Saturday, December 8, 2012

The brutality of this Israeli retaliation shocked those in the international community who had anticipated a reaction but not one so contemptuous of the General Assembly, and so insolent a rebuke to Barack Obama and the American government, which hours before had supported Israel in the General Assembly vote. (The U.S. remains Israel's suzeraine. Sad, very sad.)

How to dispose of Israel's Palestinians

Date 2012/12/5


What exactly is it that Israel intends to do with the Palestinians now in the territories that it has just opened for home construction for Jewish settlers, thereby extending its policy of occupying and annexing legally Palestinian lands?

The UN General Assembly’s overwhelming vote last week to grant the Palestinian Authority non-member state observer status was followed by the Israeli government’s “punishment” of the Palestinians by withholding tax revenues of some $100 million due the Palestinian Authority, and authorizing the construction of three thousand new illegal homes for Israeli settlers in contested areas east of Jerusalem, thereby making it impossible for this territory to become, as previously assumed, and as claimed by the Palestinians, part of a future Palestinian state. If Israel has its (present) way, there will be no Palestinian state

The brutality of this Israeli retaliation shocked those in the international community who had anticipated a reaction but not one so contemptuous of the General Assembly, and so insolent a rebuke to Barack Obama and the American government, which hours before had supported Israel in the General Assembly vote.

The European reaction was unprecedentedly sharp, with harsh criticism by governments, ambassadors summoned for explanations, and a conference scheduled for Monday between France and Britain, and possibly other European governments, to discuss further common actions against Israel.

Israel’s government reportedly was taken aback by the British and German abstentions during the vote (Britain in the past has been a complaisant follower of any American lead on Israel, and Germany is always expected to vote with Israel) as well as by the total number of votes by the other major European governments against Israel. Globally, only three major nations, other than Israel itself, voted against the Palestinians: the U.S., Canada and the Czech Republic. (In addition there were some tiny American island dependencies in the Pacific and Panama).

While the American Congress, to a man/woman, rallied to Israel’s side, what the American people as a whole thought is hard to say, given the rather muddled notion of the Arab-Israeli conflict held by most Americans, and popular ignorance of international affairs in general.

Most Americans have accepted the exploitation by Israel and its American supporters of the vast material and military assistance, and even vaster political backing, put at Israel’s disposal by Republican and Democratic administrations alike, as well as the notorious intimidation and blackmail of American elected officials that goes on concerning the Palestinian issue (which is a commonplace item of the political landscape in Washington and New York, but not widely known across the country). A substantial number of American (and Israeli!) political observers fear that this ignorance/indifference might eventually end in a popular American backlash against Israel and its American facilitators. That is not likely soon, but could be of great force if it came.

But to return to the original question, which few seem willing to pose. When Israel wins its campaign to create a single unchallenged Jewish state on all of the land given by the UN General Assembly in 1948 to make parallel Jewish and Arab homelands (a plan which the Arab states fought and lost), what happens to the Palestinian people left in the country?

There will not be quite as many of them as there currently are, if they persist in their sporadic and unsuccessful outbursts of resistance, revenge or retaliation, since it is Israel that like the imperialist powers of the past, “has the Maxim gun and they have not” – taking the form of F-16s, cluster bombs, and nuclear weapons if necessary. But the Palestinian (and Gaza) birth rate is much higher than the overall rate of Israel’s Jewish population.

What do Prime Minister Netanyahu and his colleagues intend to do with the Palestinians? For the present the latter are penned up in walled or barricaded enclosures on what they consider their own land, but the whole purpose of Israel’s national policy is to take that land away from them.

Moreover, left landless, in ever-deteriorating conditions – in a Greater Israel -- they become apartheid victims, or Indians on a reservation, deprived of all hope. That would be a terrible inconvenience and international disgrace -- as well as an ethnic contradiction, in what Israeli patriots would expect to be seen as a triumphant All-Jewish State, the Israel of the Prophets.

What can they do with the Palestinians? Force them all out into Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon or Syria (what’s left of it)—none of which want them? In that case the spectacle of the Israeli defense forces herding millions of Palestinians -- sobbing mothers, children dragging their pitiful possessions, struggling men -- across Israel’s frontiers into foreign countries, at gunpoint or using bulldozers and tanks, would be poor public relations (one might say).

Perhaps the United States, land of immigrants, would take the Palestinians in? One must ask Barack Obama, or Congressional leaders. I would think, though, the answer would be no. Europe already has more Muslim immigrants than it finds comfortable. But perhaps the Israelis could force them onto ships to go to Germany, which started all this?

It is a very serious question -- what does Netanyahu think he is going to do with the Palestinians? There is an unthinkable solution. The better one would be for Israel, right now, to accept the two-state solution.


© Copyright 2012 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.




This article comes from William PFAFF

http://www.williampfaff.com



The URL for this article is:

http://www.williampfaff.com/article.php?storyid=602

While one can’t know for certain what actually transpired in the events that led to their arrests, Eugenio Velázquez and Maximino Melchor Vázquez appear to be among the more sympathetic individuals tragically ensnared by the seemingly endless drug war. Regardless of what they did and why, their cases demonstrate that it is the war itself that is the crime. It produces countless victims—whether “innocent” or “guilty”—while fueling the very practices that allegedly necessitate the “war” that is supposed to extinguish them.

The Real Crime is the War Itself

Convicts, Collateral Damage, and the “War on Drugs”

by JOSEPH NEVINS


Two recent court cases in southern California provide insight into the identity of those smuggle drugs across the international boundary between the two countries. But more importantly what they do is highlight how the ludicrous “war on drugs” produces casualties of many sorts.

Eugenio Velázquez, 51, is a U.S. citizen who resides in Tijuana. He is also one of that city’s most prominent architects. U.S. border authorities arrested him in March while he tried to enter the United States from through the official port of entry in San Ysidro (part of San Diego), California, after finding more than 12 kilos of cocaine concealed in his vehicle.

In June, he pleaded guilty “to knowingly and intentionally importing the cocaine,” reports the San Diego Union Tribune and is scheduled to be sentenced later this month.

Maximino Melchor Vázquez was, until recently, a member of Tijuana’s classical music community. Sheriff’s deputies arrested the 23-year-old trained tenor who enjoys singing opera and traditional Mexican music, in September near Camp Pendleton, a U.S. Marine base north of San Diego. They caught him transporting 44 pounds of crystal methamphetamine.

The young man, a member of the Tijuana musical ensemble, Opera Ambulante, pleaded guilty in November to drug trafficking charges in San Diego Superior Court. According to the Union-Tribune, he received a nine-year sentence, at least half of which he will have to serve in prison.

In addition to challenging the stereotype of who smuggles narcotics, what the two men share is that both might very well be victims of the very drug trafficking syndicates that the authorities who arrested, charged, and convicted them claim to combat.

Melchor has remained tight-lipped about the circumstances that resulted in his transport of the drug. But his lawyer, John R. Rodriguez, asserts that his client acted under duress, and did so to protect himself and his family. According to his attorney, “He was propositioned in a way that it would put everybody at risk if he simply walked away.”

Velázquez, for his part, has been more forthcoming. In a recent letter to the news media in Tijuana, he explains that his actions were “the result of a situation of high risk, threat, and intimidation.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson Lauren Mack coldly says that such claims are to be expected: “It’s very common for drug smugglers to claim coercion after they’ve been caught.” She uselessly advises those who feel that “they are in harm’s way if they don’t smuggle . . . . to contact authorities and let them know before they get caught.”

While one can’t know for certain what actually transpired in the events that led to their arrests, Eugenio Velázquez and Maximino Melchor Vázquez appear to be among the more sympathetic individuals tragically ensnared by the seemingly endless drug war. Regardless of what they did and why, their cases demonstrate that it is the war itself that is the crime. It produces countless victims—whether “innocent” or “guilty”—while fueling the very practices that allegedly necessitate the “war” that is supposed to extinguish them.


Joseph Nevins teaches geography at Vassar College. He is the author of Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Operation Gatekeeper and Beyond: The War on “Illegals” and the Remaking of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2010).

This article was originally published by NACLA.

The moment when the New Deal as we knew it became history by bi-partisan consensus was a long time coming. A trans-generational core of inherited wealth and right-wing cranks has been trying to undo the New Deal since Social Security became fact in 1935. Ronald Reagan echoed anti-New Deal cries of ‘socialism,’ first as a paid spokesperson of the AMA (American Medical Association) against the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid, and later through his racist caricature of the ‘welfare queen’ living fat on public largesse. Despite the fact that Social Security is an insurance program paid for by its participants, much the same as private insurance but without the executive looting, the charge has always been of an undeserving public sucking on “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

Austerity, Obama-Style

The Plutocrats and the Placeholder President

by ROB URIE


In Quentin Tarantino’s movie ‘Jackie Brown’ the illegal arms dealer played by Samuel L. Jackson laughs as he recounts the sales slogan used by the manufacturer of the ‘Tech Nine’ semi-automatic weapon—“the most popular gun in American crime, like they proud of that shit.” Mere weeks after Barack Obama was re-elected farce is added to tragedy with his supporters complaining that while the Republican proposal to cut Federal government spending and social insurance programs is all bluster and misdirection, their guy (Mr. Obama) has a real plan to do so—like they’re proud of that shit. Thanks just the same folks, but I’ll take the fake plan.

The moment when the New Deal as we knew it became history by bi-partisan consensus was a long time coming. A trans-generational core of inherited wealth and right-wing cranks has been trying to undo the New Deal since Social Security became fact in 1935. Ronald Reagan echoed anti-New Deal cries of ‘socialism,’ first as a paid spokesperson of the AMA (American Medical Association) against the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid, and later through his racist caricature of the ‘welfare queen’ living fat on public largesse. Despite the fact that Social Security is an insurance program paid for by its participants, much the same as private insurance but without the executive looting, the charge has always been of an undeserving public sucking on “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

Democrats first joined the effort in earnest with Bill Clinton’s plan to partially privatize Social Security. The idea was to let our good friends on Wall Street manage a bit of the money for us, for a fee of course. That proposal faltered when Mr. Clinton was impeached. As was the fashion in European Central Bank circles in 2009, Mr. Obama took up the torch of fiscal austerity of his own initiative by creating his very own deficit commission. This should have come as no surprise to anyone paying attention—Mr. Obama publicly stated his intention to ‘fix’ Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid when he allied himself with the Wall Street friendly ‘Hamilton Project’ in 2006.

(In Between Democrats Clinton and Obama came Republican George W. Bush who also tried to partially privatize Social Security. Mr. Bush quickly retreated when he saw the depth of political opposition to the effort. As the saying goes, it takes a Democrat to gut the New Deal).

For the uninitiated, the Hamilton Project is the demon spawn of the Clintonite contingent of the Democratic Party led by former Treasury Secretary and disgraced Citicorp Board member Robert Rubin. The kindest take on the Wall Street lootocracy populating the organization is that they don’t know how money is created (the U.S. has a fiat currency), making them morons. The less kind take is that their greed has no limits. Whichever is more applicable (neither is mutually exclusive), if one group of Wall Street politicos bears responsibility for the economic catastrophe that an unregulated Wall Street has visited upon the world in recent years, the Hamilton Project is it.

Never one to let the wish list of the entrenched plutocracy go unfulfilled, Barack Obama chose Democrat, inheritance baby and Wall Street ‘welfare queen’ Erskine Bowles, to co-head his (Mr. Obama’s) very own ‘deficit commission.’ Of course Mr. Obama knew nothing of Mr. Bowles experience leading the earlier effort to (partially) privatize Social Security when he appointed him to the position. In his speech welcoming the Hamilton Project into existence (link above), Mr. Obama additionally described himself as an enthusiastic ‘free trader’ committed to globalization. And of current relevance, he ascribed fiscal ‘discipline’ as the proximate cause of the Clinton economic ‘boom,’ deftly ignoring the greatest stock market bubble (as measured by price / earnings ratio—twice that of 1929) in human history.

One could be forgiven for believing that Mr. Obama, or any other placeholder Democrat for that matter, has something of a point regarding ‘entitlement’ spending if his words are the only that are listened to. People in the U.S. are living longer and a strapped citizenry simply cannot afford the lavish promises made in an earlier age of plenty goes the toxic bullshit. By leaving out class divisions this formulation simply furthers the shift in social resources upward from poor to rich. As economist Paul Krugman has effectively argued, the rich are living longer and the working class and poor are not. Additionally, unless those in the ‘gap’ years between the old and new eligibility ages for Medicare simply forgo health care, the change will force them to purchase private health insurance under whatever terms the ‘market’ will bear. But of course, private insurance companies always act in the public interest when people’s backs are to the wall.

At the end of the day this charade is a struggle over social resources. The ‘too-big-to-fail’ guarantee of the banks, which is the only reason why insolvent, predatory Wall Street remains in business, is an entitlement program for connected bankers—for which they pay nothing. The bloated, murderous, military industry that lobbies the U.S. into unnecessary wars for their own benefit and that of corporate welfare receiving multi-national corporations is an entitlement program. And the aforementioned corporate welfare that perpetuates the puffy, gray corporate executives behind the ‘Fix the Debt’ campaign for whom official Washington now apparently works is an entitlement program. So if we want to have a public ‘discussion’ of entitlement spending, by all means let’s do so.

And as far as entitlement programs go, government guarantees and redistribution schemes are only a starting point. As economist Dean Baker has argued, America’s professional class retains monopoly pricing power for their labor through trade restrictions while the working class has been thrown to the wolves. The Federal Reserve has spent upwards of four trillion dollars to entitle the fortunes of the investor class since 2008, returning the already rich to their former wealth. And corporate executives have entitled themselves to robber-baron sized paychecks through the combination of trade policies that have so reduced the fortunes of the working class, tax abatements that have bled the public weal for some forty years, and through the financialization of the economy that has favored, along with Federal Reserve policies, the financial wealth that executives pay themselves with. All of these and more are entitlement programs that have redistributed ever more social wealth from the working class and poor up to the Washington establishment’s beloved plutocrats.

But the trillions of dollars in health care expenditures that we deadbeats intend to sponge off of the blessedly deserving rich is the really big money, right? When Erskine Bowles wakes with night terrors, it is my herniated disk and your gall bladder operation that will sink the country, right? The U.S. pays 30% – 50% more per person than other first world nations for health care that is of substantially lower quality because we have a largely private health care system. Were the system totally public—Medicare for all, we would realize some material proportion of these savings and most likely vastly improve the health of the citizenry. Were the monopoly entitlements of doctors and pharmaceutical companies reduced or eliminated, further cost reductions would be realized. So quickly, who are the main beneficiaries of America’s ‘bloated’ entitlement programs?

As Mr. Obama will offer, his proposals include reducing payments to health care providers and negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. However, the private health care system in America is the global leader in shifting costs to those with the least social power. Cuts in public payments to private providers have a long history of popping up elsewhere, as health insurer profits will attest. For instance, Mr. Obama’s health care ‘reform’ program, the ACA (Affordable Care Act), requires insurance companies to spend fixed percentages of their revenues providing health care or to rebate the difference to their customers. As corporations constitute the majority of their ‘customers,’ corporations apparently now have an incentive to shop around for health insurers that provide the lowest proportion of health care to their employees to maximize the rebates. (The central business of insurers was already to provide the appearance of coverage without providing actual coverage). And health insurance providers can gain market share, if at lower margins, by doing exactly this. Welcome to America.

Last, any honest discussion of ‘entitlements’ would be to the benefit of America’s poor and working classes. The globetrotting plutocrats behind current ‘discussions’ see working class product as their due. This is the very definition of entitlement. We can either disabuse them of this notion or roll over and play dead. Or better yet, roll over and vote Democrat.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York.

Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social mediaMilitary's 'sock puppet' software creates fake online identities to spread pro-American propaganda





Jeff Jarvis: Washington shows the morals
of a clumsy spammer

Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain

The Guardian, Thursday 17 March 2011 

Gen David Petraeus has previously said US online psychological operations are aimed at 'countering extremist ideology and propaganda'.

 
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.

The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".

Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said: "The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."

He said none of the interventions would be in English, as it would be unlawful to "address US audiences" with such technology, and any English-language use of social media by Centcom was always clearly attributed. The languages in which the interventions are conducted include Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Centcom said it was not targeting any US-based web sites, in English or any other language, and specifically said it was not targeting Facebook or Twitter.

Once developed, the software could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with any number of co-ordinated messages, blogposts, chatroom posts and other interventions. Details of the contract suggest this location would be MacDill air force base near Tampa, Florida, home of US Special Operations Command.

Centcom's contract requires for each controller the provision of one "virtual private server" located in the United States and others appearing to be outside the US to give the impression the fake personas are real people located in different parts of the world.

It also calls for "traffic mixing", blending the persona controllers' internet usage with the usage of people outside Centcom in a manner that must offer "excellent cover and powerful deniability".

The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

OEV is seen by senior US commanders as a vital counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation programme. In evidence to the US Senate's armed services committee last year, General David Petraeus, then commander of Centcom, described the operation as an effort to "counter extremist ideology and propaganda and to ensure that credible voices in the region are heard". He said the US military's objective was to be "first with the truth".

This month Petraeus's successor, General James Mattis, told the same committee that OEV "supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement and web-based product distribution capabilities".

Centcom confirmed that the $2.76m contract was awarded to Ntrepid, a newly formed corporation registered in Los Angeles. It would not disclose whether the multiple persona project is already in operation or discuss any related contracts.

Nobody was available for comment at Ntrepid.

In his evidence to the Senate committee, Gen Mattis said: "OEV seeks to disrupt recruitment and training of suicide bombers; deny safe havens for our adversaries; and counter extremist ideology and propaganda." He added that Centcom was working with "our coalition partners" to develop new techniques and tactics the US could use "to counter the adversary in the cyber domain".

According to a report by the inspector general of the US defence department in Iraq, OEV was managed by the multinational forces rather than Centcom.

Asked whether any UK military personnel had been involved in OEV, Britain's Ministry of Defence said it could find "no evidence". The MoD refused to say whether it had been involved in the development of persona management programmes, saying: "We don't comment on cyber capability."

OEV was discussed last year at a gathering of electronic warfare specialists in Washington DC, where a senior Centcom officer told delegates that its purpose was to "communicate critical messages and to counter the propaganda of our adversaries".

Persona management by the US military would face legal challenges if it were turned against citizens of the US, where a number of people engaged in sock puppetry have faced prosecution.

Last year a New York lawyer who impersonated a scholar was sentenced to jail after being convicted of "criminal impersonation" and identity theft.

It is unclear whether a persona management programme would contravene UK law. Legal experts say it could fall foul of the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, which states that "a person is guilty of forgery if he makes a false instrument, with the intention that he or another shall use it to induce somebody to accept it as genuine, and by reason of so accepting it to do or not to do some act to his own or any other person's prejudice". However, this would apply only if a website or social network could be shown to have suffered "prejudice" as a result.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2011 to remove references to Facebook and Twitter, introduced during the editing process, and to add a comment from Centcom, received after publication, that it is not targeting those sites.

For the second year in row, more US soldiers killed themselves than were killed in combat. In 2010, 468 soldiers took their own lives, compared to 462 killed in fighting. “I unfortunately inhabit the demographic in the United States that kills itself, pretty much more than any other out there,” [Matthis Chiroux, Afghanistan war veteran turned anti-war activst] told RT. “We come home feeling terrible, despicable about what we did and what we saw.”

US war woe: Suicide kills more soldiers than combat

23 December, 2011


When guns fall silent and ceasefires are agreed, wars live on in the minds of the men and women who fought them. And a killer still stalks them, more deadly than the enemies they once faced.

­Being in a conflict environment is killing US soldiers. But surprisingly, the biggest killers are not enemy combatants.

For the second year in row, more US soldiers killed themselves than were killed in combat. In 2010, 468 soldiers took their own lives, compared to 462 killed in fighting.

And even off the battlefield, suicide rates continue to soar.

Matthis Chiroux is an Afghanistan war veteran turned anti-war activist.

“I unfortunately inhabit the demographic in the United States that kills itself, pretty much more than any other out there,” he told RT. “We come home feeling terrible, despicable about what we did and what we saw.”

Chiroux is one of thousands returning from deployment feeling detached and conflicted.

“The laws of decency don't apply to soldiers in combat and when you go back to having to apply those laws to yourself all the time that, for many, leads either to the grave or to jail,” he explains.

An average of 18 veterans per day commit suicide and many more attempt it. Last year, 20 per cent of America’s 30,000 suicides was a soldier or veteran.

Dr. Jan Kemp, a director of the National Mental Health Program, says many soldiers come back feeling disconnected from the world in which they once lived.

“It kind of accumulates in disaster. You really start to wonder if you're ever going to be who you were again,” she explained to RT. “Then all of a sudden, they're back. Things happened in their families while they were gone. The situation they come back to is often not the same as when they left.”

In fact, many come back to bleak situations.

A quarter of the homeless in America are military veterans. The unemployment rate among vets hovers above 12 per cent.

Meanwhile, campaigns such as “Army Strong” glorify life as a soldier, and aim to entice America’s young men and women to enlist.

Since retiring from the army, Matthis Chiroux has been committed to showing students the other side of the army experience – the side recruiters fail to mention.

“The unfortunate thing is [what they show] is not the military experience. It’s an advertisement,” he explains to a group of young people who have come to listen to his talk.

It’s all part of the “We are not your soldiers” lecture tour. His message is clear. – “Don't become one of us!”

It is a message he hopes will prevent more students and young people from becoming another grim statistic.

CENSORED 2012: Top 25 Unreported Stories of 2010-2011

Top 25

Censored 2012: Stories of 2010-2011



1. More US Soldiers Committed Suicide Than Died in Combat

2. US Military Manipulates the Social Media

3. Obama Authorizes International Assassination Campaign

4. Global Food Crisis Expands

5. Private Prison Companies Fund Anti–Immigrant Legislation

6. Google Spying?

7. U.S. Army and Psychology’s Largest Experiment–Ever

8. The Fairytale of Clean and Safe Nuclear Power

9. Government Sponsored Technologies for Weather Modification

10. Censored # 10: Real Unemployment: One Out of Five in US

11. Trafficking of Iraqi Women Rampant

12. Pacific Garbage Dump—Did You Really Think Your Plastic Was Being Recycled?

13. Will a State of Emergency Be Used to Supersede Our Constitution?

14. Family Pressure on Young Girls for Genitalia Mutilation Continues in Kenya

15. Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight

16. Sweatshops in China Are Making Your iPods While Workers Suffer

17. Superbug Bacteria Spreading Worldwide

18. Monsanto Tries to Benefit from Haiti’s Earthquake

19. Oxfam Exposes How Aid Is Used for Political Purposes

20. US Agencies Trying to Outlaw GMO Food Labelling

21. Lyme Disease: An Emerging Epidemic

22. Participatory Budgeting – A Method to Empower Local Citizens & Communities

23. Worldwide Movement To Ban or Charge Fees For Plastic Bags

24. South Dakota Takes Extreme Measures to Be the Top Anti–Abortion State

25. Extension of DU to Libya



For 36 years, Project Censored, based in California, has documented critically important stories unreported or suppressed by the media most Americans watch or read. This year's report is Censored 2013: Dispatches from the media revolution by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (Seven Stories Press). They describe the omissions of "mainstream" journalism as "history in the un-making". ... [T]heir investigation demonstrates the sham of a system (of corporate press) claiming to be free.

Leveson's Punch and Judy show on the press masks 'hacking' on a scale you can barely imagine

By John Pilger

6 December 2012


In the week Lord Leveson published almost a million words about his inquiry into the "culture, practice and ethics" of Britain's corporate press, two illuminating books about media and freedom were also published. Their contrast with the Punch and Judy show staged by Leveson is striking.

For 36 years, Project Censored, based in California, has documented critically important stories unreported or suppressed by the media most Americans watch or read. This year's report is Censored 2013: Dispatches from the media revolution by Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth (Seven Stories Press). They describe the omissions of "mainstream" journalism as "history in the un-making". Unlike Leveson, their investigation demonstrates the sham of a system claiming to be free. Among their top 25 censored stories are these:

Since 2001, the United States has erected a police state apparatus including a presidential order that allows the US military to detain anyone indefinitely without trial. FBI agents are now responsible for the majority of terrorist plots, with a network of 15,000 spies "encouraging and assisting people to commit crimes". Informants receive cash rewards of up to $100,000.

The bombing of civilian targets in Libya in 2011 was often deliberate and included the main water supply facility that provided water to 70 per cent of the population. In Afghanistan, the murder of 16 unarmed civilians, including children, attributed to one rogue US soldier, was actually committed by "multiple" soldiers, and covered up. In Syria, the US, Britain and France are funding and arming the icon of terrorism, al-Qaida. In Latin America, one US bank has laundered $378bn. in drug money.

In Britain, this world of subjugated news and information is concealed behind a similar façade of a "free" media, which promotes the extremisms of state corruption and war, consumerism and an impoverishment known as "austerity". Leveson devoted his "inquiry" to the preservation of this system. My favourite laugh-out-loud quote of His Lordship is: "I have seen no basis at any stage for challenging the integrity of the police."

Those who have long tired of deconstructing the clichés and deceptions of "news" say: "At least there is the internet now."

Yes, there is, but for how long? Alfred W. McCoy, the great American chronicler of imperialism, quotes Obama in one of the recent election debates. "We need to be thinking about cyber security," said Obama. "We need to be thinking about space." McCoy calls this revolutionary. "Not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president's sparse words," he wrote. "Yet, for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution... moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyber warfare, the weaponisation of space [and] a breakthrough in what's called 'information warfare'."

This is about "hacking" on a vast scale by the state and its intelligence and military arms and "security" corporations. It was unmentionable at the Leveson inquiry, even though the internet was within Leveson's remit. It is the subject of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the future of the internet by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmermann (OR Books). That the Guardian, a principal gatekeeper of liberal debate in Britain, should describe their published conversation as "dystopian musings" is unsurprising. Understanding what they have to say is to abandon the vicarious as journalism and embrace the real thing.

"The internet was supposed to be a civilian space," Assange writes. "[It] is our space, because we all use it to communicate with each other and with members of our family... Ten years ago [mass interception] was seen to be a fantasy, something only paranoid people believed in" but now the internet is becoming "a militarized zone." When everyone can be intercepted en masse, spying on individuals is redundant. Stasi, the East German secret police, "penetrated" 10 per cent of East Germany society. Today, the cost of intercepting and storing all telephone calls in Germany in a year is less than eight million euros. More than 175 companies now sell the surveillance of whole countries. A whistleblower at the giant US telecommunications company AT&T has disclosed that the National Security Agency (NSA) allegedly took every phone call, every internet connection. The NSA intercepts 1.6 bn. personal communications every day.

To the "national security state", of which the US is the pioneer and model, "perpetual war" is a given; and the public are the enemy - not terrorists. Google, Facebook and Twitter are all based in the US. In December 2010, Twitter was ordered by the Justice Department to surrender its clients' personal information relevant to the Obama administration's pursuit of WikiLeaks, no matter where in the world people lived. Obama has pursued twice as many whistleblowers as all US presidents combined. This is why Assange and Bradley Manning are targets - along with those rare journalists who do their job and publish in the public interest. Like Assange they, too, are liable to be prosecuted for espionage, regardless of what the US Constitution says. A whistleblower at the NSA, Bill Binney, describes this as "turnkey totalitarianism".

The iniquity of Rupert Murdoch was not his "influence" over the Tweedledees and Tweedledums in Downing Street, nor the thuggery of his eavesdroppers, but the augmented barbarism of his media empire in promoting the killing, suffering and dispossession of countless men, women and children in America's and Britain's illegal wars.

Murdoch has plenty of respectable accomplices. The liberal Observer was as rabid a devotee of the Iraq invasion. When Tony Blair gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry, bleating about the media's harassment of his wife, he was interrupted by a filmmaker, David Lawley-Wakelin, who described him as a war criminal. At that, Lord Leveson leapt to his feet and ordered the truth-teller thrown out and apologised to the war criminal. Such an exquisite display of irony is contemptuous of all of us.