significance of Burton’s ruling – as it is now championed by right-wing and mainstream U.S. news outlets – is that the vilification of Al Gore is not likely to cease, even with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize.
That also should be a cautionary lesson to Democrats seeking the White House. The political/media dynamic of Washington has changed little since Campaign 2000. The powerful right-wing news outlets still can make little controversies big and big controversies little.
Plus, major news outlets, like CNN and the Washington Post, continue to fall into line.
The Washington insider community also shows no serious readiness to reexamine its failures in the wake of George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency and the devastating Iraq War, which now even retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces, calls a “nightmare with no end in sight.”
It’s all so much easier to continue making fun of Al Gore.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
"WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?" The #1 question that should be asked of Democratic leaders...
Over at HuffingtonPost.com, Arianna Huffington asks "What one question would you have me ask Speaker of the House [i.e. the leader of Congress] Nancy Pelosi when I talk to her Monday night?"
The Number one question that the press, media and voters should be asking of Democratic leaders, bar none, is "WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?"
Republicans can create vast amounts of outrage in an instant - on wholly trivial 'issues' such as "Lincoln bedroom 'scandal'" and "White House Trashing 'scandal,'" (Both of these so-called "SCANDALS" were created out of thin air by Republicans and their media-whores PR factory. The "White House Trashing 'Scandal'" never even produced ONE PHOTO of evidence to support WEEKS worth of criminal accusations!) or turn molehills into mountains, such as the Whitewater, Foster suicide, Cisneros mistress, and other long-winded prosecutions.
And, conversely, Republicans can take entire mountains of genuine scandals, and turn them into puffs of dust, as with Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate/BCCI, swiped elections 2000, 2002, 2004, and even 2006 (Florida's 13th Congressional District recorded 18,000 "undervotes," thereby seating a Republican in Katherine Harris' old seat - an 'undervote' tally 9 times bigger than those in similar sized districts), Dereliction-of-Duty leading up to 9-11, and of course vast corruption in Iraq war contracts or the systematic lies-to-war that Bush and Cheney force-fed Congress and the media, leading to the Iraq war while Osama bin Laden roamed free.
Ms. Pelosi seems to think that merely going through the motions - routine, ineffectual (legislative) protests against the Bush-GOP agenda - is fulfilling her leadership compact with voters and the constitutional responsibilities vested through her in the Congress. Robert Parry has posted on-line the first chapter of his Secrecy & Privilege" book, illustrating how in 2001 President Clinton helped quash on-going criminal investigations into the Reagan-Bush administration abuses of power.
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/100307.html
Clearly, President Clinton hoped Republicans would reciprocate with bipartisan comity. A more cynical view is that Clinton was willing to forgive Republican crimes, if it would boost his power and privilege in the White House.
Is Nancy Pelosi following in Clinton's misbegotten steps? When will Democrats finally CONFRONT the Right-Wing smear, attack, slime, and Swift-boat machine, and put the liberal-progressive agenda of the past 200 years - hard-fought progress always towards greater enfranchisement, civil liberties, and economic empowerment - BACK on the MORAL HIGH GROUND? Will Democrats continue to beg us for money every election season, then hand over a great proportion of that money (to buy prime-time campaign ads) to the very media barons whose policies and editorial agenda we so vehemently oppose? Or will Ms. Pelosi continue to allow the Media thugs to portray all Katrina victims as criminals ("untermensch", even), justifying billions of dollars of crony contracts to Blackwater, Halliburton, and other connected corporations, even as New Orleans residents must pay mortgages on homes they are not even allowed to rebuild?
(Note: We realize how tough it is for the Democrats and the "liberal" press to confront the business and theological wings of the Radical Right Republican Party: in "whack-a-mole" fashion, any Democrat or writer who tries to stand up to the abuses of the Right-Wing theocrats - whether the Vatican influencing American elections on abortion, the Protestant Kennedy/Falwells/Robertsons/Bob Jones U advocating Christian evangelism in public schools and the US military, or the AIPAC lobby taking billions of dollars of US donations to Israel and directing it right back into influencing American politics - will be "WHACKED" (defeated or smeared) by the faithful of those religions should that Congressman/woman publicly oppose those sacred cow issues. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN that we Americans no longer have a right to oppose that radical-right, theological agenda that is the cornerstone of the Big Business wing of the Republican Party connecting with enough voters to win elections.)
The Number one question that the press, media and voters should be asking of Democratic leaders, bar none, is "WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?"
Republicans can create vast amounts of outrage in an instant - on wholly trivial 'issues' such as "Lincoln bedroom 'scandal'" and "White House Trashing 'scandal,'" (Both of these so-called "SCANDALS" were created out of thin air by Republicans and their media-whores PR factory. The "White House Trashing 'Scandal'" never even produced ONE PHOTO of evidence to support WEEKS worth of criminal accusations!) or turn molehills into mountains, such as the Whitewater, Foster suicide, Cisneros mistress, and other long-winded prosecutions.
And, conversely, Republicans can take entire mountains of genuine scandals, and turn them into puffs of dust, as with Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate/BCCI, swiped elections 2000, 2002, 2004, and even 2006 (Florida's 13th Congressional District recorded 18,000 "undervotes," thereby seating a Republican in Katherine Harris' old seat - an 'undervote' tally 9 times bigger than those in similar sized districts), Dereliction-of-Duty leading up to 9-11, and of course vast corruption in Iraq war contracts or the systematic lies-to-war that Bush and Cheney force-fed Congress and the media, leading to the Iraq war while Osama bin Laden roamed free.
Ms. Pelosi seems to think that merely going through the motions - routine, ineffectual (legislative) protests against the Bush-GOP agenda - is fulfilling her leadership compact with voters and the constitutional responsibilities vested through her in the Congress. Robert Parry has posted on-line the first chapter of his Secrecy & Privilege" book, illustrating how in 2001 President Clinton helped quash on-going criminal investigations into the Reagan-Bush administration abuses of power.
http://consortiumnews.com/2007/100307.html
Clearly, President Clinton hoped Republicans would reciprocate with bipartisan comity. A more cynical view is that Clinton was willing to forgive Republican crimes, if it would boost his power and privilege in the White House.
Is Nancy Pelosi following in Clinton's misbegotten steps? When will Democrats finally CONFRONT the Right-Wing smear, attack, slime, and Swift-boat machine, and put the liberal-progressive agenda of the past 200 years - hard-fought progress always towards greater enfranchisement, civil liberties, and economic empowerment - BACK on the MORAL HIGH GROUND? Will Democrats continue to beg us for money every election season, then hand over a great proportion of that money (to buy prime-time campaign ads) to the very media barons whose policies and editorial agenda we so vehemently oppose? Or will Ms. Pelosi continue to allow the Media thugs to portray all Katrina victims as criminals ("untermensch", even), justifying billions of dollars of crony contracts to Blackwater, Halliburton, and other connected corporations, even as New Orleans residents must pay mortgages on homes they are not even allowed to rebuild?
(Note: We realize how tough it is for the Democrats and the "liberal" press to confront the business and theological wings of the Radical Right Republican Party: in "whack-a-mole" fashion, any Democrat or writer who tries to stand up to the abuses of the Right-Wing theocrats - whether the Vatican influencing American elections on abortion, the Protestant Kennedy/Falwells/Robertsons/Bob Jones U advocating Christian evangelism in public schools and the US military, or the AIPAC lobby taking billions of dollars of US donations to Israel and directing it right back into influencing American politics - will be "WHACKED" (defeated or smeared) by the faithful of those religions should that Congressman/woman publicly oppose those sacred cow issues. BUT THAT DOES NOT MEAN that we Americans no longer have a right to oppose that radical-right, theological agenda that is the cornerstone of the Big Business wing of the Republican Party connecting with enough voters to win elections.)
Friday, October 12, 2007
Ho Hum. The AIPAC wing of the Radical-Right junta (coup) in America FINALLY notices Ann Coulter's HATE-speech. Only took 7 years...
Ann Coulter, the oh-so-favorite guest for the "Mainstream" media whores, is the very face of Republican Right-Wing hate, intolerance, contempt, scorn, and devisive derision (and "moral values" hypocrisy, Ms. Coulter proud of her "play the field" single promiscuity and sexual allure). The AIPAC wings of the Republican and Democratic parties have IGNORED Ms. Coulter till now, in a despicable attempt to drown out war opponents and administration critics by heaping scorn and derision on them - Ms. Coulter's specialty.
For the past several years, of course, ANN COULTER could INSULT 9-11 WIDOWS, INSULT Black Voters, INSULT Vietnam-wounded combat veterans (like Max Cleland and John Kerry, among others),INSULT US military generals, and even INSULT Iraq war-wounded combat veterans... all completely "A-OK" by the AIPAC wing of the Democratic Party ("leaders" like Lieberman, Feinstein, Boxer, Feingold, Levin, and others). The Democratic Party NEVER had an articulate (much less forceful) RESPONSE to the abject HATRED and no-bones RACISM of ANN COULTER, RUSH LIMBAUGH,Bill O'Reily, Michael 'Savage' (ne Wiener), Fox "news," or other propaganda components of the Radical Right-Wing Republican Party... Because ALL of that Right-Wing propaganda, no matter how vile or racist, WAS NECESSARY to create a climate to bolster and support the Bush-Cheney illegal invasion, war, occupation, torture, and looting of Iraq. NOW Ms. Coulter - in one of her "come hither" seductive "moral values" prime-time mini-skirts - finally gets around to, SURPRISE, SURPRISE, SURPRISE! putting Jews in the same category as Muslims who need to be converted to Christianity (or, dare we say it, as "terror suspects" who should be rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps beyond the purview of law or human rights).
Makes one wonder how long it will take the AIAPC lobby TO NOTICE that Mr. Bush's pet BLACKWATER "security contractors" HAVE ALL THE ATTRIBUTES OF THE German pre-WWII SS: a PRIVATE "Christ-ian" army loyal only to the Furher! The AIPAC heads (talking heads) in the media thought it was SO AMUSING when BLACKWATER GOONS PATROLLED NEW ORLEANS STREETS in black uniforms with machine-guns and license to kill... and that two years later, BLACKWATER rakes in MILLIONS of dollars of government contracts, while New Orleans residents must still pay mortgages on homes they are not allowed to rebuild. Even today, the more radically-right AIAPC news-heads (Krauthammer, Kristol, Kurtz, Sulzberger, Safire, Kagan, Brooks, etc.) PRETEND NOT TO NOTICE the GOP's ALLIANCE with Ms. Coulter... or the Bush-Cheney administration's DEPENDENCE on BLACKWATER mercenaries.
(below, one of a hundred articles this week on Ann Coulter's "Jews should be 'perfected' by conversion to Christianty" comment, this particular article choosen at random.)
=============================================
Coulter's anti-Semitic comment too dangerous to ignore
Tim Rutten: Regarding Media
October 13, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rutten13oct13,0,1859447.column?coll=la-home-center
Ann Coulter is buzzing from one talk show to another these days, peddling her new book. Our era values mindless contention as a kind of entertainment, and we don't just reward relentless self-promotion -- we admire it. Thus, Coulter's phenomenal success at marketing distasteful, mean-spirited books -- poorly written and spottily researched -- that otherwise would go all but unremarked upon by everyone except the rhetorical ghouls who haunt the political fringes.
Now, no Coulter promotional campaign would be complete without a calculated outrage -- a call for the forcible conversion of all Muslims, for example, or a demand for revocation of women's suffrage, an insult hurled at gays or the grieving widows of Sept. 11 victims. As more than one political consultant has remarked, the American far right is a carnivorous constituency, and it needs to be regularly thrown red meat. Coulter's singular genius has been to ignite tightly focused and timely controversies, thereby getting her ideological opponents to toss the scraps to her fans.
So if you know what's coming, why play ball and deliver the denunciation that validates the Coulter strategy?
In part, it's because this time Coulter didn't intend to ignite the firestorm that's currently raging around her; in part, it's because the implications of these latest remarks simply are too threatening to be allowed to stand.
Earlier this week, Coulter went on "The Big Idea," a talk show aired on CNBC, the cable channel devoted to business news. Its host, Donny Deutsch, is a preternaturally affable businessman who invites successful people on to talk about how they turn their ideas into money. Coulter was there to describe how she had -- in our vulgar commercial argot --"branded" herself. At one point, Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everyone was "a Christian." Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish, protested that Coulter was advocating his people's elimination. She responded that she simply hoped to see Jews "perfected" through conversion to Christianity.
Deutsch, to his everlasting credit, wasn't having any of it, and the full transcript of their extended and -- on Coulter's side -- vilely offensive exchange on the matter is widely available online. Reaction over the last couple of days has been swift.
The National Jewish Democratic Council weighed in with a petition asking other broadcast news organizations not to give Coulter a forum. "While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment," said council Executive Director Ira N. Forman. "Just as media outlets don't invite those who believe that Martians walk the Earth to frequently comment on science stories, it's time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics." (Sadly, too many Americans now believe the only way to confront offensive or dangerous speech is to silence it.)
Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that Coulter's "remarks that Jews needed to be perfected and America would be better off if everyone was Christian are deeply offensive and have been the classic language of anti-Semites throughout the millennia. She may have been a guest on CNBC's 'Big Idea,' but what she invoked is the oldest 'Bigoted Idea,' and she should apologize." (Good luck on that one, rabbi.)
Perhaps the best response came from the Anti-Defamation League, which called Coulter's comments "outrageous, offensive and a throwback to the centuries-old teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. The notion that Jews are religiously inferior or imperfect because they do not accept Christian beliefs was the basis for 2,000 years of church-based anti-Semitism. While she is entitled to her beliefs, using mainstream media to espouse the idea that Judaism needs to be replaced with Christianity and that each individual Jew is somehow deficient and needs to be "perfected" is rank Christian supersessionism and has been rejected by the Catholic Church and the vast majority of mainstream Christian denominations. Clearly, Ann Coulter needs a wake-up call about the power of words to injure others and fuel hatred. She needs an education, too, about the roots of anti-Semitism."
That she does. As the league points out, "supersessionism," the theological notion that Christianity "completes" or "perfects" Judaism is, along with the deicide libel, anti-Semitism's major theological underpinning. Indeed, in Central and Western Europe between the world wars, there was a substantial body of purportedly "respectable" intellectual opinion that held "supersessionism" made possible a "reasonable" theological anti-Semitism that was entirely licit, as opposed to the Nazis' and fascists' illicit, "racially based" anti-Semitism. It is fair to say that the rails leading to Auschwitz were greased by precisely the opinion Coulter expressed on American television this week.
It's a scandal that in this pluralist nation it falls to the voices of organized Jewry to make this case, because it is a case whose outcome is of the greatest consequence to us all. For too long we've pretended that the brutal political rhetoric that now characterizes our partisan politics can be quarantined, that it won't inevitably leach over into every other aspect of our lives. In fact, it's doing just that, and soon the coarse and vituperative language of the war between red and blue -- with it's instantaneous imputations of bad-faith and utter disrespect for minimal civility -- will begin to color aspects of our civil society where mutual respect is too crucial and hard won to tolerate this sort of risk.
Here, for example, is what transpired on the airwaves Friday. Deutsch went onto NBC's "Today" show and called it "scary" that, in this instance, Coulter was not being deliberately provocative. "We're playing with dangerous words in our society -- there's no accountability, there's a glibness that we in the media kind of elevate."
Meanwhile, Coulter was on the Kevin McCullough radio talk show, making the utterly absurd case that Deutsch somehow had ambushed her. On his blog later in the day, McCullough agreed. Deutsch, he said, "is an angry anti-Christian bigot, looking to make a name for himself by biting into Christian icons."
How many Americans really want to follow Ann Coulter into this sort of confrontation? Not many, one suspects. But are enough of them willing to give up, once and for all, the sort of dangerous fun she and her rhetorical fellow travelers provide?
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
AIPAC wing of the Right
America's whore Corporate media IGNORES Burma mass-murder nightly purges...
Betraying the GREED and LUST (for money and power) that drives America's whore media, most outlets IGNORE the SYSTEMATIC MASS-MURDER PURGES by the Burma military junta, conducted nightly as we speak - "NO MORE SHINY BAUBLES to sell the American public" (vidoe footage of peaceful protests led by Burmese monks), so TIME TO MOVE ON TO THE NEXT celbrity-retard story.
Today, the US WHORE MEDIA doesn't give A DAMN how many monks, protesters, and democracy advocates ARE MURDERED by the election-stealing Burma regime.
===================================
Only now, the full horror of Burmese junta's repression of monks emerges
By Rosalind Russell
Published: 11 October 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3047606.ece
Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.
Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.
The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime's soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.
The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-government sympathies.
"There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing," said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in northern Rangoon which is now a prison camp for suspected dissidents. The young man, too frightened to be named, was one of 185 monks taken in a raid on a monastery in the Yankin district of Rangoon on 28 September, two days after government soldiers began attacking street protesters.
"The room was too small for everyone to lie down at once. We took it in turns to sleep. Every night at 8 o'clock we were given a small bowl of rice and a cup of water. But after a few days many of us just couldn't eat. The smell was so bad.
"Some of the novice monks were under 10 years old, the youngest was just seven. They were stripped of their robes and given prison sarongs. Some were beaten, leaving open, untreated wounds, but no doctors came."
On his release, the monk spoke to a Western aid worker in Rangoon, who smuggled his testimony and those of other prisoners and witnesses out of Burma on a small memory stick.
Most of the detained monks, the low-level clergy, were eventually freed without charge as were the children among them. But suspected ringleaders of the protests can expect much harsher treatment, secret trials and long prison sentences. One detained opposition leader has been tortured to death, activist groups said yesterday. Win Shwe, 42, a member of the National League for Democracy, the party of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has died under interrogation, the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said, adding that the information came from authorities in Kyaukpandawn township. "However, his body was not sent to his family and the interrogators indicated that they had cremated it instead." Win Shwe was arrested on the first day of the crackdown.
It was the russet-robed Buddhist clergy, not political groups, who had formed the backbone of demonstrations during days of euphoric defiance and previously undreamed-of hope that Burma's military regime could be brought down by peaceful revolution. That hope has been crushed under the boots of government soldiers and intelligence agents and replaced by fear and dread.
A young woman, a domestic worker in Rangoon, described how one woman bystander who applauded the monks was rounded up. "My friend was taken away for clapping during the demonstrations. She had not marched. She came out of her house as the marchers went by and, for perhaps 30 seconds, smiled and clapped as the monks chanted. Her face was recorded on a military intelligence camera. She was taken and beaten. Now she is so scared she won't even leave her room to come and talk to me, to anyone."
Another Rangoon resident told the aid worker: "We all hear screams at night as they [the police] arrive to drag off a neighbour. We are torn between going to help them and hiding behind our doors. We hide behind our doors. We are ashamed. We are frightened."
Burmese intelligence agents are scrutinising photographs and video footage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. They have also arrested the owners of computers which they suspect were used to transmit images and testimonies out of the country. For each story smuggled out to The Independent, someone has risked arrest and imprisonment.
Hein Zay Kyaw (not his real name) received a telephone call last week telling him to be at a government compound where the military were releasing 42 people, among them Mr Kyaw's friend, missing since he was plucked from the edge of a demonstration on 26 September. Mr Kyaw told the aid worker: "The prisoners were let out of the trucks. Even though now they were safe, they were still so scared. They walked with their hands shielding their faces as if they were expecting blows. They were lined up in rows and sat down against the wall, still cowering. Their clothes were dirty, some stained with blood. Our friend had a clean T-shirt on. We were relieved because we thought this meant that he had not been beaten. We were wrong. He had been beaten on the head and the blood had soaked his shirt which he carried in a plastic bag."
The United States yesterday threatened unspecified new sanctions against Burma and called for an investigation into the death of Win Shwe.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement: "The junta must stop the brutal treatment of its people and peacefully transition to democracy or face new sanctions from the United States."
The scale of the crackdown remains undocumented. The regime has banned journalists from entering Burma and has blocked internet access and phone lines.
Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK says the number of dead is possibly in the hundreds. "The regime covers up its atrocities. We will never know the true numbers," he said.
At the weekend the government said it has released more than half of the 2,171 people arrested, but exile groups estimate the number of detentions between 6,000 and 10,000.
In Rangoon, people say they are more frightened now than when soldiers were shooting on the streets.
"When there were demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, the world was watching," said a professional woman who watched the marchers from her office.
"But now the soldiers only come at night. They take anyone they can identify from their videos. People who clapped, who offered water to the monks, who knelt and prayed as they passed. People who happened to turn and watch as they passed by and their faces were caught on film. It is now we are most fearful. It is now we need the world to help us."
Today, the US WHORE MEDIA doesn't give A DAMN how many monks, protesters, and democracy advocates ARE MURDERED by the election-stealing Burma regime.
===================================
Only now, the full horror of Burmese junta's repression of monks emerges
By Rosalind Russell
Published: 11 October 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3047606.ece
Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.
Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.
The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime's soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching.
The hidden crackdown is as methodical as it is brutal. First the monks were targeted, then the thousands of ordinary Burmese who joined the demonstrations, those who even applauded or watched, or those merely suspected of anti-government sympathies.
"There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing," said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in northern Rangoon which is now a prison camp for suspected dissidents. The young man, too frightened to be named, was one of 185 monks taken in a raid on a monastery in the Yankin district of Rangoon on 28 September, two days after government soldiers began attacking street protesters.
"The room was too small for everyone to lie down at once. We took it in turns to sleep. Every night at 8 o'clock we were given a small bowl of rice and a cup of water. But after a few days many of us just couldn't eat. The smell was so bad.
"Some of the novice monks were under 10 years old, the youngest was just seven. They were stripped of their robes and given prison sarongs. Some were beaten, leaving open, untreated wounds, but no doctors came."
On his release, the monk spoke to a Western aid worker in Rangoon, who smuggled his testimony and those of other prisoners and witnesses out of Burma on a small memory stick.
Most of the detained monks, the low-level clergy, were eventually freed without charge as were the children among them. But suspected ringleaders of the protests can expect much harsher treatment, secret trials and long prison sentences. One detained opposition leader has been tortured to death, activist groups said yesterday. Win Shwe, 42, a member of the National League for Democracy, the party of the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has died under interrogation, the Thai-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners said, adding that the information came from authorities in Kyaukpandawn township. "However, his body was not sent to his family and the interrogators indicated that they had cremated it instead." Win Shwe was arrested on the first day of the crackdown.
It was the russet-robed Buddhist clergy, not political groups, who had formed the backbone of demonstrations during days of euphoric defiance and previously undreamed-of hope that Burma's military regime could be brought down by peaceful revolution. That hope has been crushed under the boots of government soldiers and intelligence agents and replaced by fear and dread.
A young woman, a domestic worker in Rangoon, described how one woman bystander who applauded the monks was rounded up. "My friend was taken away for clapping during the demonstrations. She had not marched. She came out of her house as the marchers went by and, for perhaps 30 seconds, smiled and clapped as the monks chanted. Her face was recorded on a military intelligence camera. She was taken and beaten. Now she is so scared she won't even leave her room to come and talk to me, to anyone."
Another Rangoon resident told the aid worker: "We all hear screams at night as they [the police] arrive to drag off a neighbour. We are torn between going to help them and hiding behind our doors. We hide behind our doors. We are ashamed. We are frightened."
Burmese intelligence agents are scrutinising photographs and video footage to identify demonstrators and bystanders. They have also arrested the owners of computers which they suspect were used to transmit images and testimonies out of the country. For each story smuggled out to The Independent, someone has risked arrest and imprisonment.
Hein Zay Kyaw (not his real name) received a telephone call last week telling him to be at a government compound where the military were releasing 42 people, among them Mr Kyaw's friend, missing since he was plucked from the edge of a demonstration on 26 September. Mr Kyaw told the aid worker: "The prisoners were let out of the trucks. Even though now they were safe, they were still so scared. They walked with their hands shielding their faces as if they were expecting blows. They were lined up in rows and sat down against the wall, still cowering. Their clothes were dirty, some stained with blood. Our friend had a clean T-shirt on. We were relieved because we thought this meant that he had not been beaten. We were wrong. He had been beaten on the head and the blood had soaked his shirt which he carried in a plastic bag."
The United States yesterday threatened unspecified new sanctions against Burma and called for an investigation into the death of Win Shwe.
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement: "The junta must stop the brutal treatment of its people and peacefully transition to democracy or face new sanctions from the United States."
The scale of the crackdown remains undocumented. The regime has banned journalists from entering Burma and has blocked internet access and phone lines.
Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK says the number of dead is possibly in the hundreds. "The regime covers up its atrocities. We will never know the true numbers," he said.
At the weekend the government said it has released more than half of the 2,171 people arrested, but exile groups estimate the number of detentions between 6,000 and 10,000.
In Rangoon, people say they are more frightened now than when soldiers were shooting on the streets.
"When there were demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, the world was watching," said a professional woman who watched the marchers from her office.
"But now the soldiers only come at night. They take anyone they can identify from their videos. People who clapped, who offered water to the monks, who knelt and prayed as they passed. People who happened to turn and watch as they passed by and their faces were caught on film. It is now we are most fearful. It is now we need the world to help us."
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
New York Times whores - ALL of its oil and energy reporting. PROPAGANDA from the pages of Herr Goebbels...
The Gray Lady's Obdurate Bias on Oil Reporting
by Raymond J. Leasy
Posted October 9, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/the-gray-ladys-obdurate-_b_67708.html
On it goes at the "Gray Lady." And, sadly it is becoming progressively more debilitating and peculiar. Unable to present an objective view of the oil industry and oil markets THE NEW YORK TIMES has VACATED VIRTUALLY ALL CLAIM TO RESPONSIBLE REPORTING on one of the economy's more important industries and critical commodities. In effect placing into question the bona fides of its business and financial pages. And writing of the New York Times' shortcomings on this issue is becoming boring.
On Friday, the lead Business Day article, "Can a Plucky US Economy Surmount $80 Oil" could have been written by a semi-skilled oil industry flack. It reports yes, the price of oil is high, reaching record levels. Then goes to assuage us that the fallout has been negligible, factories stayed busy, consumers continued spending.
The NY Times article then poses the question: with the economy starting to sputter, will the high price of oil cause pain? Blithely it answers the question, "Many economists do not think so...if the United States entered a recession the price of oil would quickly drop." Then, to give the appearance of balance and to lay the groundwork for continued steep prices, goes on to quote none other than Larry Goldstein of the Petroleum Research Foundation, a foundation largely supported by the oil industry and always ready to trot out whatever rationalizations are needed by a gullible press to explain the manipulated levels of today's oil prices. Says Goldstein, "Our relative importance in the global markets is diminishing" and an economic slowdown "won't have a visible impact on high oil prices." Get it? Prices will remain high and the NY Times has helped indoctrinate us into accepting the reasons why.
The Times' article goes on to state there is little precedent for understanding today's oil market. Which is probably true if you ceaselessly report oil industry PR information handouts as received gospel. The article goes on to repeat the tried and true oil industry saws, placating us with such bamboozle as "the economy has become less sensitive to energy prices," and "the amount of energy needed to produce $1 of economic output has been cut nearly in half since 1988," and on.
continued at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/the-gray-ladys-obdurate-_b_67708.html
by Raymond J. Leasy
Posted October 9, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/the-gray-ladys-obdurate-_b_67708.html
On it goes at the "Gray Lady." And, sadly it is becoming progressively more debilitating and peculiar. Unable to present an objective view of the oil industry and oil markets THE NEW YORK TIMES has VACATED VIRTUALLY ALL CLAIM TO RESPONSIBLE REPORTING on one of the economy's more important industries and critical commodities. In effect placing into question the bona fides of its business and financial pages. And writing of the New York Times' shortcomings on this issue is becoming boring.
On Friday, the lead Business Day article, "Can a Plucky US Economy Surmount $80 Oil" could have been written by a semi-skilled oil industry flack. It reports yes, the price of oil is high, reaching record levels. Then goes to assuage us that the fallout has been negligible, factories stayed busy, consumers continued spending.
The NY Times article then poses the question: with the economy starting to sputter, will the high price of oil cause pain? Blithely it answers the question, "Many economists do not think so...if the United States entered a recession the price of oil would quickly drop." Then, to give the appearance of balance and to lay the groundwork for continued steep prices, goes on to quote none other than Larry Goldstein of the Petroleum Research Foundation, a foundation largely supported by the oil industry and always ready to trot out whatever rationalizations are needed by a gullible press to explain the manipulated levels of today's oil prices. Says Goldstein, "Our relative importance in the global markets is diminishing" and an economic slowdown "won't have a visible impact on high oil prices." Get it? Prices will remain high and the NY Times has helped indoctrinate us into accepting the reasons why.
The Times' article goes on to state there is little precedent for understanding today's oil market. Which is probably true if you ceaselessly report oil industry PR information handouts as received gospel. The article goes on to repeat the tried and true oil industry saws, placating us with such bamboozle as "the economy has become less sensitive to energy prices," and "the amount of energy needed to produce $1 of economic output has been cut nearly in half since 1988," and on.
continued at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/the-gray-ladys-obdurate-_b_67708.html
Sunday, October 07, 2007
MORE on US STATE DEPARTMENT as sponsors, employers, and Defenders of BLACKWATER MURDERS in Iraq....
Again we note: the USE OF MERCENARY HIRED GUNS was one of the SPECIFIC COMPLAINTS enumerated (listed) by the Signers of the Declaration of Independence against King George III of Britain in July of 1776:
<< For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
He is at this time transporting large armies of FOREIGN MERCENARIES to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. >>
==========================================
State Dept. ignored Blackwater warnings
Yuri Cortez / AFP/Getty Images
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blackwater7oct07,1,4463745.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true
ACCOUNTABILITY: Complaints about Blackwater guards’ behavior were acknowledged by some in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but received little high-level attention.
Diplomats had raised concerns about guards' endangering of Iraqi civilians, but the complaints got little attention.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The State Department, which is facing growing criticism of its policy on private security contractors, overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population, according to current and former U.S. officials.
Ever since the contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts in June 2004 by the U.S.-led occupation authority, diplomats have cautioned that the decision to do so was "a bomb that could go off at any time," said one former U.S. official.
On guard
click to enlarge
Related
- TOP OF THE TICKET Blog on Blackwater's chairman
- TOP OF THE TICKET: Blackwater's Prince tied to GOP
Related Stories
- U.S. supervision is ordered for convoys
- House OKs bill to prosecute contractors
- Congress moves to rein in contractors
But State Department leadership, unable to field U.S. troops or in-house personnel to guard its team, has clung to an approach that shielded the contractors from criminal liability, in the hope of ensuring continued protection to operate in the violent countryside.
The procedures have come under critical scrutiny since a Sept. 16 shooting involving contractors for Blackwater USA, the State Department's main security contractor, killed at least 11 Iraqis and set off a series of American and Iraqi investigations.
On Friday, in a tacit acknowledgment of the policy's shortcomings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered drastic increases in supervision of the security contractors. Meanwhile, the House, flatly rejecting the current approach, on Thursday approved in a 389-30 vote legislation that would subject contractors to U.S. criminal law.
The developments -- and the dramatically heightened attention to violence involving security contractors -- have not surprised current and former officials who have served in Iraq and seen incidents that injured Iraqis and destroyed their property.
"It's about time," said Janessa Gans, who was a U.S. official in Iraq for nearly two years, describing her reaction to news that the Iraqi government was threatening to expel Blackwater in the aftermath of the Sept. 16 shooting.
Gans said that during her travels around the country she saw heavily armed contract guards frighten Iraqi civilians and destroy their property, and she was shocked that they appeared to have so little accountability and that the Iraqis often found it difficult to obtain justice or compensation.
Gans, who related her experiences in an interview and in an opinion article published in Saturday's Times, described one incident. In 2005, a heavily armored Chevy Suburban at the head of her U.S. convoy smashed into a tiny car carrying an elderly man, a younger woman and three frightened children.
When she objected, the contractors pointed out that they were trained to treat all Iraqis as potential terrorists. Gans said she replied: "If they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now."
Several other officials formerly assigned to duty in Iraq agreed to discuss concerns about security procedures but insisted on anonymity because they still are employed by the government and are not authorized to express their views. Some officials who have had similar experiences while at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad declined to describe them out of concern that they could be identified through the details of their accounts.
Their views of Blackwater and other security contractors are at odds with the descriptions in recent weeks from Rice and other top State Department officials, who have praised the guards as providing effective service under dangerous conditions.
Blackwater's chief executive noted last week that no U.S. official has been killed under Blackwater's protection.
Nonetheless, concerns have been voiced at times even by the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq. Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John D. Negroponte, now the deputy secretary of State, had been overheard urging contractors to slow down and take more care as they careened through the streets.
"He was frequently exasperated," Gans said. "He would say, 'Is that necessary?' "
Gans said she complained to high-level embassy officials. Other current and former officials said that the concerns frequently were discussed among embassy staff and were acknowledged by some members of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which oversees contractors for the State Department.
But the complaints and concerns received little high-level attention, for several reasons, said diplomats who served in Iraq. In the crisis atmosphere of Iraq, the security problems seemed less urgent than other issues. In addition, even staff members who were uneasy with the arrangement were ambivalent because they wanted aggressive protection when they felt personally endangered.
When leaving the gates of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, "you want the biggest, meanest guys in the world protecting you," said a U.S. official who served in Baghdad and has been moved to another post in the region.
The private security contractors working for the State Department have operated under murky legal guidelines. While U.S. laws apply to contractors working for the Pentagon, workers for the State Department do not fall clearly under American or Iraqi law, allowing some to escape punishment for wrongdoing.
In May 2005, an Iraqi cabdriver with two passengers in the back seat was traveling down a broad thoroughfare when a five-car U.S. convoy carrying U.S. officials heading back to the Green Zone approached from a side street. The driver, Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 34, stopped about 50 feet from the convoy, but bullets ripped into his Opel, killing one passenger and striking Hattab's shoulder.
<< For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:
He is at this time transporting large armies of FOREIGN MERCENARIES to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. >>
==========================================
State Dept. ignored Blackwater warnings
Yuri Cortez / AFP/Getty Images
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blackwater7oct07,1,4463745.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true
ACCOUNTABILITY: Complaints about Blackwater guards’ behavior were acknowledged by some in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, but received little high-level attention.
Diplomats had raised concerns about guards' endangering of Iraqi civilians, but the complaints got little attention.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 7, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The State Department, which is facing growing criticism of its policy on private security contractors, overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population, according to current and former U.S. officials.
Ever since the contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts in June 2004 by the U.S.-led occupation authority, diplomats have cautioned that the decision to do so was "a bomb that could go off at any time," said one former U.S. official.
On guard
click to enlarge
Related
- TOP OF THE TICKET Blog on Blackwater's chairman
- TOP OF THE TICKET: Blackwater's Prince tied to GOP
Related Stories
- U.S. supervision is ordered for convoys
- House OKs bill to prosecute contractors
- Congress moves to rein in contractors
But State Department leadership, unable to field U.S. troops or in-house personnel to guard its team, has clung to an approach that shielded the contractors from criminal liability, in the hope of ensuring continued protection to operate in the violent countryside.
The procedures have come under critical scrutiny since a Sept. 16 shooting involving contractors for Blackwater USA, the State Department's main security contractor, killed at least 11 Iraqis and set off a series of American and Iraqi investigations.
On Friday, in a tacit acknowledgment of the policy's shortcomings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered drastic increases in supervision of the security contractors. Meanwhile, the House, flatly rejecting the current approach, on Thursday approved in a 389-30 vote legislation that would subject contractors to U.S. criminal law.
The developments -- and the dramatically heightened attention to violence involving security contractors -- have not surprised current and former officials who have served in Iraq and seen incidents that injured Iraqis and destroyed their property.
"It's about time," said Janessa Gans, who was a U.S. official in Iraq for nearly two years, describing her reaction to news that the Iraqi government was threatening to expel Blackwater in the aftermath of the Sept. 16 shooting.
Gans said that during her travels around the country she saw heavily armed contract guards frighten Iraqi civilians and destroy their property, and she was shocked that they appeared to have so little accountability and that the Iraqis often found it difficult to obtain justice or compensation.
Gans, who related her experiences in an interview and in an opinion article published in Saturday's Times, described one incident. In 2005, a heavily armored Chevy Suburban at the head of her U.S. convoy smashed into a tiny car carrying an elderly man, a younger woman and three frightened children.
When she objected, the contractors pointed out that they were trained to treat all Iraqis as potential terrorists. Gans said she replied: "If they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now."
Several other officials formerly assigned to duty in Iraq agreed to discuss concerns about security procedures but insisted on anonymity because they still are employed by the government and are not authorized to express their views. Some officials who have had similar experiences while at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad declined to describe them out of concern that they could be identified through the details of their accounts.
Their views of Blackwater and other security contractors are at odds with the descriptions in recent weeks from Rice and other top State Department officials, who have praised the guards as providing effective service under dangerous conditions.
Blackwater's chief executive noted last week that no U.S. official has been killed under Blackwater's protection.
Nonetheless, concerns have been voiced at times even by the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq. Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq John D. Negroponte, now the deputy secretary of State, had been overheard urging contractors to slow down and take more care as they careened through the streets.
"He was frequently exasperated," Gans said. "He would say, 'Is that necessary?' "
Gans said she complained to high-level embassy officials. Other current and former officials said that the concerns frequently were discussed among embassy staff and were acknowledged by some members of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which oversees contractors for the State Department.
But the complaints and concerns received little high-level attention, for several reasons, said diplomats who served in Iraq. In the crisis atmosphere of Iraq, the security problems seemed less urgent than other issues. In addition, even staff members who were uneasy with the arrangement were ambivalent because they wanted aggressive protection when they felt personally endangered.
When leaving the gates of the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, "you want the biggest, meanest guys in the world protecting you," said a U.S. official who served in Baghdad and has been moved to another post in the region.
The private security contractors working for the State Department have operated under murky legal guidelines. While U.S. laws apply to contractors working for the Pentagon, workers for the State Department do not fall clearly under American or Iraqi law, allowing some to escape punishment for wrongdoing.
In May 2005, an Iraqi cabdriver with two passengers in the back seat was traveling down a broad thoroughfare when a five-car U.S. convoy carrying U.S. officials heading back to the Green Zone approached from a side street. The driver, Mohammed Nouri Hattab, 34, stopped about 50 feet from the convoy, but bullets ripped into his Opel, killing one passenger and striking Hattab's shoulder.
Corporate Media = CONFEDERATE media: ALWAYS TRYING TO PIT SLAVE against MASTERS.....
GILDED MEDIA WHORES: Corporate Media Whore executives among those at a Bush fundraiser dinner, part and parcel of "THE ELITE" - "THE HAVES AND THE HAVES MORE"- that pResident George W. Bush calls his base."
IN this terrific commentary Larisa Alexandrovna points out a new aspect of the MoveOn.org ad questioning the veracity of General Patraeus' "I did not write this report with any direction from the White House" report to Congress on the state of Iraq war (and of 'the surge' specifically) on 9-11-2007: Larisa points out that the MoveOn full-page ad in the New York Times EFFECTIVELY BROKE THROUGH the GHETTO WALLS of media PROPAGANDA CONTROL that the "Major Media" tries to impose on us Americans.
Of course the most obvious, if forgotten, example of media hypocrisy in trying to CONTROL the pro-war American narrative is how the DC media press whores helped Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, Asst. Sec. of War Paul Wolfowitz, and the Bush administration RUN OUT OF TOWN, in derision and scorn, Army Chief of Staff GENERAL SHINSEKI for telling the Ameican people (in his testimony before senate committee) THAT THE IRAQ WAR WOULD REQUIRE 500,000 TROOPS, but four years later those same MEDIA WHORES would be SO UPSET and outraged that a MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times would question the credibility of the Bush administration's attempt to put on a Teflon vest (as Frank Rich put it this week) in the person of General David Patraeus. Indeed, thanks to the miracle of the internet, we have the New York WHORE Tiems/Eric Schmitt HIT PIECE deriding General Shinseki click HERE: NOTE how the WHORE Times, and their hired smear-brown-shirt thug Schmitt, use WEASEL WORDS to cast SHINSEKI - not Wolfowitz or Rumsfeld - in a bad light. {i.e.
<< The Pentagon's second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general's assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.>>
Note how, in typical "official" WHORE fashion, Mr. Schmitt cast it as a case of OFFICIAL Washington - "The Penagon's seocond ranking official" coupled with "DISAPARAGED a top Army general." Mr. Schmitt, YOU ARE A LIAR BY OMMISSION: General Shinseki wasn't merely "a top Army general" - he was THE top Army general, Secretary of the Army, the only higher uniformed official the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Fellow NY Times-man (and one of only a small handful of honest Times-men) Paul Krugman highlights what happened to HONEST WHISTLEBLOWERS and government critics of the Bush administration: THEY ARE ALL GIVEN THE VALERIE PLAME treatment, or threatened with it.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E4DA1630F930A15750C0A9629C8B63
Further into her commentary, she uses an even more dramatic metaphor than "wall" of media propaganda dividing Americans from their government: first she details how "CORPORATE INTERESTS MERGE WITH STATE INTERESTS," and then she points out the biggie: THE CORPORATE CONFEDERACY.
For, indeed, America's corporate media whores - the executives who CONTROL the media companies - DO have a desire to take us 21st Century Americans BACK to the ANTE-BELLUM (pre-Civil War)era economic and governance models, when nearly half the population in some districts was counted as "THREE-FIFTHS" of a man for voting purposes FOR THE OWNERS, ONLY - but otherwise those people had NO RIGHTS WHATSOEVER. And of course the slave plantation economic model held that ALL profits and wealth acrue to the owner exclusively - the plantation aristocracy - ONLY, and that HEALTH CARE, and all other "luxuries" for the slaves should be paid AT THE CONVENIENCE OF THE 'OWNERS,' only.
As Larisa correctly points out, thanks to the CORRUPTED Democratic Party, the CORRUPT "major media" and the blatantly neo-segregationist Right-Wing Republican Party (and their Surpeme Court allies such as CLARENCE "my Yale degree was soiled by affirmative action - that's why I'm in favor of a return to neo-segregation!" THOMAS) - WE AMERICANS ARE NOW REFIGHTING the agenda if not the battles of the Civil War, and the MEDIA WHORE BOSSES are most definitely NOT on the side of
"OF THE PEOPLE, BY the people, FOR the people".....
===================================
Larisa Alexandrovna
Our Cold Civil War...
Posted October 5, 2007 |
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/our-cold-civil-war_b_67383.html
It took me sometime to process the whole MoveOn.org controversy and I finally realized that something truly monumental has happened in our nation. While the coverage of the now world famous MoveOn.org ad has been wall to wall and spun and re-spun from every conceivable political and ethical angle, the most important developments of this whole story have entirely been missed.
In order to understand what has happened, really happened with the advertisement asking if General Petraeus was essentially acting as a Teflon vest for the Bush administration, we must first understand the context and the background.
Propaganda Presidency
The Bush administration has been using media outlets as cutouts for state sponsored propaganda since even before the unelected Bush was appointed to office by a politically motivated Supreme Court decision against the will of the people and the popular vote. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not the singular, all-transforming event that changed everything. Rather, it was the Supreme Court decision of 2000 that changed everything, a consequence of that single monumental failure to protect the Constitution. It was in a more general way, really, the 2000 election cycle that showed us just how willing the corporate fourth estate bosses were to fabricate a myth of goodness and accomplishment out of a man so ill suited to be anywhere near government, let alone the presidency of the United States.
The robber barons needed their figurehead, and so their allied fourth estate bosses fixed the propaganda around the myth, creating substance where there was none. The propaganda worked to create an image of a war veteran candidate Bush with a stellar educational background, an experienced and successful businessman, and an honest Texan raised on a farm. Those lies led to more lies and since then, we have essentially been held hostage by an ever expanding parade of liars.
The most extreme example of this, of course, is Fox News, which is seen by all credible reporters as political porn, of the low grade variety at that, featuring D-listers in the news industry with the ethics of Debbie and her Dallas doers. Fox is laughable, and it is clearly a state run organ which hires official state reporters to report officially sanctioned news.
The Fox outfit is obvious propaganda, but it has played the foil to something far more insidious and sinister, and which in its sheer subtlety is far more dangerous. The mainstream press, as it is known, compared with Fox looks like left wing reportage, of course. In reality, however, the mainstream is neither left wing nor anything remotely resembling even a moderate or objective fourth estate.
Should you have doubt in this regard, I urge you to consider, as an example, the revelations from Dan Rather about what CBS did to curry favor with the White House.
Or the most criminal example of what can happen to a corporate owned, fully politicized, fourth estate: the Iraq war. These types of political propaganda practices used to be called Yellow Journalism. Now they are the standard, cleverly renamed "fair and balanced."
So it naturally follows that the robber barons and their fourth estate business partners should indeed benefit from the puppet they all worked so vigorously to enthrone.
Corporate Interests merged with State Interests
The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.
Think about this for a moment.
A defense contractor pays heavily into the coffers of political candidates to get them elected to office. After they are elected, those same defense contractors get big contracts -- but for what? If there is no war, how will money already promised to these companies be justified?
The mechanism is of course propaganda, repackaged as news, sold to us to convince us to part with our hard earned money so that the few can profit and re-profit from a veritable buffet of free labor, free brand marketing, and easy money, and all under the banner of patriotism, something which no one will criticize easily or lightly.
You see, these same defense contractors also happen to either own (as with General Electric) or have business relationships with media giants, which makes the solution of creating a war much easier. If the news informs us, as it did prior to the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein has built an entire arsenal of WMD's ready to kill us all, we believe it, and since dissenting views are excluded, what other choice or avenues of information can we turn to? What other arguments from what other "experts," and what other evidence from what other "independent" institutions, can we compare to the so called facts being put forth?
Do we have a choice then but to believe, if for no other reason than to because we want to have faith that someone is telling us the truth? But it does not end there, just in case a few questioning minds might try to locate a pebble of truth outside of the pre-packaged, pre-approved, formally sanctioned propaganda we have been so meticulously fed to us. The same corporate and political interests have not only purchased the truth or manufactured their version of the truth, they have also purchased identities, created front groups, bought off churches and through them the souls of the congregants, to act as a secondary machine of disinformation and even - when needed - to be called upon to attack and destroy.
If a voice of dissent should manage to slip through the heavily corporatized and politicized public censors, as we saw happen in the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a cadre of purchased truth tellers, reporters, and grassroots groups are ready in the wings to react swiftly, to silence and discredit back into the shadows not only the lone whistle-blower, but any other person considering coming forward.
This is not something that happens in a democracy. This type of political character assassination in which the assassins are so much of the mainstream does not happen in a democracy. It only happens in countries under the control of something other than the people, but not in a democracy.
In a nation where corporations control the government, the military, and every possible freedom that can be afforded to a people (voting rights, access to basic life sustaining resources, etc.), a thing such as "democracy" is merely another marketing strategy or product brand, worn like one might wear a tiny American flag on the lapel of a dinner jacket.
Such corporate control and merger with the government and military has been in modern times called fascism. In America, we call it "privatization," so that the jagged edges and unpleasant concepts of a nation where no choice is our own to make can be much more easily digested.
Some discontent began brewing in pockets across the nation shortly after the appointment of a corporate approved leadership. It was momentarily interrupted by the horrors of an attack on this nation, but it continued to grow again as the fear tactics of the state sponsored machine could no longer keep us all silent at the same time and for the same duration. Of course, the modern day printing press in the form of the Internet is something that cannot be emphasized enough as the single most important technological development of our modern era.
In America we now have designated areas where people may protest, conveniently far away from news cameras and the people they are protesting - so out of sight are the new Americans that they have been rendered largely invisible. The right to congregate, as with other constitutionally protected rights, would have been almost entirely dismantled by this administration if not for the Internet. So armed with a new printing press, a global printing press at that, it would not be long before the public awoke from the lies that led to the Iraq war.
And even when those lies were finally exposed, and we - the public knew that we were all being lied to, we watched is stunned horror as the corporate owned/state sponsored "news" outlets attempted to convince us that we simply did not understand the reasons given for the war in the first place. It was WMD; no, it was the spreading of Democracy; no, it was something or other; but whatever it was, it was always "we the people" who were at fault. We simply did not get it, is what we were told. The entire administration set off on a tour of the US hoping to convince us that we simply did not get it. What they did not realize, however, is that we simply no longer bought it.
And so we move into the Cold Civil War
It has slowly become more and more obvious that we are fighting a domestic war, as yet unnamed, but is palpable to any of us who pay attention. Although it is important today as ever that we hold the Bush administration accountable for cooking intelligence that led us into a war of choice against a nation posing no threat to us, the most immediately important questions surround the reasons for why we continue to be held hostage to that war.
Understanding the nature of the domestic battle can only lead to a single conclusion. Whatever the myriad lies that have led us into Iraq in the first place, we now only continue to remain in Iraq as a distraction from the real war at home and likely for the worst kind of political abuses.
What possible motivations can continue to keep this administration focused on seeing through the worst policy decision ever to have been conceived, let alone carried out? It can't be the continued profiteering as the rape and pillage of Iraqi resources had already climaxed some time ago and the domestic pressure of Congressional investigations has already changed how US companies in Iraq are operating.
We can't be in Iraq because the people want to fight and win the war on terror as the majority of the nation does not believe this slogan anymore and also understands - despite the failings of the fourth estate - that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11. It can't be that we are in Iraq because our allies want continued war - although the House of Saud likely wants us to clean up the mess we have already made. In general, however, the international community certainly wants a political solution at this point.
What motive is left for keeping our nation embroiled in a civil war abroad? If we had men of honor in leadership, then I might believe the humanitarian concerns about the Iraqi refugees and so many displaced and so much destroyed as a possible motive. Yet could anyone call George W. Bush and Dick Cheney men of honor or say of them in earnest that they are truly concerned with the humanitarian nightmare that is now Iraq?
No. The reason we continue to remain in Iraq is that it is the only weapon left in the political arsenal of the corporate robber barons trying drastically and desperately to maintain their grip on domestic power. That fight for domestic power and the abuses of those who I would call the domestic villains in the saga is nothing short of a civil war, a cold civil war to be sure, but nevertheless a national struggle with the same stakes and the same motives. Although there are no geographical demarcations indicating enemy territory, there is no uniform identifying the adversary, and there is no bloodshed in the streets, it is still a war, a war for the foundation of this nation and the future of democracy. Even the villains are the same now as they were during the violent Civil War, although they do not all congregate along a particular geographical locale. They are the same villains who during the American Civil War wanted corporate power, slave labor, and control of government and national resources.
Yet those villains would have us believe we are fighting each other, a nation divided by its own political and social views. The same corporate interests who are robbing us blind would have us believe that we are a deeply divided nation: pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, taxes vs. no taxes, God vs. godlessness, gays vs. heterosexuals, and on and on it goes, pitting us against one another on the basis of every conceivable human attribute, position, and whatever differentiates any one person from another.
Does it not seem odd that differences that have for so long existed and co-existed, even with some tension, would suddenly now be strong enough to split this nation apart over the policies of George W. Bush? I have yet to meet a sane and rational person, regardless of political affiliation, who believes anything positive about Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their administration. When I talk to everyday people in everyday context, they don't bring up pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, nor do they bring up the mantra of gays taking over the country. No, everyday people I talk to are appalled, embarrassed, and frightened of this cabal.
Indeed, on the most important issues of our time and despite our many individual differences, the majority of us agree on the basics of what is currently wrong with this country and its leadership.
So why are we being constantly bombarded with the idea that we are a nation divided? And just who spending billions on propaganda to make us believe it?
The Corporate Confederacy
In our cold civil war, the enemy is not a part of the country called the "red states," as conveniently manufactured. Nor is the enemy a phantom right wing "wing-nut" or left wing "liberal loony," although there are some people who fall very much under those definitions. On the whole, however, there are simply not enough delusional and/or corrupt Americans to fill the manufactured stereotypes of the typical this or a typical that, even if the label is even color-coded for political fear tactics.
The image of a divided nation at war with itself is a false one, as false as the reasons for this war and the general war on terror, which is more of a reign of terror than anything else. But who is it trying so hard to divide this nation and for what reason?
Perhaps the most obvious answer lies in that same question reworded thusly: Who benefits? Consider this question in yet another way: So long as we are standing face to face and not standing shoulder to shoulder, who is benefiting? The answer of course is the same corporations and their lackeys masquerading in the garb of government. They need to distract us, divide us, spend billions of dollars trying to convince us what we need, what we hate, what we love, who is evil, who is good and everything in between.
These authoritarians, more appropriately fascists, understand that dissent is to be treated like a virus. It has to be, because the spread of individual opinions might collapse a whole industry. The more you know, the more you question; the more you question, the more you infect others; and the more people there are asking questions, the more we become a nation that cannot be ruled or bullied. We are far too many, and if we are left to think for ourselves, we might not like what we find.
We are, therefore, a threat, a virus, a thing that must be entertained, distracted, confused, frightened, anything, but allowed the freedom to think for ourselves or express those views to one another. People standing shoulder to shoulder outnumber the few who have claimed the control of our nation for themselves and against our best interests. We outnumber them and we frighten them because should we stand together, they cannot stand for long.
Forcing the President to Answer...
This brings me to the MoveOn moment of history, not so much for the ad itself, which I actually found petty because of its title. No, the ad has become almost irrelevant to the aftermath and the series of events that followed. It is those events collectively that are historic in their meaning, and on many and important levels.
Remember, the majority of the American public - regardless of age, religion, and political leanings -- is opposed to the war in Iraq. MoveOn represents but a mere 3 million or so Americans out of this majority, but still a large delegation expressing a very mainstream and popular view. So what happened, then? What was the real issue that no one noticed or actually verbalized, but felt almost instantaneously? We all felt it. I felt it. You felt it. But what happened that we all felt?
One of the major accomplishments of the MoveOn ad is that it showed that a President who claims not to care about the poll numbers, and hence the opinion of the public he claims to represent, suddenly had to answer the gauntlet publicly thrown down. His arrogance demanded it and his opportunistic nature wanted to exploit it.
Imagine this. The President of the United States had to answer 3 million Americans because they placed an advertisement in a newspaper. One newspaper ad is all it took for the most arrogant and misanthropic failure of a President in US history to be forced to stand up on national television and face the public. That is fairly miraculous in my humble opinion, and had the public known that this would work earlier, they would likely have peppered every space within every newspaper with a constant assortment of expressions, judgments, demands, and so forth. That alone would be a victory, but it is not the only victory that came, in quick succession, one after the other.
When the President denounced the ad as disgusting, he also denounced the public opinion of most Americans and, without meaning to, actually united and energized the public. He energized the public against him and the corporate-political junta he represents. We all felt energized by the arrogance of a leader who would so insult his own constituents and in such a public forum. In reaction, it was as though everyone was pushed into the streets - like it or not - at the same time.
Forcing the Corporate Confederacy into a defensive posture...
Yet the President and his corporate owners were far too panicked to stop at that. They were downright terrified -- enough to actually condemn the majority of Americans, including active duty members of the military, in the public circus of a formal Senate rebuke.
Think about this for a moment. Here is a Congress which cannot or simply will not do what they have been elected to do. We do not want a law passed, and they pass it. We want to redress our grievances, and they ignore us. Yet they were able to muster up the energy and numbers to get together in a collective rebuke of us because of an advertisement?
I'm not a member of MoveOn and I likely and in all honesty would have ignored the ad. But I felt insulted, as did many other people who might have also ignored the ad. If the corporate-political mechanism had not so panicked and not so overreacted, this would have been but an advertisement placed in a paper by a so-called liberal group. Perhaps a few official opinion makers would have noted it as a bit petty, but it was nothing anyone really would have remembered in a society where information is processed only in short bursts and quickly forgotten.
But the corporate and political mechanism could not ignore this, would not ignore it, and by attacking and rebuking the very mainstream sentiments about this war, they inadvertently made each and every American who shares that view feel directly insulted.
The realization that in numbers comes strength...
Something happened here, something momentous, but it took me some time before I fully understood what it was that occurred. In the end, it was really not the ad itself that caused such shameless and desperate attempts to muzzle the public. No, the ad was simply a mechanism for a popular opinion. What really frightened the corporate owned and their masters is that roughly 3 million Americans realized that in pooling their resources and standing together, they could take on the big boys. That is to say, they realized that regardless of their differences, they could stand shoulder to shoulder and this sent a wave of panic inside America Inc.
Because what would happen if more and more people defied the propaganda of a nation divided in opinion about this war? What if more and more people joined the ranks and showed that that without doubt, the public is very much united against this war? Most importantly, what if the public realized that it is not just the war they are so fully united in opinion on? What if this spread to other industries, such as health care, or taxes, and so on?
That notion is far too dangerous for America Inc., and also for their employees in government. What would happen if Americans could be heard above the din of corporate lobbyists and opinion makers, and were able to directly invalidate the carefully produced message telling us who we are, what we like, what we hate, what we want, what we need, and everything in between? You see the danger in this for those who spend billions upon billions a year on "public relations" and "advertising" and "image-making," all in order to make us believe that we do not agree and therefore cannot be united?
The public demand for redress was swift and unexpected, it blindsided the state mechanism, and it delivered a direct hit using nothing but a slogan, a picture, and facts.
Those who have betrayed us identify themselves...
But there is one more reason why this was something of a historic moment in its collection of reactions and counter-reactions. It exposed those in government as representative of someone or something other than the American people.
Consider that the majority of the public shares the sentiment of MoveOn's ad, not in the petty title of it, but in its content. The majority of the public which shares this opinion is also the majority of the voting public to whom these politicians in office are beholden, right?
Yet the President held full court to denounce the public. The Senate Republicans and 20 Democrats held full court to rebuke the public. The paid propagandists ran out with pen in hand to reprimand the public. TV screens were filled from channel to channel by the mobilized shills all condemning the public. And the corporate owned "grassroots" organization called Freedom's Watch wasted no time in creating and distributing its own ad vilifying the public. Does this not strike anyone as strange?
If the majority of the public shares this sentiment, then who are all these people rushing forth to defend? Who is this highly organized, well funded condemnation of the American public for? The only conclusion that can be reached is that the people who voted to rebuke the American people do not represent the American people. It is that simple. Whoever the elected officials in office are beholden to, it is most certainly not the public.
For the Still Deluded Among You...
If you are still a card carrying Republican, then you likely believe that the President and his party represent you. In reality, for those of you "Conservatives" still imagining yourselves to be the "base," and somehow represented by this President and his cronies, I have news for you: You are not in that club either.
Take a moment to see for yourselves:
Do you see a single soldier or a family member of a soldier represented in the President's "base?" Do you see a church, a temple, or any other religious organization represented, or a religious object in any way displayed at this "base" dinner? Do you see your political party friends or associates here, dining on food most of you cannot even afford to look at? In fact, do any of these people appear to you to be anyone you know? Does this event resemble your dining experience in general or your access to our dear leader in particular?
The majority of us now know that we are no longer represented by those in elected office. What we did not know until the Senate resolution to rebuke the MoveOn ad is just which of our elected public officials were "with us" and which were most decidedly "with the President." On that point, there is no longer any doubt. Every elected official who voted for condemning roughly 3 million Americans for something so fundamentally protected by the Constitution as the freedom to disagree with the President - does not represent us. Whoever they represent, it is not us.
In the cold civil war in which we are now all fighting to free ourselves from the corporate confederacy, the MoveOn ad was the first direct hit against a monolithic machine thought impervious before.
Friday, October 05, 2007
America's COWARDLY 'leadership' - Democrats, Bush, media whores - IGNORE massacres and mass-murder by regime in Burma....
Media Whores, cowardly, corrupted Democrats, and Bush-Cheney Republicans, NOT INTERESTED in covering Burma massacries, SUPPRESSION of democratic protests, and MASS SLAVERY by the Burma junta.....
US Media Don't Cover It
Posted October 2, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/if-a-tree-falls-in-burma_b_66863.html
The story in Burma just gets worse. The "warehouse", in which more than a thousand have been kept since their arrest, sounds like someplace even worse than Gitmo. And then there's the story of the Army major who deserted rather than stay to shoot monks, lest he burn in hell forever. American media, to the extent they ever cared about the Burma story, have moved on.
We allow ourselves to be roused to warlike ire by such stories when the government sees fit, even when those stories are untrue. But here, when the reporting on Burma seems against all odds to truthfully reflect the awful situation there, it's hard for us to be roused even to a simulation of moderate interest...
UPDATE: "We'll continue to cover this story, no matter how long it takes.." That was Anderson Cooper Tuesday night, wrapping up a CNN segment in which "exclusive" video of the demonstrations (and the military response) in Burma was aired for the first time--on CNN. Tuesday night--more than a week after the demonstrations occurred, and almost four full days since Al Jazeera English and BBC World aired if not the same almost virtually identical footage. How about continuing to cover it while it can still do some good--i.e., while demonstrators are still putting their lives on the line in the hope of some support from the West?
US Media Don't Cover It
Posted October 2, 2007
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harry-shearer/if-a-tree-falls-in-burma_b_66863.html
The story in Burma just gets worse. The "warehouse", in which more than a thousand have been kept since their arrest, sounds like someplace even worse than Gitmo. And then there's the story of the Army major who deserted rather than stay to shoot monks, lest he burn in hell forever. American media, to the extent they ever cared about the Burma story, have moved on.
We allow ourselves to be roused to warlike ire by such stories when the government sees fit, even when those stories are untrue. But here, when the reporting on Burma seems against all odds to truthfully reflect the awful situation there, it's hard for us to be roused even to a simulation of moderate interest...
UPDATE: "We'll continue to cover this story, no matter how long it takes.." That was Anderson Cooper Tuesday night, wrapping up a CNN segment in which "exclusive" video of the demonstrations (and the military response) in Burma was aired for the first time--on CNN. Tuesday night--more than a week after the demonstrations occurred, and almost four full days since Al Jazeera English and BBC World aired if not the same almost virtually identical footage. How about continuing to cover it while it can still do some good--i.e., while demonstrators are still putting their lives on the line in the hope of some support from the West?
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Media Whores echo AIPAC, Bush "I HATE IRANIANS!" narrative... Just as Goebbels and Hitler HATED the Jews....
It is ONLY because the Iraq war has squandered the better part of a trillion dollars (question: how many solar panels, and how much energy generated, would a TRILLION DOLLARS buy for America's sunbelt?), ground the United States Military into the dust of the Mideast, and broken the bodies of thousands of American men and women (and killed at least several hundred thousand Iraqis, not that they count) that this story even makes it to the pages of the "far left web."
IF it weren't for all that DEATH and DESTRUCTION unleashed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney's war(s), Ms. Cagan's grotesque comments would be just some more anonymous VIP mutterings from the bowels of the Bush-infested Department of Defense, sort of like Douglas Feith (whose "parrellel" intel agency subverted and bypassed CIA, NSA, State Dept., and other legitimate intel estimates) or Paul Wolfowitz or even that master of ceremonies himself, Donald Rumsfeld, who back in the good old days could wow the DC press corpse with his mastery of Dr. Strangelovian meaningless gobbledygook doublespeak. ("We know where the WMDs in Iraq are... they are in points to the North, East, South, and West of Tikrit... and Over the Rainbow, too!")
-----------------------------------------------
"I Hate All Iranians"
Frank Talk from [a Bush-infested] Defense Department Official
By GARY LEUPP
October 2, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp10022007.html
It ought to be political suicide. A Bush administration official (specifically, the Defense Department's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Coalition Affairs) told a group of six members of the British Parliament, "In any case, I hate all Iranians." Three MPs attending the meeting have confirmed this to the British tabloid The Daily Mail.
The official in question, Debra Cagan, appears in the Daily Mail photo in a red leather blouse and what looks like a chain-mail choker around her neck, along with some sort of martial cross although I understand she's Jewish. Her hair's slicked back like that of a fifties street gang kid. She looks like a butch dominatrix. I hope she would not be offended by this description because it is accurate and I suspect it's her intention to project such an image. (Compare Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in February 2005 arriving at the Wiesbaden Army Airfield wearing a black skirt showing just a little leg, a black gold-buttoned coat descending to mid-calf, and knee-high dirk-slim high-heeled boots. What fashion statement are these powerful political women trying to make?)
Dressed that way, she states in a casual aside to respectable Britons, as though they'll understand and be anything other than appalled, "I hate all Iranians." Did she preface the remark with, "Just between us imperialists"? Did she expect that they'd just nod in sympathy and keep the matter to themselves? The Mail reports they were in fact "taken aback," which of course speaks somewhat well for them.
So now the word is out, but predictably, denied. "She doesn't speak that way," an unnamed Defense Department official assured the Mail. It's not fashionable in the early 21^st century to hate entire peoples, and there are actually laws in civilized countries against hate speech. A Defense Department official cannot say to British MPs, "In any case, I hate all Jews," for example. This was possible in the 1930s, but would be political suicide today. But maybe you can say what Cagan did, without job consequences.
When you have the entire Senate calling for the U.S. to "confront" Iran, the entire Congress deferring to AIPAC in its refusal to demand that Bush consult with it before attacking Iran, the Persian Empire of Xerxes ludicrously depicted as the enemy of "freedom" in a popular film, the president of a great U.S. university taking the opportunity of the Iranian president's invited visit to insult him at length before conceding to him the podium---well, you know that norms of civility no longer apply. Logic, reason, balance pale before the power of myth and backwards reasoning of those seeking to create their own new, wild and spectacularly crazy reality. The Nazis called it "the triumph of the will"---the will that slams down the hated, weaker, lesser peoples and allows the Ubermenschen, the supermen, to realize their fate.
Somehow it seems fitting that a Defense Department official should speak so frankly as three U.S. aircraft carriers linger off the Iranian coast, the well-financed anti-Iran disinformation campaign swells, and neocon ideologues granted extensive White House access explicitly demand the bombing of Iran. It is the natural culmination of the vilification trend. If you hate all of them (and are grotesquely ignorant of their vast contribution to human civilization), why not nuke them, and their monuments and treasures, and destroy their 3000 year history, and "wipe them off the map"? Why not prepare public opinion for that shattering scenario, and grind those boot heels into the brains of any sympathizers of those you call "sand-niggers" as you try to spread Bush's gospel of hate?
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Media whores IGNORE the CHEVRON-Condoleeza Rice-BURMA MASS MURDER CONNECTION....
CHEVRON'S PIPELINE in Burma is the conduit that fuels Burma's MURDEROUS THUG REGIME....
Because GREED, lust for profit, centralization of wealth and power, and WORSHIP of MONEY are the elements that govern America's Right-leaning corporate media, THIS STORY about CHEVRON's SUPPORT for the MASS-MURDER BURMA REGIME is only found on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" newscast.....
=========================================
Chevron’s Pipeline Is the Burmese Regime’s Lifeline
By Amy Goodman
Posted on Oct 2, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071002_chevrons_pipeline_is_the_burmese_regimes_lifeline/
<< ...Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: “Sanctions haven’t worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma’s regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It’s really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers.”
The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal’s exemption from the Burma sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.
Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.
Human-rights groups around the world have called for a global day of action on Saturday, Oct. 6, in solidarity with the people of Burma. Like the brave activists and citizen journalists sending news and photos out of the country, the organizers of the Oct. 6 protest are using the Internet to pull together what will probably be the largest demonstration ever in support of Burma. Among the demands are calls for companies to stop doing business with Burma’s brutal regime. >>
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.
Because GREED, lust for profit, centralization of wealth and power, and WORSHIP of MONEY are the elements that govern America's Right-leaning corporate media, THIS STORY about CHEVRON's SUPPORT for the MASS-MURDER BURMA REGIME is only found on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" newscast.....
=========================================
Chevron’s Pipeline Is the Burmese Regime’s Lifeline
By Amy Goodman
Posted on Oct 2, 2007
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071002_chevrons_pipeline_is_the_burmese_regimes_lifeline/
<< ...Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: “Sanctions haven’t worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma’s regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It’s really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers.”
The U.S. government has had sanctions in place against Burma since 1997. A loophole exists, though, for companies grandfathered in. Unocal’s exemption from the Burma sanctions has been passed on to its new owner, Chevron.
Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.
Human-rights groups around the world have called for a global day of action on Saturday, Oct. 6, in solidarity with the people of Burma. Like the brave activists and citizen journalists sending news and photos out of the country, the organizers of the Oct. 6 protest are using the Internet to pull together what will probably be the largest demonstration ever in support of Burma. Among the demands are calls for companies to stop doing business with Burma’s brutal regime. >>
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
CNN, US media whores, DOWNPLAY, WHITEWASH, CENSOR the FEROCITY of Burma regime's brutal, MURDEROUS crackdown on democracy protesters.....
CNN, US media whores, DOWNPLAY, WHITEWASH, CENSOR the FEROCITY of Burma regime's brutal, silent, MASS-MURDER crackdown on regime opponents and pro-democracy protesters.... BECAUSE CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH and POWER (anti-democratic tendencies) ARE WHAT AMERICA's MEDIA WHORES - CNN, Fox 'news' - are all about.
TEXTBOOK photo of MILITARY as parasites: Burma's army has one and only one main purpose: TO TERRORIZE the citizens of that country, so the military junta can rob the nation of its wealth and ENSLAVE the regime's enemies and opponents.
SOLDIERS HUNT DISSIDENTS in Myanmar http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar;_ylt=Ag42Ph9LAtoy0CWEkFU0BvGs0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar;_ylt=Ag42Ph9LAtoy0CWEkFU0BvGs0NUE
TEXTBOOK photo of MILITARY as parasites: Burma's army has one and only one main purpose: TO TERRORIZE the citizens of that country, so the military junta can rob the nation of its wealth and ENSLAVE the regime's enemies and opponents.
SOLDIERS HUNT DISSIDENTS in Myanmar http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar;_ylt=Ag42Ph9LAtoy0CWEkFU0BvGs0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar;_ylt=Ag42Ph9LAtoy0CWEkFU0BvGs0NUE
'MAJOR MEDIA" downplays, censors story of Back woman kidnapped, tortured, raped by white family in West Virginia....
ePluribus Media details the story of a Black woman kidnapped, rapped, tortured, and forced to eat animal feces, by her White-trash captors... and how the "MAJOR MEDIA" downplays or minimizes the story, to where it is nonexistent in national coverage. CNN does carry the story in a one-page web article:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/12/woman.tortured/index.html
...but as ePluribus points out, this story with all the elements of true outrage and horrendous cruelty receives almost no media coverage, while "Missing White Women" are still the "mainstream media's" favorite "slow news week" distraction/filler stories.
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/09/12/woman.tortured/index.html
...but as ePluribus points out, this story with all the elements of true outrage and horrendous cruelty receives almost no media coverage, while "Missing White Women" are still the "mainstream media's" favorite "slow news week" distraction/filler stories.
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