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Commentary and Opinions
on a Changing World

Other Voices is a series of articles, commentary and opinion from writers and critics on the state of the world in 2004. Most of the articles published in this series are from journalists and writers who are not regularly published in the mainstream media.

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NEW - No 196 – December 6

FALLUJAH:PENTAGON PLANS HIGH-TECH HAMLET
By Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
It is now official – the United States does not learn from history. It is destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet program was introduced in Vietnam, based on a British counterinsurgency program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. In a dismal attempt to prevent the National Liberation Front from “influencing” peasants in South Vietnam, the United States turned villages into concentration camps – they erected stockade walls and patrolled the villages with armed guards. According to figures compiled by the United States, 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in these restrictive hamlets.

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NEW - No 195 – December 6

MICHAEL MOORE: MADE OVER AND MOVING ON
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On the evening of November 29, a made-over Michael Moore appeared on the Tonight Show. With a haircut, cleanly-shaved and dressed in a smart looking suit, dress shirt and striped tie, Moore had shed his familiar baseball cap, ill-fitting jeans and baggy jacket, and the unshaven, shaggy-haired look that has been his inimitable fashion statement and sartorial calling card for years. Tonight show host, Jay Leno, stirred by the newly made over Moore, joked that the filmmaker looked like Denny Hastert, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. When Leno asked Moore if he had turned Republican, Moore responded, “If you can’t beat ‘em,” he said, “you might as well try to look like ‘em.”

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NEW - No 194 – December 3

MILITAINMENT GONE AMOK
By Ted Rall, tedrall.com
"America is a strange country. All of its best generals are journalists,” Defense Undersecretary Douglas J. Feith told the San Francisco Chronicle in recent interview. Now the generals have their own cable channel. As the Fourth Estate continues to morph into what General/Journalist Tommy Franks calls the “Fourth Front” in the ongoing and endless war on terror, and as the lines blur ever-further between military public affairs – disseminating accurate information to the media and the public – and psychological and information operations – using often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle – the inevitable has finally happened.

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NEW - No 193 – December 1

IF IT'S 2005, IT MUST BE TIME FOR ANOTHER WAR
By Rory O'Connor, roryoconnor.org
You’ve heard this song before. There’s this country, see, and they hate America. They’d nuke us if they had the chance, you bet they would. Damn Muslim religious fanatics! Guess what? They have weapons of mass destruction! Either that or their scientists are about to develop them. Whatever – we can’t let that happen. We’ve gotta hit them before they hit us! What’s that? Of course we’re sure! Our intelligence says so. Huh? No. We can’t show you the proof. We’ll say this much...a little bird told us. A little exile bird that wants to run the country after we overthrow the current regime. They wouldn’t lie, and neither would we. And while we’re at it, can we borrow your son for the next few years?

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NEW - No 192 – November 25

CHICKENS A LA KIEV
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Let’s take a look at this Ukraine thing. Who on this Earth can begin to swallow the sanctimonious self-righteousness of the Bush Government, not to mention their Obsequious Oreo Gofer Passe Colin Powell, piously bleating on about open elections, democracy, and the Rights of The People. Puhleeeeeze. Not while I’m breathing. These guys act from one and only one motivation – insatiable self-interest.

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NEW - No 191 – November 17

WELCOME TO THE ONE-PARTY STATE
By Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, prwatch.org
One of the biggest mistakes made by the Democratic Party during the recent election is that, once again, it “misunderestimated” George W. Bush. Rather than focusing on the big picture – the growing power of the conservative movement in the United States – much of the liberal rhetoric during the campaign focused on Bush’s incompetence, his character flaws and the failings of his administration. These themes found expression in books with titles such as “The Lies of George W. Bush,” the “I Hate Bush Reader” and the “Bush Hater’s Handbook.” In “Fahrenheit: 9/11,” Michael Moore dwelt on Bush’s rich-kid background, his frequent vacations, his Saudi connections and the frozen, deer-in-the-headlights way he continued reading “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren after he first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center towers.

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NEW - No 190 – November 17

WELCOME TO THE ONE-PARTY STATE
By Sheldon Rampton & John Stauber, prwatch.org
One of the biggest mistakes made by the Democratic Party during the recent election is that, once again, it “misunderestimated” George W. Bush. Rather than focusing on the big picture – the growing power of the conservative movement in the United States – much of the liberal rhetoric during the campaign focused on Bush’s incompetence, his character flaws and the failings of his administration. These themes found expression in books with titles such as “The Lies of George W. Bush,” the “I Hate Bush Reader” and the “Bush Hater’s Handbook.” In “Fahrenheit: 9/11,” Michael Moore dwelt on Bush’s rich-kid background, his frequent vacations, his Saudi connections and the frozen, deer-in-the-headlights way he continued reading “My Pet Goat” to schoolchildren after he first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center towers.

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NEW - No 188 – November 8

THE NEWS SHIFT FROM FLORIDA TO FALLUJAH
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
One minute, we are still debating election returns in Ohio and Florida. And then, in a flash, the story largely disappears and the subject changes. Quickly, we have moved on as the news media converges on Falluja to report on, and in the view of many, support what may be the bloodiest chapter to date of the Iraq war. Media coverage lurches from event to event, and from spectacle to spectacle as a substance deficit disorder hyperactively drives the news agenda. No sooner are we focused on one major story, than another intrudes to change the subject and insure that there is no time for follow-up, much less thoughtful processing.

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NEW - No 187 – November 8

TEAM BUSH'S NOVEMBER SURPRISE
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
Forty years after Senator Barry Goldwater crashed and burned as the Republican Party’s conservative presidential candidate, a consolidated conservative movement spearheaded by evangelical Christians carried George W. Bush to victory. The re-election of the president wasn’t so much determined by Soccer Moms, NASCAR Dads, or military voters as it was by Karl Rove’s army of “Values Voters” – an unwaveringly loyal bloc of Republican Party voters that marched to the polls and provided President Bush the votes necessary in a number of key states, including the pivotal battleground state of Ohio.

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NEW - No 186 – November 8

WHO, WHAT'S TO BLAME?
By Rory O’Connor, globalvision.org
It was the Ground War. Ir was the Air War. It was the youth vote. It was the ‘Yalla’ vote. It was the hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters. It was the millions of newly registered voters. It was George Soros. It was the felons’ list. It was voter suppression. It was voter fraud. It was the mystery bulge, and the wired President. It was the swing states. It was the battleground states. It was the computer voting machines. It was the media.

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NEW - No 185 – November 4

KERRY WON!
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
I know you don’t want to hear it. You can’t face one more hung chad.  But I don’t have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it’s my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry. Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN’s exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with – and therefore contaminated by – the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio’s male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

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NEW - No 184 – October 26

LUNTZ ON THE LOOSE
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
From helping craft Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” to advising Republicans to take the gloves off in going after President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair, to frequent memos on how to politically use 9/11, to reams of advice for Republicans on how to talk about the war on terrorism, the environment and other hot-button issues, to being a consultant to NBC’s The West Wing, to being named by Time magazine as one of “50 of America’s most promising leaders aged 40 and under,” Frank Luntz has been massaging the GOP’s messages, occasionally putting a kinder, gentler spin on GOP core issues, and taking the pulse of the nation’s voters for more than a decade. Regardless of the outcome of November’s election, Frank Luntz will be giving advice to the Republican Party and its candidates for a long time to come.

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NEW - No 183 – October 26

BBC TO REVEAL NEW FLORIDA VOTE SCANDAL
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan - possibly in violation of US law - to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals. Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”

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NEW - No 182 – October 24

5,000 ELEPHANTS MUST DIE. HERE'S WHY
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
We sat down to a hot meal of maize porridge and elephant and onion mince, swigged down with Castle lager, at the end of a hard day. I had spent it with Kruger Park game ranger Jack Greef, who had been dispatching African elephants with high-velocity 7.62 bullets fired behind their ears and into their brains. “Don’t ask me if I enjoyed today,” Jack warned me gruffly. “Elephants are beautiful creatures. Of all the animals in the Kruger Park I respect the elephant most. We play God, but we are not God. Every time you cull it takes something away from you. This is not a nice job, but it has to be done.”

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No 181 – October 22

COLLATERAL DAMAGE
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Boston’s Finest Police and Boston’s Numbskull Mayor finally got what they have been training for and arming for, what they have been bigtime bragging about, what the papers and stooges on TV have been crowing about. First, they got what they paid those federally subsidized, Ashcroft Authorized millions of dollars for: the very very finest in state-of-the-art anti-riot and anti-people weapons. And then their plastic shielded black helmeted Nazi Storm Trooper Motherfuckers finally got their b-i-i-i-i-i-g chance – the one they'd been itching for and hoping for these many months – to really, actually SHOOT the fancy pepper pellets and plastic bullets and stun guns that had lain amoldering in their holsters since the Republican National Convention.

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No 180 – October 18

TRIAL WAS A MUGABE MASTERSTROKE
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
The judge who presided at opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai’s 20-month treason trial in Zimbabwe is a corrupt placeman who last year grabbed a prize white-owned farm for himself. Paddington Garwe was promoted by President Robert Mugabe to the second highest post in the land – Judge President – three years ago after a purge of independent-minded judges who had, until then, ruled that land grabs and the eviction of mainly white commercial farmers were illegal. Judges who have refused to toe the line have been arrested, attacked and toppled. Several have fled into exile.

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No 179– October 18

CONTRARY ON MARY
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
After more than two decades of unremitting gay-bashing, using gays and lesbians as fund-raising fodder for right wing organizations and candidates, demonizing gays at every turn and, in this election cycle, calling for a constitutional amendment that would deny gays and lesbians the right to marry, conservatives have finally found the outrage. You’ll remember that in 1996, the Republican Party’s Presidential candidate, Senator Bob Dole, spent much of his time during the campaign looking for the “outrage.” Outraged by Hollywood’s immorality, and outraged by the failure of the nation’s voters to stand behind the GOP’s effort to dump President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Sen. Dole trucked around the country and demanded to know: “Where’s the outrage?”

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NEW - No 178 – October 18

CAUGHT IN A CROSSFIRE
By Rory O’Connor, roryoconnor.org
Talk about ‘cheap and tawdry’ political tricks! How would you feel if you were sitting at home watching television with your family when your privacy was invaded, your love life scrutinized ... and you suddenly found yourself being compared to a Nazi? That’s what happened to my longtime friend Winona LaDuke during a recently televised drive-by shooting on CNN’s Crossfire. Bow-tied Junior-Leaguer and George-Will-wannabe Tucker Carlson gratuitously slandered LaDuke last week following the endorsement of Kerry by Ralph Nader’s one-time running mate. And co-host Paul Begala chimed in ignorantly (from the left???) to compare Native American leader LaDuke – a prominent human and earth rights activist – with Nazi-lover David Duke!.

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NEW - No 177 – October 14

IS TEAM BUSH SUPPRESSING THE VOTE?
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
These days, schemes to suppress the vote are coming down the pike at a NASCAR-like clip: In July, Michigan State Rep. John Pappageorge told a gathering of party officials at an election strategy meeting of the Oakland County Republican Party that “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election cycle.” In Orlando, Fla., members of the Orlando League of Voters – an African-American civic group made up of mostly elderly women that has helped turn out large numbers of Democratic voters in the city – were the subject of an intimidating house-to-house investigation by Governor Jeb Bush’s state police, who were supposedly checking out charges of electoral irregularities. The Rev. Jesse Jackson recently charged Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell with “trying to reverse gains made by the civil rights movement by limiting where some Ohioans can cast their ballots,” the Palm Beach Post recently reported.

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NEW - No 176 – October 12

STOLEN HONOR: THE MOON CONNECTION
By Rory O’Connor, roryoconnor.org
The Sinclair Broadcasting Group – that wonderfully fair and balanced media firm that made news in April for refusing to run a Nightline program in which Ted Koppel read the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq – is up to its old political tricks again. This time the controversy centers on what WILL appear on as many as 62 television stations owned or managed by Sinclair: a suspect documentary highly critical of John Kerry’s antiwar activities thirty years ago.
The film, “Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal” is produced by Carlton Sherwood, a former reporter for the Washington Times, which of course is subsidized and controlled by the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his followers in the Unification Church.

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NEW - No 175 – October 10

HOROWITZ'S CAMPUS JIHAD
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
At Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, “WANTED” posters with a headshot of Professor Abel Alves appeared on campus a few weeks back; a student who took Associate professor David Gibbs’ “What is Politics?” class at the University of Arizona claimed that Gibbs “is an anti-American communist who hates America and is trying to brainwash young people into thinking America sucks”; a political-science professor at Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado says she has been the target of death threats and hate e-mail in the wake of the recent debate in the state over an Academic Bill of Rights; a University of Georgia professor is being investigated after allegations he bullied a conservative student. Revenge of the Nerds? Twenty-first century Gipper brigades? No, and No. It’s the Horowistas — a small, hearty and growing band of followers of right wing provocateur David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom.

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NEW - No 174 – October 7

THE CREDIBILITY GAP
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
There are two debates going on in American politics. The first is between and about the candidates. Who is ahead? Who is behind? The horse race metaphor frames the mainstream narrative as in years past. Alongside it, another debate rages about the role of the media itself. Is it being fair? Is it covering what it should? Is it biased – not just toward individual politicians but also against the democratic process itself? With the credibility of leading news organizations in question – with a coterie of partisan bloggers digging up media controversy at every political twist and turn – there seems to be a growing popular rejection of the traditional news machine.

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NEW - No 173 – October 1

SHOOT THE MESSENGER, BUT NOT THE MESSAGE
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
When Dan Rather went down for airing a document he couldn’t source, he did the courageous thing: blamed someone else. In this case, Rather and CBS loaded their corporate guilt on a guy you’ve probably never heard of before, rancher Bill Burkett of Abilene, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Texas Air National Guard. CBS did a no-no – used a document on air without fully checking out its source. No excuses. Shouldn’t have done it. They got the document from Burkett. Once CBS hung out its source and painted a target on him, Rove-ing gangs of media hit men finished him off. Burkett’s an evidence “fabricator,” “Bush-hater,” and even, suggests William Safire in the New York Times as he fantasizes a dark left-wing conspiracy, a felon ready for hard time.

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NEW - No 172 – October 1

MR TALL AND MR SMALL
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Our President told the debate audience, “You cannot lead if you send mexxed missiges.” I certainly hope not. But that’s exactly what we got. You watch our President, the nervous hand-hiding, the compulsive water-glass-fondling, the panicked I-wish-I-had-a-whiskey look, and you think, “My god, this is the guy who’s supposed to save us from al Qaeda.”

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NEW - No 171 – September 30

BUSH SAYS KERRY 'EMBOLDENED ENEMY'
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
With President Bush and Senator Kerry preparing to square off in their first debate – covering foreign affairs – widespread insurgent attacks and US casualties continue to mount. Have the Bush Administration and its surrogates crossed the line by charging the Kerry campaign with undermining the war effort? Dusting off the “watch what you say, watch what you do” mantra from its post-9/11 playbook, Team Bush appears confident it can level these charges without suffering any significant damage. With Iraq’s un-elected transitional Prime Minister Ayad Allawi at his side during a White House Rose Garden press conference on September 23, President Bush claimed that critics of his policy in Iraq were encouraging the enemy: “I understand... what mixed messages do. You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. That’s why I will continue to lead with clarity and in a resolute way.”

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NEW - No 170– September 26

IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
Having passed with flying colours, Tuval returns to the main gunshop attached to the shooting gallery, where the owner renews the licence for the Beretta, and sells him a fresh box of bullets. WINCHESTER – FULL METAL JACKET says the writing on the box. In the display case beneath the counter is an assortment of other guns, saw-toothed “special forces” knives, knuckledusters and telescopic batons for sale. Next to us an elderly woman, who a few seconds earlier was going though her own locked-and-loaded routine like a veteran SAS man, is now perusing a selection of “discreet gun pouches” which the manufacturer insists are the “Best home your weapon will ever find”.

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NEW - No 169– September 25

EXCLUDED FROM THE USA
By Yusuf Islam, yusufislam.org.uk
First, I thank God for relieving me of my ordeal and delivering me home safe; also, thanks to all those who prayed for me and supported me through this whole dark episode, from eminent politicians, the press and religious leaders, to plain, everyday people. Never would I believe that such a thing could happen in the ‘land of the free’ – unfortunately, it did. But it’s warming to have such a wave of sympathy from my friends and my worldwide well-wishers. After the experience of my dramatic deportation from the U.S.A. it feels like I am on a different planet from the one I was on a couple of days ago; certainly the world has changed, not for the best.

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NEW - No 168 – September 25

WELCOME TO ALLAWI'S
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Welcome to Allawi’s White House Grill Room. My name is AYAD, and I will be your server. Our menu tonight features our famous Bullshit Buffet, a miraculously mendacious menu of meretriciously delicious cuisine. But first, we do have a few specials I’d like to tell you about, OK? For appetizers, we have Abu al la Ghraib, which is fresh young Sunni, handcuffed and stuffed with vegetables, and roasted in a plastic bag.

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No 167 – September 23

BUSH'S IRAQ FALLU-CINATION
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On the campaign trail earlier this summer, President Bush was fond of saying “We are turning the corner, and we are not turning back.” According to the president, under his stewardship the US had turned the corner on the economy, education, health care and national security. Along about mid-August, he “apparently turned a corner in his use of what had been a popular refrain in recent campaign stump speeches,” CNN reported, dropping the “turning the corner” catchphrase from his repertoire. Well, the president has turned another corner and this time he has smashed into a brick wall of criticism about his failed policy in Iraq. If he follows the advice of the mow-’em-downers and the flush-’em-outers, President Bush will turn Fallujah – a cauldron of Iraqi resistance – into rubble; fill the city’s under-staffed and under-equipped hospitals with the pulpy remnants of men, women and children; and unleash US bombers that will create a rebuilding project that even Bechtel might have second thoughts about taking on.

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No 166 – September 23

WHAT WOULD HEWITT HAVE DONE?
By Rory O’Connor, mediachannel.org
Why didn’t anyone ask Don Hewitt what he thought? Of all the unanswered questions raging over the CBS News/Bush National Guard service memo flap, this remains one of the most puzzling. After all, Hewitt is the acknowledged creator of the 60 Minutes “brand” that is now endangered by the controversy. Moreover, for all his obvious flaws – he’s famously mercurial, abusive, demanding, and profane – Hewitt is a certified broadcasting legend, and his decades of experience might have spared CBS News the painful public embarrassment it now faces.
In other words, if I had been in the room with Jeff Fager – Hewitt’s successor at the helm of 60 Minutes -- or program producer Josh Howard, or field producer Mary Mapes, or the now-beleaguered Dan Rather, or senior executive Betsy West, or CBS News head Andrew Heyward (and there was any question or doubt at all about whether or not to move forward with the broadcast) I would have suggested taking advantage of the experience and wisdom of Hewitt. So why didn’t anyone ask Don Hewitt what he thought?

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No 165 – September 22

IN A LATHER OVER RATHER
By Danny Schechter, newsday.com
CBS’s most popular program “CSI” can now investigate a crime scene close to home. The reputation of veteran news anchor Dan Rather is lying on the floor, bloodied by a mistake he has now admitted, flanked on the political right by “we told you so” finger-pointers led by GOP operatives demanding his head. A news outlet once headed by “the most trusted man in America” is accused of being the least trustworthy. With Rather apologizing for airing a story based in part on memos that CBS cannot verify, it looks bad for network news in general and critics of President George W. Bush in particular. And that fits the M.O. of the people behind the hit. The story that “60 Minutes” ran charging that Bush had not completed his Texas National Guard duty has now been pronounced a “mistake.” CBS News added that “a source had misled the network on the documents’ origins.” The network promised “an independent review of how the report was prepared to help determine what actions need to be taken.”

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No 164 – September 21

THE RAPTURE RACKET
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
What if the Book of Revelation doesn’t mandate death, destruction and the annihilation of all but true believers? “The rapture is a racket,” writes Barbara R. Rossing in the first sentence of her recently published book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Westview Press, 2004). Rossing, a New Testament scholar and an associate professor at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, maintains that the Rapture is a fraud of monumental proportions, as well as a disturbing way to instill fear in people.

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No 163 – September 20

PUT AWAY YOUR HANKIES
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
Enough of the handwringing! Enough of the doomsaying! Do I have to come there and personally calm you down? Stop with all the defeatism, OK? Bush IS a goner – IF we all just quit our whining and bellyaching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, “Oh, it’s all over! We are finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!” Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished – they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying.

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No 162 – September 20

THE LYNCHING OF DAN RATHER
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
"It’s that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions,” the aging American journalist told the British television audience. In June 2002, Dan Rather looked old, defeated, making a confession he dare not speak on American TV about the deadly censorship – and self-censorship – which had seized US newsrooms. After September 11, news on the US tube was bound and gagged. Any reporter who stepped out of line, he said, would be professionally lynched as un-American.

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No 161 – September 19

BUSH AND BLAIR: SECRETS AND LIES
By Neil Mackay, sundayherald.com
Tony Blair’s secrets are out, and this is what he knew a full year before the invasion of Iraq: the war was illegal, it would turn into a quagmire that could last for generations and it was more than likely that, once Saddam was overthrown, a new Iraqi government, even a democratic one, would start developing weapons of mass destruction. These warnings were contained in a series of top-secret documents that Blair read and digested long before the invasion. It’s little wonder that Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, says these revelations are ‘the crown jewels’.

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No 160 – September 17

BUSH'S HOLLOW NARRATIVE ON IRAQ
By Bill Berkowitz, workingfor change.com
The occupation of Iraq is spiraling out of control, averaging more than three US deaths a day since the beginning of September. Yet despite the cascading bad news – the US casualty count has jumped from 1,000 on the morning of September 7 to 1,029 at press time – President Bush is steadfastly sticking to his narrative. The occupation of Iraq is muddled, confused, and messy and the prospects for the future are bleak. That isn’t spin from the DNC’s latest press release. It’s the current assessment of two highly-respected Republican Senators and the conclusion of a highly-classified report produced by the National Intelligence Council that, according to The New York Times, forecast “a dark assortment of prospects for Iraq.”

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No 159 – September 17

WAS THE IRAQ WAR LEGAL, OR ILLEGAL, UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW?
By Evan Augustine Peterson III
During a BBC radio interview on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created a controversy by reiterating his long-held position that the Iraq War was illegal because it breached the United Nations Charter. On Thursday, the imperial leaders of the “Coalition of the Willing” retaliated by vehemently arguing that their Iraq War was, to the contrary, legal. Obviously, this dispute raises a legal question: “Whose opinion is correct, and whose is incorrect?” Additionally, we should be asking ourselves: “Who decides? (i.e., ‘Whose jurisprudential opinion shall be dispositive for purposes of resolving this dispute?’)”

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No 158 – September 16

PAKISTAN PLAYING BALL WITH BUSH
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
I f Joseph Cofer Black, the U.S. State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, is correct, al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden might be in the hands of U.S. authorities sometime before Election Day, thanks to Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. Black, emerging from a September 2nd/3rd meeting of the Pakistan-U.S. Joint Working Group on Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement in Islamabad, Pakistan, told the private Geo television network that bin Laden’s time was clearly running out: “Osama bin Laden is probably the most hunted man in the planet now. Osama bin Laden and his associates at that level are primarily defensive, they spend most of their time trying to keep from getting caught. If he (bin Laden) has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught. Programs are in place and what I tell people (is) I would be surprised but not necessarily shocked if we wake up tomorrow and he has been caught along with all his lieutenants.”

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No 157 – September 15

WHEN THE RABBITS GET A GUN
By William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org
This is the comforting fiction: Osama bin Laden is a monster who sprang whole from the fetid mire. He had no childhood, no influences, no education, no experiences to form his view of the world. He did not exist, and then he did, a vessel into which the universe poured the essence of evil. It is a simple, straightforward story of a man who hates freedom and kills for the pure joy of feeling innocent blood drip from his fingers. This is the fairy tale by which children are put to bed at night. As frightening and terrifying as bin Laden may be, it is a comfort to imagine him as having been chiseled from the dust. The fiction of his existence, absent of detail, makes him unique, a singular entity not to be replicated. Osama bin Laden becomes truly scary only when the actual context of his life is made clear, where he is from, what he has seen, and why those things motivated him to do what he does.

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No 156 – September 15

SEVERE THREAT TO FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
By Lucy Dalglish, mediachannel.org
In the days immediately following September 11, the U.S. government embarked on a disturbing path of secrecy. The atmosphere of terror induced public officials to abandon this country’s culture of openness and opt for secrecy as a way of ensuring safety and security. At first, we hoped that the move toward secrecy would be short lived. The actions would be viewed as temporary” or “emergency” measures. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Led by secrecy-loving officials in the executive branch, secrecy in the United States government is now the norm. Over the past three years, the administration of President George W. Bush has taken a variety of actions designed to restrict information from reaching the public.

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No 155 – September 13

NEW - THE HIJACKING OF 9/11
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
I first heard the phrase “I am a September 11th person” during a 2003 interview on the Fox News Channel. At the time, actor Ron Silver told Neil Cavuto, host of the daily afternoon program Your World with Cavuto, that “There are two kinds of people. There are September 10th people and September 11th people, and I am a September 11th person.” Silver, who likely still considers himself a liberal Democrat, admitted that his politics changed forever on 9/11 and that he supported President Bush’s prosecution of the war on terror (he has since said that he’s always been a hawk on national security issues). At the Republican Party’s national convention Silver reiterated his support for President Bush: “I think there are September 10 people and there are September 11 people. I’m one of the latter. Everything changed for me. Since then I see everything through the prism of what happened that day,” he said.

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No 154 – September 12

A FRIGHTENING WEEKEND FOR MARK THATCHER
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
Margaret Thatcher’s controversial son, Mark, must be a nervous man this weekend as his friend and close Cape Town neighbour, Simon Mann, begins a seven-year jail term in Zimbabwe’s notorious Chikurubi Jail for offences related to an attempted mercenary coup d’etat in Equatorial Guinea. Mark Thatcher is under house arrest in Cape Town, facing charges of co-financing the coup and providing a plane that was scheduled to fly an exiled opposition leader into Equatorial Guinea to replace dictator-President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

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No 153 – September 10

IS THERE AN ASSAULT RIFLE IN YOUR FUTURE?
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
Despite recent polls showing that most Americans favor it, despite support from a number of major law enforcement agencies, and despite the unqualified support from Senator John Kerry and quasi-support from President Bush – he claims to favor it but has done nothing to push it – the 1994 law signed by President Clinton banning the manufacture and importation of 19 types of assault weapons, including semiautomatic versions of the Intratec Tec-9 pistol and Uzi submachine gun, will expire at midnight Monday, September 13. While some gun manufacturers managed to find ways around the law, and the gun lobby, spearheaded by the National Rifle Association and its congressional allies, repeatedly tried to repeal the law, the ban remained intact and according to a number of studies proved to successfully remove a rash of deadly weapons from the streets. Now, however, unless Congress acts immediately, the 10-year sunset clause written into the law will kick in and the ban on these assault weapons will automatically expire.

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No 152 – September 9

SEPT 11: WHAT YOU REALLY OUGHT TO KNOW
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On November 9, 2001, when you could still choke on the dust in the air near Ground Zero, BBC Television received a call in London from a top-level US intelligence agent. He was not happy. Shortly after George W. Bush took office, he told us reluctantly, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the FBI, “were told to back off the Saudis.” We knew that. In the newsroom, we had a document already in hand, marked, “SECRET” across the top and “199-I” – meaning this was a national security matter. The secret memo released agents to hunt down two member of the bin Laden family operating a “suspected terrorist organization” in the USA. It was dated September 13, 2001 – two days too late for too many. What the memo indicates, corroborated by other sources, was that the agents had long wanted to question these characters ... but could not until after the attack. By that time, these bin Laden birds had flown their American nest.

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No 151 – September 8

DON'T LOOK AT THE FLASH
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On September 11, 2001, we Americans were the victims of a terrible attack. By September 12, we became the suspects. Not one single U.S. citizen hijacked a plane, yet President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, through powers seized and codified in the USA PATRIOT Act, fingered 270 million of us for surveillance, for searches, for tracking, for watching. And who was going to play Anti-Santa, watching to see when we’ve been good or bad? A guy named Derek Smith. And that made September 11, 2001 Derek’s lucky day. Even before the spying work could begin, there were all those pieces of people to collect – tubes marked “DM” (for “Disaster Manhattan”) – from which his company, ChoicePoint Inc, would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the firm would receive $12 million from New York City’s government. Maybe Smith, like the rest of us, grieved at the murder of innocent friends and countrymen. As for the 12-million-dollar corpse identification fee, that’s chump change to the $4 billion corporation Smith had founded only four years earlier in Alpharetta, Georgia).

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No 150 – September 8

IRAQ'S INVISIBLE WAR BECOMES VISIBLE
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On Tuesday, September 7, sixteen months after President Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the 1,000th US service member was killed in Iraq. Within hours, the 1,000th death was followed by death number 1,001, making twenty-three US dead since the beginning of the month. (In August, 66 US service members died in Iraq.) The Bush Administration’s response? On the campaign trail, the president keeps insisting that America was right to go into Iraq. And on the battlefield, according to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the US is planning an increase in military operations. Blitzer reported that US military officials, in a departure from previous policy, had trumpeted the large number of Iraqi casualties the US has inflicted. (Since March 2003, the Pentagon had insisted that it had no mechanism for, or interest in, counting Iraqi deaths, particularly civilians. Now, it appears that counting the bodies of Iraqi insurgents – a staple of US policy in Vietnam – is back on the Pentagon’s agenda.)

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No 149 – September 7

POLITICAL COVERAGE IS AN ECHO OF WAR
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
During the run-up to the war in Iraq and through the US invasion, it was obvious that our media system had signed up as an unofficial megaphone for war. There was a uniformity of perspective, a reliance on the same “facts,” and a dismissal of critics and dissenters.
Journalists outside America compared our TV coverage to that of a “state-run media” even though most U.S. media outlets are in private hands and nominally competitive with each other. A year and a half-later, some journalists and newspapers took a second look at their coverage and acknowledged it had been flawed. There were admissions of misreporting, especially on supporting the government’s allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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September 7

RUSSIAN STATE TERROR AND THE BUSH AGENDA
By Milan Rai
President Bush said at the Republican National Convention in New York, ‘We are staying on the offensive – striking terrorists abroad – so we do not have to face them here at home.’ (http://tinyurl.com/55ad3) The tragedy in North Ossetia in Russia, where several hundred people have died in a school siege, demonstrates the end result of such an attitude. ‘Yesterday’s seizure of a school in the southern town of Beslan, about 30 miles west of Chechnya, caps a bloody week for Mr Putin, whose usual take on the [Chechnya] conflict is that it is “getting better”. Two planes and a metro station have been attacked, and now he must achieve what seems impossible: the safe extraction of up to 400 schoolchildren [actually more than twice that number] from a mined gymnasium.’ (Guardian, 2 Sept., p. 4).

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No 147 – September 6

WHY I WON'T BE SEEKING AN OSCAR
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
I had dinner recently with a well-known pollster who had often worked for Republicans. He told me that when he went to see “Fahrenheit 9/11” he got so distraught he twice had to go out in the lobby and pace during the movie. “The Bush White House left open a huge void when it came to explaining the war to the American people,” he told me. “And your film has filled that void – and now there is no way to defeat it. It is the atomic bomb of this campaign.” He told me how he had conducted an informal poll with “Fahrenheit 9/11” audiences in three different cities and the results were all the same. “Essentially, 80% of the people going IN to see your movie are already likely Kerry voters and the movie has galvanized them in a way you rarely see Democrats galvanized.

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No 146 – September 5

THE GRINCH THAT STOLE LABOR DAY
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
In celebration of the working person’s holiday, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao has announced the Bush Administration’s plan to end the 60-year-old law which requires employers to pay time-and-a-half for overtime. I’m sure you already knew that – if you happened to have run across page 15,576 of last year’s Federal Register. According to the Register, where the Bush Administration likes to place its little gifts to major campaign donors, 2.7 million workers will lose their overtime pay for a “benefit” of $1.53 billion. I put “benefit” in quotes because, in the official cost-benefit analysis issued by Bush’s Labor Department, the amount employers will now be able to slice out of workers’ pockets is tallied on the plus side of the rules change.

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No 145 – September 2

NAJAF: TRUCE OR TRAP?
By Milan Rai
The Najaf ceasefire did not resolve the conflict in Najaf. Before the ink was even dry on the agreement signed by militant Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the supreme Shia religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the United States and its client forces were breaking the terms of the truce. In particular, US Marines refused to withdraw from Najaf, as required by the Sistani peace deal. Muqtada al-Sadr may wish to move the conflict over the occupation to the political sphere, but the US and the Allawi do not.

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No 144 – September 2

PRESIDENT DECLARES 'OWNERSHIP SOCIETY'
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Of all the bone-headed, whacky, breathtakingly threatening schemes George W. Bush is trying to sell us in his acceptance speech tonight is something he and his handlers call, “the Ownership Society.” Sounds cool, “ownership.” Everyone gets a piece of the action. Everyone’s a winner as the economy zooms. All boats rise. Sure. Behind the hooray-for-free-enterprise crapola is that dog-eared game-plan to siphon off Social Security revenues to pay for making Bush’s tax cuts for the rich permanent.

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No 143 – August 31

MICHAEL MOORE MEETS THE SECRET SERVICE
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
With thousands of New York’s finest corralling free speech and hunting for terrorists, it isn’t likely that the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau will have time to unravel one of the more intriguing mysteries of the day. This whodunit has nothing to do with: missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; who was responsible for the miserable post-war occupation; how much U.S. taxpayer money has been wasted in Iraq; or who ordered the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The question that many will be asking by nightfall on Thursday is: Where in the name of Waldo are the Republican Party’s fundamentalist evangelical Christian leaders?

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No 142 – August 31

THE REAL GOP GOES MIA IN NYC
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
With thousands of New York’s finest corralling free speech and hunting for terrorists, it isn’t likely that the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau will have time to unravel one of the more intriguing mysteries of the day. This whodunit has nothing to do with: missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda; who was responsible for the miserable post-war occupation; how much U.S. taxpayer money has been wasted in Iraq; or who ordered the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The question that many will be asking by nightfall on Thursday is: Where in the name of Waldo are the Republican Party’s fundamentalist evangelical Christian leaders?

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DID SISTANI COLLUDE WITH US ASSAULT ON NAJAF
By Milan Rai
There are at least three possible accounts of the origins of the recent Najaf conflict. Uncovering the truth requires a close scrutiny of the behaviour of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, now feted as the peace-bringer of Najaf. The standard Western media rendering is that (for some unknown reason) militant Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr decided to launch an uprising against the US occupation on 5 August This flies in the face of the fact that, as the Financial Times reported, it was US forces that ‘went on the offensive’ against al-Sadr’s group, ‘breaking a two-month ceasefire with followers of Shia radical Moqtada al-Sadr’ by surrounding al-Sadr’s home in Kufa, next to Najaf, sparking an exchange fire with members of al-Sadr’s militia.’ (FT, 3 August, p. 9)

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No 140– August 29

MADAME BUTTERFLY AND THE ABSENTEE BALLOTS
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On Friday, Theresa LePore, Supervisor of Elections in Palm Beach, candidate for re-election as Supervisor of Elections, chose to supervise her own election, no one allowed. This Tuesday, Florida votes for these nominally non-partisan posts. You remember Theresa, “Madame Butterfly,” the one whose ballots brought in the big vote for Pat Buchanan in the Jewish precincts in November 2000. Then she failed to do the hand count that would have changed the White House from Blue to Red. This time, Theresa’s in a hurry to get to the counting. She began tallying absentee ballots on Friday in her own re-election race. Not to worry: the law requires the Supervisor of Elections in each county to certify poll-watchers to observe the count.But Theresa has a better idea. She refused to certify a single poll-watcher from opponents’ organizations despite the legal requirement she do so by last week. She’ll count her own votes herself, thank you very much!

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No 139 – August 29

DEAR MR GANDHI
By Uri Avnery
Dear Dr. Gandhi,
We Israeli peace activists welcome you with all our heart.
We are all deeply impressed by the immortal message of your grandfather, the great Mahatma, who practiced non-violence while fighting with all his strength against a cruel foreign occupation. We are grateful to you for coming here to encourage our commitment to freedom, justice and non-violence. But what IS violence?

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No 138 – August 29

A VERY AFRICAN COUP
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, sits under house arrest this weekend in his luxury Cape Town home, overlooking a magnificent bay where southern right whales and their newborn calves swim free, and staffed by 12 servants and a number of rifle-toting bodyguards. He has until at least November 25 to enjoy the comforts of his Dutch Cape-style home, whose two hectares include a swimming pool and tennis court behind 10ft-high walls which currently keep out squads of encamped British newspaper reporters as effectively as they do the Cape’s many part-time and full-time violent robbers.

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No 137 – August 29

ROSE GENTLE'S RAGE
By Susan Flockhart, sundayherald.com
Murder is an ugly word. But Rose Gentle hates euphemisms about falling on battlefields or being ‘killed in action’. Two months ago in Basra, her 19-year-old son, Gordon, died when a roadside bomb exploded, and as far as Gentle is concerned, he was murdered. ‘If somebody puts a bomb under John Prescott’s feet and he stands on it, that’s murder,’ she reasons. ‘It’s like getting stabbed in the street.’ So who is the murderer Gentle isn’t saying the Iraqis are blameless and she’d like to get her hands on whoever planted that bomb. But the bulk of her ire is directed towards the British government, who she thinks used her son as ‘a bit of meat’ in a conflict she describes as ‘a war over oil’.

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No 136 – August 28

BUSH AND VIETNAM; THE UNREPORTED PAY-OFF
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men’s sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the ‘champagne’ unit of the Texas Air National Guard.  There, Top Gun fighter pilot George Dubya was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas ‘fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. “I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard – and I’m ashamed.” That's far from the end of the story.

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No 135 – August 27

PANAMA PARDONS ANTI-CASTRO TERRORISTS
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
President Bush has made a point of repeatedly saying “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” In 2001, he told thousands of members of the 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky: “If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you feed or fund a terrorist, you’re a terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends.” These remarks are at the foundation of the Bush Doctrine and his attempts to enlist other nations in the war against terrorism. What then to make of Panama’s recent decision to pardon four Cuban exiles convicted of plotting a terrorist attack?

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No 134– August 26

GOP FEARS AIDS AND PIES IN NYC
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
A year and a half ago, we kept hearing about that fanatical and feared Republican Guard as the force that Saddam was relying on to save his regime. He didn’t have just one Republican Guard, the “Butcher of Baghdad” had two – a SPECIAL Republican Guard. Remember? Now, here in America another Republican Guard is trying to save the Bush Regime. And it is not so special. Iraq’s RG crumbled in the face of superior force. How will ours do in the week ahead? Cry don’t laugh. There are striking similarities. Both Guards relied on deception, manipulation of information and brute force, including torture. The Bathists crushed protests; the Bushists do the same, but they do it stealthfully behind the scenes with FBI intimidation and the refusal to allow demonstrators to assemble in a park that has long been a rallying ground. New York’s Republican Guard mayor toadies up to the party hierarchy.

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No 133 – August 26

THE COURAGE OF PRESIDENT BUSH!
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
Dear Mr. Bush,
I know you and I have had our differences in the past, and I realize I am the one who started this whole mess about “who did what” during Vietnam when I brought up that “deserter” nonsense back in January. But I have to hand it to you on what you have uncovered about John Kerry and his record in Vietnam. Kerry has tried to pass himself off as a war hero, but thanks to you and your friends, we now know the truth. First of all, thank you for pointing out to all of us that Mr. Kerry was never struck by a BULLET. It was only SHRAPNEL that entered his body! I did not know that! Hell, what’s the big deal about a bunch of large, sharp, metal shards ripping open your flesh? That happens to all of us! In my opinion, if you want a purple heart, you’d better be hit with a bullet — with your name on it!

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No 130 – August 16

WHY VENEZUELA HAS VOTED AGAIN FOR CHAVEZ
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
There’s so much BS and baloney thrown around about Venezuela that I may be violating some rule of US journalism by providing some facts. Let’s begin with this: 77% of Venezuela’s farmland is owned by 3% of the population, the ‘hacendados.’ I met one of these farmlords in Caracas at an anti-Chavez protest march. Oddest demonstration I’ve ever seen: frosted blondes in high heels clutching designer bags, screeching, ‘Chavez – dic-ta-dor!’ The plantation owner griped about the ‘socialismo’ of Chavez, then jumped into his Jaguar convertible. That week, Chavez himself handed me a copy of the ‘socialist’ manifesto that so rattled the man in the Jag. It was a new law passed by Venezuela’s Congress which gave land to the landless. The Chavez law transferred only fields from the giant haciendas which had been left unused and abandoned.

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No 129 – August 15

IS OUR MEDIA COVERING UP ITS ERRORS?
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
As more mainstream media outlets admit their failures in covering the Iraq War, a question must be asked: are we seeing a real coming to grips with the media role that helped “sell the war” to the American public? Or could these recent mea culpas be something more insidious, more like what the CIA used to call a “limited hang out?” That phrase translates as “you concede a little to hide a lot.” As the author of a book and maker of a film on Iraq war coverage, I am delighted to see some acknowledgement of errors and omissions on the part of media outlets that, when it really counted, become transmission belts for unsubstantiated government claims and pro-war propaganda.

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No 128 – August 15

THE FUEL FOR FAHRENHEIT 9/11
By Torcuil Creighton, sundayherald.com
Thanks to the First Amendment of the United States constitution, some robust laws that defend writers against libel and principles that enshrine freedom of expression and an open system of government, respected American journalist Craig Unger has been able to write an explosive book about President George Bush and his links to the Saudi royal family. It’s called House Of Bush House Of Saud and in it Unger details the connections between a leading member of the Saudi royal family and the fundamentalist terrorist groups determined to destroy the US. It was this book that formed the backbone of Michael Moore’s much-hyped documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

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No 127 – August 15

BOERS AT WAR
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
He might have been laughing as he said it, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu wasn’t joking when he said that South Africa had become a crazy country. On the one hand, he said, look at Pretoria. There, the trial of 22 extreme right-wingers known as the “Boer Force” has heard about their plan to breed a new white super-race and reinstate white rule. When the Nobel Peace Prize winner mentioned this to journalists in Cape Town last week, the response was laughter rather than shock and horror. On the other hand, he continued, look at the demise of the National Party. During its 50-year reign it created apartheid, banned the ANC (African National Congress) and imprisoned Nelson Mandela after narrowly failing to have him hanged. Now, however, it has decided to become … part of the ANC.

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No 126 – August 14

POWER CUTS AND A DIM BULB IN THE WHITE HOUSE
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
A year ago today, the lights went out. Even when the Big Blackout ended, the power pirates who have us by the bulbs kept us in the dark, fibbing, fabricating and faking their way through a series of bogus excuses for a disaster created by greed overload. Instead of fixing the system, the fix is in. We now know that goof-ups and bone-headed moves started the power outage rolling; but it’s spread, from a few tree branches out of Ohio to a third of the continent, occurred because power companies – First Energy and Niagara-Mohawk to name two – had slashed staffing and maintenance.

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No 125 – August 13

ASSAULTING IRAQ'S SHIA MAJORITY
By Milan Rai, znet.org
The United States has launched a war against a large part of the Iraqi people. It is the Bush Administration’s desire for total domination, not the militancy of Shia insurgents, that has triggered this latest uprising. The US is trying to tame the Shia majority. At the time of writing, US forces have surrounded the most holy site in Shia Islam, the Imam Ali mosque in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, after eight days of fierce fighting with the forces of Muqtada al-Sadr, reportedly leaving hundreds dead. Elsewhere, ‘US air strikes and fighting on the ground in the [largely Shia] Iraqi city of Kut have left 72 people dead and about 150 injured,’ according to the interim Iraqi government. (BBC News Online, 12 Aug.)

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No 124 – August 11

IRAQ's PRIME MINISTER SUPPRESSES MEDIA
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
Several days after the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) sent a letter to Iraq’s interim Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, expressing concern over the formation of a new media regulatory commission that “reportedly will have the authority to restrict news coverage,” the prime minister closed the Baghdad office of the Al-Jazeera television network for thirty days. “Word of the new commission,” wrote the CPJ, a New York-based, nonprofit organization working to safeguard press freedom worldwide, “came one day after Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari lashed out at Al-Jazeera and other pan-Arab broadcasters, accusing them of ‘one-sided and biased coverage of the situation in Iraq.’” Zebari reportedly said that Iraq “will not allow some people to hide behind the slogan of freedom of the press and media.”

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No 123 – August 10

IRAQ: ILLUSION AND REALITY
By Bill Bowles, williambowles.info
The Western media made a great play of the ‘sovereignty’ that Iraq allegedly achieved a little over a month ago when CIA/MI5 ‘asset’ Allawi was installed ‘Diem-style’ by his US paymasters. And indeed, ever since then, the media in direct collusion with the state has tried to foist on an extremely sceptical public the illusion of a ‘benign occupier’, the USUK, backing the new ‘sovereign’ state of Iraq. Press coverage, almost without exception plays down the role of the occupation forces, by creating the illusion of the existence of an Iraqi army, when in the months preceding ‘sovereignty’ the constant cry was that was no Iraqi army to takeover the role of the occupiers once the ‘handover’ was achieved. Charting the press coverage over this period reveals the confidence trick that's been played on us.

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No 122 – August 10

PASSIVE RESISTANCE
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
We are three weeks from the First Bushevik Convention in New York. In accordance with the Miami Model, about which you have read extensively in previous articles, The Busheviks are progressively pursuing their plan for suppressing dissent, and are now in the phase of refusing our right to assembly, harassing participants, instituting Draconian rules, concentrating their command center, and exhibiting and deploying their military power. As we know from Seattle, Cancun, Miami, Sea Island, Boston. They are not about to back off.

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No 121 – August 10

BUSH'S BAND OF BROTHERS
By Bill Berkowitz, alternet.org
High-profile rock-stars and a large band of Hollywood entertainers are pledging their time and money to help defeat President George W. Bush in November. Karl Rove, the president’s chief political advisor, is looking to the GOP’s traditional base – fundamentalist evangelical Christians – to put Bush over the top this year. Will a revivified and politically-focused men’s movement from the 1990s bail Bush Out? In mid-May, when conservative organizations were heavily courting African American religious leaders – to discredit the argument that same-sex marriage was a civil rights issue – Thomas Fortson, the African American appointed to lead Promise Keepers last October, eagerly joined the chorus. “It would be a historical error to equate the civil rights struggle for racial equality with the movement for civil accommodations based solely upon sexual behavior,” Fortson said in a letter of support sent to the “Not On My Watch” committee, which was organizing a May 22 rally of African American pastors on the steps of the Arlington, Texas, City Hall

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No 120 – August 10

THE FLORIDATION OF VENEZUELA
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Hugo Chavez drives George Bush crazy. Maybe it’s jealousy: Unlike Mr. Bush, Chavez, in Venezuela, won his Presidency by a majority of the vote. Or maybe it’s the oil. Venezuela sits atop a reserve rivaling Iraq’s. And Hugo thinks the US and British oil companies that pump the crude ought to pay more than a 16% royalty to his nation for the stuff. Hey, 16 percent isn’t even acceptable as a tip at a New York diner. Whatever it is, our President has decided that their president has to go. This is none too easy given that Chavez is backed by Venezuela’s poor; and the US oil industry, joined with local oligarchs, has made sure a vast majority of Venezuelans remain poor. Therefore, Chavez is expected to win this coming Sunday’s recall vote. That is, if the elections are free and fair.

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No. 119 – August 10

A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE ON BEATING BUSH
By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon
The U.S.-centric nature of American politics often affects the U.S. left. It’s hard to get out of USA mindsets long enough to grasp the global implications of decisions made here at home. Yet the effects of U.S. government policies are so enormous across the planet that some people have suggested – with more than a little justification – that every person on Earth should get to vote in U.S. presidential elections. On the international left, no one has more credibility as an unwavering opponent of U.S. foreign policy than Tariq Ali. Raised in Pakistan, he was a leader of Britain’s Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in the 1960s, and is now a prominent London-based writer and an editor at New Left Review. His recent books include “Bush in Babylon” and “The Clash of Fundamentalisms.” As progressives in the United States try to make sense out of the current presidential campaign, Ali’s perspective on the global significance of Bush’s electoral fate deserves serious consideration.

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No. 118 – August 8

AT THE CENTER OF A STORM
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
Whenever political junkies get together to chat about Election 2000, at some point the conversation turns to the exploits of Katherine Harris. As Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris rose overnight out of virtual anonymity to the center of a political hurricane surrounding the disputed 2000 presidential election. In 2002, recovered from her electoral travail, which she detailed copiously in her book “Center of the Storm: Practicing Principled Leadership in Times of Crisis,” Katherine Harris ran and was elected to Congress. Now, Rep. Harris is experiencing more anguish: She appears to be at the center of another storm; this one having to do with the accuracy of remarks she made at a Bush rally in Florida and whether she leaked classified information. On Monday, August 2, speaking at a rally for President Bush in Venice, Florida, Harris told the crowd that the administration had thwarted over 100 terrorist plots. She also claimed that “a plot existed to blow up the power grid in Carmel, Indiana,” the Associated Press reported.

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No. 117 – August 8

GROUPTHINK AND THE SLIDE INTO FASCISM
By Ritt Goldstein, Asia Times
On July 8, Asia Times Online broke the story (Patriotic pride and fear) of how noted Canadian psychologist Daniel Burston (two PhDs from Canada’s York University and a widely acclaimed author) perceived a broad retreat into “social fantasy systems” and “socially patterned defects” as explaining much of the Bush administration’s decision-making. He observed for ATol that such flaws bring those involved to “act in ways which - from an outsiders perspective - look insane”. On the following day, July 9, the US Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the United States’ justification for the Iraq war, claiming an erroneous “groupthink” was to blame, and coincidentally highlighting the validity of Burston’s observations.

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No. 116 – August 8

WE WANT THE TRUTH ABOUT TERRORIST ATTACKS
Opinion, sundayherald.com
In an age when international security is the most pressing problem facing governments, few would doubt that the war against terrorism is much more than an irritant which annoyingly raises its ugly head from time to time. It informs and influences both our domestic and foreign policies, on everything from last week’s arrest of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in southern England to the declaration of a holy war against British forces in Basra, Iraq. Combating terrorism is also highly contentious, both from a political and policy point of view. For the government, it is a political minefield. In the event of a major attack they can be damned if they fail to take appropriate measures to safeguard the homeland, yet they are also damned if they release information which leads to scaremongering and the publication of sensationalist headlines.

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No. 115 – August 8

WHERE THE KILLING STARTS!
By David Edwards, medialens.org
The statistics of death in Baghdad are now “beyond shame”, Robert Fisk writes in the Independent. In the first three weeks of July there were 506 violent deaths in Baghdad alone: “Even the Iraqi officials here shake their heads in disbelief”. Before last year’s invasion, Baghdad’s morgue investigated an average of 20 deaths a month caused by firearms. In June 2003, that number rose to 389 and in August it reached 518. Where did all this killing begin? We might think it began with the leaders who issued the orders for the invasion of Iraq, and with the pilots and soldiers who pushed the buttons and pulled the triggers. But in truth the killing always starts with you and us – the public.

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No. 114 – August 5

FAHRENHEIT THIS!
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
He claims that the title of his film is more satire than publicity-seeking hyperbole. He says he's not out to get Michael Moore, he's just trying to reinvigorate the public discourse. He enlisted a number of ultra-right-wing commentators for his "journey across the nation" to help him "find out whether the American Dream is still alive." Bandwagon jumper or serious filmmaker? What is Michael Wilson, the director of the forthcoming Michael Moore Hates America up to? "I think he [Michael Moore] demonstrates a distrust of America when he manipulates facts so that they skew his point. I think that's distrustful," Wilson told The Daily Show's Samantha Bee during a segment titled "Dislike Mike" in which Wilson goes to New York City to hunt down Moore. "I'd like to do to Michael Moore what he's done to others," Wilson added.

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No. 113 – August 5

FLYING THE HYSTERICAL SKIES
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
What happened on Northwest Airlines flight 327? The question has been on the lips of the press, public and punditry ever since the story was published on the website WomensWallStreet.com. The author of the article, Annie Jacobsen, was traveling with her family from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29, 2004. She and other passengers grew frightened when 14 Middle Eastern men behaved in what they felt was a “suspicious” manner during the flight. One gave her a “cold defiant look” and others went to the bathroom in succession. The crew shared Ms. Jacobsen’s alarm and dialed the airline equivalent of 911. When the plane landed in Los Angeles the FBI and other law enforcement personnel were on hand.

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No. 112 – August 5

KRUGMAN: A RECKONING FOR MEDIA MACHINE
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
I try to write only about economics,” says Paul Krugman with a smile and a shrug.
But in the next breath Krugman admits that his best-selling book, The Great Unraveling, “is really about politics and not economics.” The same may be said of Krugman’s scathing Op-Ed columns in The New York Times, which have undoubtedly earned him a high place on the White House’s media enemy list. Krugman is an unlikely radical. The Princeton economist identifies himself as a “moderate liberal,” and a “free-market Keynesian,” and swears he didn’t plan things this way. “The original idea for my column came in 1999 from (ex-Times editor) Howell Raines,” he remembers.

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No. 111 – July 30

LIVE! FROM THE PEN
By David Rubinson, drrantblogspot.com
I have never been more thrilled to be wrong. There was NO Emergency. On the day of the Big Demonstration, all was basically tranquil, non violent, chilled. Except if you watched TV or read the newspapers. If you watched TV or read the newspapers, there was a riot – a nasty confrontation between violent anarchists and stoic disciplined meticulously trained police. If you watched TV or read the newspapers, a young terrorist had a Molotov Cocktail, but was fortuitously thwarted by the decisive intercession of Heroic Homeland Security personnel, and if you watched TV or read the newspapers, Peace Goons burned the American Flag but the sacrilege was suppressed, thank the Lord, in the nick of time. But – if you were THERE you saw a totally different Reality on July 29.

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No. 110 – July 28

WHAT WE DIDN'T SEE. WHY WE DIDN'T SEE IT
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
As I was leaving the Democratic Convention at Boston’s Fleet Center last night, Congress member Jesse Jackson Jr. was telling me how ecstatic he was about the inspiring keynote address of Barrack Obama, the young Kenyan-Kansan American who may be on his way to the US Senate From Illinois. If he wins, he will be the first black male Senator since Massachusetts Edwin Brooke, whose name graces a federal court house just up the street from where we were chatting. Obama’s inaugural oration was a stunning personal and political coming out party – my partner now thinks of him as a possible first black president as a result of his dynamic presentation. Jesse Jr. said he deliberately watched the speech of the night on TV set, not on the Convention floor, because he wanted to see how it was going over in America’s living rooms. His take resonated with mine: a ‘star was born.’

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No. 109 – July 27

NETWORKS SLEEP AS FLEET CENTER BURNS
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
Sometimes the mainstream media is so bad it’s good, and once again that’s been the case thus far here in Boston at the DNC. Not good, of course, for the public they should be and often falsely claim to be serving, but certainly good for under-resourced sloggers and bloggers like yours truly, in that despite their massive technological and financial resource advantages, hundreds of employees, and “We Want to Own this Story” special convention sections, the mavens of the mainstream consistently miss the biggest and best stories staring all of us straight in the face.

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No. 108 – July 27

GREETINGS FROM LOCKDOWN CITY
By Michael Blanding, michaelblanding.com
"Welcome to the DNC Free Speech Camp – line up!” yelled the drill sergeant, a black, military-style cap pulled down to his sunglasses. Following his orders, a dozen or so “prisoners” put black hoods over their heads and had their hands bound behind their backs, then knelt with their heads touching the ground. Other men and women walked around with gags over their mouths. “We are gathered here today in solemn and silent protest at the incarceration of pro-democracy demonstrators in the barbwire cage known as the DNC Free Speech zone,” yelled the drill sergeant. “What does it mean when Boston, a city built on the history of revolutionary dissent, builds a barbaric confine for people who want to express their democratic rights?”

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No. 107 – July 17

IRAN, THE NEXT TARGET?
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
Iran’s borders are porous places. Having crossed back and forward through the mountains that flank Iraq to the west, and the deserts of Afghanistan in the east, I can vouch for this. On both sides of these frontiers lie a shadowy world of smugglers and safe houses, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi, Kurdish, and Afghan militias. Here, drugs, guns, fuel, and just about anything else that makes a fast black-market buck slips past daily. Over the years, so too have spies, agents provocateur, assassins, saboteurs, and if last week’s findings of the 9/11 Commission are to be believed, al-Qaeda terrorists.

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No. 106 – July 21

US: PATRIOTIC PRIDE AND FEAR
By Ritt Goldstein, asiatimes.com
While some critics of US President George W Bush have charged that his administration is pursuing policies of madness, such a charge is clinically incorrect, but it may convey an extraordinarily disturbing reality. Both an eminent psychologist and a noted political scientist perceive a particularly virulent social pathogen as the basis for much of the present global strife, with Washington at the center of the epidemic. “It certainly seems that the world is going mad,” Canadian psychologist Dr Daniel Burston told Asia Times Online, quickly noting that an increasing retreat into “social phantasy systems” would be more accurate.

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No. 105 – July 19

DEMOCRATS DISCOVER BLACK AMERICANS
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Like Christopher Columbus blinking in shock at first seeing an American Indian, John Kerry has just discovered African-American voters. On Thursday afternoon, Kerry landed at the NAACP convention, stepped off his slow-moving campaign boat and announced that he was exploring for one million missing Black voters. Let me explain – because the New York Times won’t. In the 2000 elections, 1.9 million ballots were cast which were never counted — “spoiled” is the technical term. Ballots don’t spoil because they are left out of the fridge. There’s always a technical reason: a stray mark, or my favorite, from Gadsden County, Florida, writing in Al Gore’s name instead of checking a box.

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IRAQ SCANDAL: MEDIA FAILURES ARE NEXT
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
In July of 2004, much of what was left of the pretexts and rationalizations for the US invasion of Iraq had unraveled.
• Richard Clarke, President’s Bush’s own Terrorism coordinator went public with a view of the war as evidence of a FAILURE of policy. It was, he charged based on insider knowledge, not only NOT part of the war on terror but undermining of it.
• Experienced Military leaders like General Zinni and others condemned it as military FAILURE.
• A Senate Committee in the US and a commission headed by Lord Butler in the UK catalogued extensive intelligence FAILURES. The Senators condemned what they called “group think.” .

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No. 103 – July 9

BLOODY UNIFORM
By David Edwards, medialens.org
Q. You’re married?
A. Right.
Q. Children?
A. Two.
Q. How old?
A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half.
Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind... the father of two little
kids like that... how can he shoot babies?
A. I didn’t have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the
time.
Q. Uh-huh... How do you shoot babies?
A. I don’t know. It’s just one of those things.” – (Mike Wallace of CBS News interviewing a participant of the US massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Quoted Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.202)
As anyone who has worked in a modern corporation will know, the people working in those corporations are good, caring people. It’s just that, in their work, they are required to obey a system of economic logic that subordinates human and animal suffering to short-term profit. They are decent, civilised people – their actions result in mass suffering and death. It is wrong to think that evil comes with a black hat, horns, scarred face, handle-bar moustache, or even mad, staring eyes. Endless testimony has documented the banal nature of evil. Men, women and children are generally burned alive, not by grinning monsters, but by fresh-faced kids pushing throttles, raising flaps and pressing bomb releases.

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LAY LOOT THAT BOUGHT THE WHITE HOUSE
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
When the feds swoop down and cuff racketeers, they also load the vans with all the perp’s ill-gotten gains: stacks of cash, BMWs, whatever. Their associates have to cough up the goodies too: lady friends must give up their diamond rocks. Under the racketeering law, RICO, even before a verdict, anything bought with the proceeds of the crime goes into the public treasury. But there seems to be special treatment afforded those who loaded up on the ‘bennies’ of Ken Lay’s crimes. If the G-men don’t know where the tainted loot is cached, try this address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Ask for George or Dick.

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No. 101 – June 28

LET FREEDOM REIGN: THE BIG LIE
By David Edwards, medialens.org
The stakes are high for anyone willing to pit their capacity for independent, rational thought against the media’s version of the world. All too often, we find ourselves faced with the choice of deciding that either we, or a wide range of celebrity journalists, are mad. It takes a brave soul to affirm, with Thoreau: “Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.” It takes a brave female soul, too. Consider the literally mind-boggling media performance in reporting “the handover of power” to the Iraqi interim government. Prior to the ‘handover’, the media never tired of insisting that the “coalition” would “hand over power to the Iraqis” on June 30 (Laura Trevelyan, BBC1, 16:45 News, May 23, 2004), such that “soon the occupation will end” (Orla Guerin, BBC1, 19:00 News, June 16).

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No. 100 – June 27

US IRAQ AND THE FUTURE - BY JOHN PILGER
By Torcuil Creighton, sundayherald.com
Campaigning journalist John Pilger has vehemently opposed the Bush-Blair war on terror. With power due to be handed to the Iraqi people on Wednesday, I asked Pilger asked for his thoughts on that country’s future, and the prospects for world peace.

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No. 99 – June 20

HOW TO LOSE A MILLION VOTES
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. “Spoiled votes” is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them – half of the rejected ballots – were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate. This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-’round. How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It’s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

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No. 98 – June 16

WHEN IGNORANCE ISN'T BLISS
By David J. Sirota, inthesetimes.com
Between Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, John Ashcroft's terror warnings, “The Bachelor,” the final episode of “The Sopranos” and those incessant injury lawyer commercials, voters in November are somehow expected to cast informed votes for Congress. We are supposed to base our decision on talking points parroted to us by inane TV reporters or, worse, paid political ads. Many people, of course, simply tune out and do not vote. Those who do head to the polls often vote with little knowledge of what their elected representatives are doing. So, in an effort to cut through the din this year, here are five congressional votes that everyone in America should know about. They come straight from the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up file, and capture how soundbite politics hide the troubling reality behind conservatives’ bumper-sticker slogans.

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No. 97 – June 15

ENTARTEKEKUNST REDUX
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
On May 4, 2003, I wrote the following: In the 30’s with the ascent of Hitler and the Nazis came an infamous and brutal campaign of repression and persecution of all art, artists, composers, musicians, actors, whose work was considered anti Nazi, or deemed to support non Aryan ideology. Their work was removed from museums and all public view, destroyed, forbidden from public performance, and banned from mention. Later in the 30’s the Nazis actually created a large PUBLIC showing of the forbidden art – The “EntartekeKunst” (Forbidden Art) so the submissive German people could witness and experience these degraded and forbidden offending art works.

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No. 96 – June 12

AFTER THE TALIBAN
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
Afghans rarely make idle threats. So when a belligerent warlord says he will shoot you and burn down the compound in which you are housed, it’s wise to take it seriously. At first glance the setting could not have been more peaceful. A village called Du Abi in remote Baghlan province. A place of dusty streets and a spaghetti western bazaar full of pale children with running sores, the whole place flanked by spectacular snow-capped mountains and cascading rivers. “Commander Hamid”, a local ethnic Hazara and hardman, had decided the time had come to put pressure on Concern Worldwide, the only humanitarian agency working in the district. A commitment from the agency to improve the dirt road where it ran across his land seemingly topped Hamid’s demands, but at the heart of his grievance was a complicated political spat with the local governor who had welcomed Concern’s work in the area and previously dismissed Hamid from a local government post.

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No. 95 – June 14

WHILE RONNIE NAPPED
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Vinnie the Chin had a great alibi. The New York mob capo shuffled down the street in his bathrobe, unshaved, drooling out the side of his mouth. When he got busted, he pleaded he was too gone-in-the-head to know about the Cosa Nostra running rackets from his candy shop. Ronald Reagan out-Chinned the Chin. When caught paying ransom to Khomeini and his Hizbollah terrorists, Reagan did his aw-shucks I’m just a ga-ga grandpa routine, “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart tells me that’s true, but the facts tell me it is not.” Oh, OK then.

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No. 94 – June 12

RONNIE AND SADDAM
By Neil Mackay, sundayherald.com
It was just before Christmas 1983 that Donald Rumsfeld, then US presidential envoy to Iraq, slipped quietly into Baghdad to come face to face with the man who would become one of America’s greatest enemies within two decades. The trip by the current US defence secretary, to pledge US support for Saddam Hussein, marked one of the lowest points of the entire Reagan presidency, and symbolically represents the real legacy of the “Great Communicator”. For Reagan was a president who allowed the US to secretly arm the Iraqi dictator with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), supported Iraq’s military expansion, turned a blind eye to Saddam using chemical weapons against Iran and thereby set in train the events that would lead to George W Bush’s disastrous decision to invade the country in 2002.

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No. 93 – June 9

KERRY COMES OUT AGAINST BIG MEDIA . . SORT OF
By Timothy Karr, mediachannel.org
What a difference a year makes. Media consolidation, an issue that galvanized millions of Americans in 2003 is nowhere to be found on the election map of 2004. That was until Sunday, when Senator John Kerry ventured forth on CSPAN to confirm that, had he been around to vote on last year’s proposal to loosen rules against media ownership, he would have voted against it. “I wasn’t there for the vote, but I was 100 percent in favor of overturning his rule,” Kerry told CSPAN executive vice president Susan Swain during an interview taped earlier in the week. The “his” Kerry was referring to is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell.

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No. 92 – June 7

MAKING THE MYTH, FORGETTING THE MAN
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel,org
In the bad old days of the Cold War, we would learn that a Russian leader died when their TV screens went dark and martial music was all that we heard. Afterwards, their channels filled with non-stop accolades and tributes to a “great proletarian leader.” It was this type of Cold War propaganda posing as news that was held up as an example of the kind of information control the Free World was fighting to overturn – and had, thanks to the brilliance of our 40th President.

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No. 91 – June 10

NINE MILLION BUCKS, AND NO RAID
By Enrico Piovesana, peacereporter.net
That house at 17 Zaitun Street in Baghdad had been vacant for at least two months. Monday night [June 7], at about 11, we heard noises. I live at 13 Zaitun Street, and I saw some cars stop in front of that house. Some people entered. It was dark, I couldn’t see well. In a short while, they left, and everything was quiet. “The next morning, at about 9.30, five American military vehicles arrived. They stopped in front of that house. Some guys in civilian clothes and dark glasses got off. They certainly were American mukhabarat. [Mukhabarat is Arabic for secret service.] They opened the door of the house, they did not kick it in, as if it had been left unlocked, and left right away with four men, who we later found out were the three Italian hostages and the Polish one.

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No. 90 – June 6

GOOD RIDDANCE, RONNIE REAGAN
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
You’re not going to like this. You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone’s got to. Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer. In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis. People don’t die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big-hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn’t like the government that the people there had elected.

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No. 89 – June 2

WHITHER MEDIA REFORM
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
Leave it to Eric Idle of Monty Python to bring the FCC back into public view. He has written a catchy anti-FCC ditty and put it up on his Pythonline.com website where it quickly has become an underground classic. Idle explains with tongue in cheek: “Here’s a little song I wrote the other day while I was out duck hunting with a judge ... It’s a new song, it’s dedicated to the FCC and if they broadcast it, it will cost a quarter of a million dollars.” Idle’s profanity-laced riposte comes around the first anniversary of a momentous 3-2 decision to loosen rules governing media ownership. The June 2, 2003 FCC vote was not surprising in light of the Commission’s tendency to rubber stamp the wishes of the industry it is nominally regulating. .

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No. 88 – June 4

ROME PULLS PLUG ON BUSH RADIO PROTESTS
By Timothy Karr, mediachannel.org
Italy’s largest electric company pulled the plug on two left-wing radio stations the morning of U.S President George W. Bush’s visit to Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. The outage – described as “strange maintenance work” by Enel, Italy’s 60 percent state-owned utility – forced Radio Città Aperta and Radio Onda Rossa off the air as they were preparing to broadcast extensive coverage of street protests against the president’s visit. “The stations lost electricity for four hours, all the morning, during several ‘actions’ of the civil disobedience movement,” Francesco Diasio told MediaChannel by email. Diasio, managing director of Amisnet, a community radio agency supporting several Italian radio stations, was working with Radio Città Aperta (Open City Radio) and Radio Onda Rossa (Red Wave Radio), in concert with several other radio networks in Italy, to broadcast up-to-the-minute reports on the Rome protests.

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No. 87 – June 3

CENSORED
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
There are at least two constants in the opinion column trade. The first is that it’s usually bad news when you get a call from your publisher prior to publication. The second is that it’s almost always bad news when you opine about Israeli-Palestinian relations. Last Sunday, when my phone rang, I got the double whammy. Russel Pergament was calling. Pergament publishes AM New York, a new daily newspaper, aimed primarily at 18-34 year olds, with a circulation of 210,000. This column appears every Monday in AM New York – or almost every Monday, as I was about to find out. “I’m killing this week’s column,” Pergament began without preface.

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No. 86 – May 30

PUBLIC ENEMY No. 1
By Torcuil Creighton, sundayherald.com
When James Ujamma, a former worshipper at the notorious Finsbury Park mosque in north London, was released from a US detention centre on April 19, Abu Hamza’s fate was sealed.
The release of Ujamma, an American Muslim convert, after having served less than two years of a sentence for conspiring to help the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, was what US authorities and the frustrated UK Home Secretary David Blunkett had been waiting for. The same day a sealed indictment of 11 charges was laid against Abu Hamza, “Britain’s bin Laden”, in a New York court. Ujamma had cut a deal with the US authorities to escape serious terrorist charges. He is to become a star witness against the Egyptian-born cleric if attempts to extradite him from Britain to face terrorist charges in America are successful.

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No. 85 – May 28

IT'S ALL IN THE NAME
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
Ten years after the last apartheid government stepped down, the dramatic changes that have taken place in South Africa are nowhere more apparent than in the country’s schools. If JG Strijdom, South Africa’s hardline white racist prime minister from 1954 to 1958, came back from the dead now and saw Nkosana Mlambo saunter into Höerskool JG Strijdom [JG Strijdom High School] he might choke on the memory of when he ordered the trial for treason of a certain 39-year-old black hothead, Nelson Mandela. Not only does 16-year-old Mlambo, from Soweto, have no idea who Strijdom was – “He was, like, some guy, uhm, who was, uhm, important” – but it was certainly not part of Strijdom’s vision to have a non-racial school, and especially not one named after him.

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No. 84– May 28

ABUSE FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
By Van Jones, alternet.org
The images we’ve seen from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison are truly horrifying. Now reports are surfacing of similar, videotaped abuses by U.S. soldiers at Guantanamo Bay. But as awful as all of this is, these scandals should come as no surprise. Just look at the horrible way we treat prisoners here at home. People across the country are rightfully outraged by the abuses in U.S. prisons in Iraq. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, 69 percent of Americans think this kind of abuse is unacceptable in any situation. But where is the outrage for the abuse of prisoners right here at home? A recent New York Times article details physical and sexual abuse of prisoners in facilities throughout the U.S. – abuse that continues with little public knowledge or concern.

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No. 83 – May 25

RISE OF THE CELEBRITY CEOs
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
"It was the ultimate train wreck of a free press,” Christopher Byron says of the Great Bull Market of the late Twentieth Century. “Everything conspired to turn working business reporters into cheerleaders with pom-poms.” Byron should know. He’s one of the best business writers around, having reported for more than thirty years at places like Esquire, Playboy and New York magazines. He currently hosts a syndicated radio show, writes a column for the New York Post, and spins out best sellers like the recent Martha Inc.

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No. 82 – May 23

SMILING FACE OF EVIL THAT SHAMES US ALL
By Iain Macwhirter, sundayherald.com
I don’t often find myself using the word “evil”. I’ve never even been sure quite what it means. But it is hard not to regard what is happening now in the Middle East as inhuman, bestial, degrading. There has been a breakdown of civilised values, of respect for life itself. And we are all collectively responsible for it. The dead children were the worst. On Thursday we saw the bodies of 40 Iraqi wedding guests, including women and children, killed, almost certainly, by a trigger-happy American helicopter crew near the Syrian border. There was something unbearably tragic about the makeshift body bags, improvised out of carpets, curtains and sleeping bags. The mutilated and headless child corpses – killed at what should have been a celebration of the family.

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No. 81 – May 23

POLITICAL PUNCH-UP INFLAMES LAND WAR
By Fred Bridgeland sundayherald.com
Laconic Australian cricket commentator and former test batsman Dean Jones injected a rare bit of dry humour into the tragedy that is Zimbabwe last week. Just before the Australian test team flew out of the country on Friday, following the collapse of the test series there because Zimbabwean cricket is riven by racism, Jones told TV viewers back home: “The boys have told me over a few frosties that they can’t wait to get the hell out of Dodge City.” In the thuggish police state that is modern Zimbabwe, Jones would have been arrested and thrown into a fetid prison had he been a local commentator making such a remark. President Robert Mugabe’s political commissar on the Zimbabwe Cricket Union’s board, Ozias Bvute, has bodily thrown local journalists out of cricket commentary boxes for making mildly critical remarks about political interference with the sport.

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No. 80 – May 21

ARMAGEDDON, YOURMAGEDDON
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
“There can be little doubt that he envisages the global war on terror as a crusade. With the Geneva conventions apparently suspended, international law is supplanted by biblical law. Boykin is in God’s chain of command. President Bush, he told an Oregon congregation last June, is “a man who prays in the Oval Office”. And the president, too, is on a divine mission. “George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the US. He was appointed by God.”

Maybe you all remember the charming and delightful General William Boykin ? He of the MyGodIsBetterThanYourGod speech? Written off as some kinda nut, sent home from camp with no dessert, bad boy, seeyalatta. We thought we had gotten rid of him. Can you guess where he’s been hiding, and what he’s been doing ? One guess. Here’s a hint: the initials are A G, and it has bars, hoods, electrodes and piles of naked people . . .

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No. 79 – May 21

PRIVATISING SPIN
By David Miller, Stirling, UK
The appointment of Howell James as Britain’s first ever Permanent Secretary for government information is a strong indication of the shape of things to come in government spin. His post is the most powerful civil service propaganda job since the second world war. James is the former Director of Corporate Affairs for both TVAM and the BBC, overseeing the latter’s commercialisation. Latterly, this ‘close friend’ of Peter Mandelson ran his own PR firm, briefly advising the Hinduja brothers in the donations for passports row which led to Mandelson’s second resignation from the cabinet. In his role as partner of PR firm Brown Lloyd James, he also sat on the Phillis committee which recommended the creation of his new post. Phillis abolished the half century old Government Information and Communication Service in February, which had inhibited the progress of spin, leaving its incumbent director Mike Granatt, jobless. This was the culmination of the New Labour reforms of spin set in train by Mandelson and Campbell in May 1997.

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No. 78 – May 19

TALK SHOWS SOUND AN ECHO OF RWANDA
By Philip Smucker, mediachannel.org
Radio host Sean Hannity asks a guest to talk about the American military’s abuse of Iraqi prisoners and “maybe compare it to the beheading of Nick Berg.” The guest, in deference to good taste or out of respect for the grieving Berg family, refuses. Still, for several weeks now, right wing radio talk show hosts, like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage – who dominate the airwaves and much of the political debate across the American heartland – have been hammering home the idea that our enemies are far more inhumane than anyone on the U.S. side. For observers familiar with the rhetoric that dominated Balkan and Rwandan airwaves during the hate and war crimes in those two regions, the strident, accusatory language of American radio sounds a troubling echo.

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No. 77 – May 19

OF TAILS AND DOGS: AN EDITOR IS FIRED
By David Edwards, medialens.org
An January an inquiry presided over by Lord Hutton determined that a report by BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan had been “unfounded”. Last year, Gilligan had reported that senior intelligence officials thought the British government's claim that Iraqi WMD could be deployed within 45-minutes was “risible”. Gilligan also dared to suggest that the government must have known that the claim was “wrong”. As a result of Hutton’s criticism, Gilligan, together with the BBC's chairman, Gavyn Davies, and director-general, Greg Dyke, resigned. Noam Chomsky made the only point that mattered: “The idea that the state - whether hiding itself beyond a judge’s robes or not - should even have a voice in whether a journalist's report was ‘unfounded’ is utterly shocking, an indication of remarkably low level of respect for freedom of speech and reverence for authority. Just for laughs, can you imagine an inquiry into whether a press report praising state or corporate power was ‘unfounded’?” (Chomskychat, www.zmag.org, January 29, 2004).

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No. 76 – May 19

BRUTALITY STARTS AT HOME
By Ritt Goldstein, atimes.com
On April 30, US President George W Bush condemned the incidents of Iraq prison abuse and those who perpetrated them, saying: “That’s not the way we do things in America.” Administration officials have launched a campaign to portray the incidents as isolated aberrations; though, “systemic” abuse has been charged by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Amnesty International claims a “pattern of torture”. But while an army report has described the “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” of Iraqi prisoners – including sodomy and other physical assaults – no one has yet dared compare this to America’s well documented abuse of its own citizens, and the factors driving abuse at home and abroad.

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No. 75 – May 19

WHAT HAPPENED TO ELECTION 2004?
By Danny Schechter & Timothy Kerr, mediachannel.org
The political jokes on Letterman and Saturday Night Live have grown stale. The Republicans repeat their Kerry flip-flop mantra like a listless Greek chorus, while all-too-familiar pundits trade theories on whether the Senator will choose McCain/Edwards/Graham as a running mate. Bush’s approval ratings fall, but he stands even if not ahead of Kerry in the mind-numbing barrage of presidential preference polls. We have entered the seventh-inning stretch of a hotly contested election race. Why, then, are many already heading for the exits? We’re told this election is a watershed event, the most divisive and important political choice of our generation, a battle between America’s two halves, a time of grave national introspection. . . Still, the nation seems to have become bored with it all.

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No. 74 – May 18

HUMAN WASTE
By David Rubinson, drrant.blogspot.com
Our nation derives its self worth and defines itself by its productivity, consumption, and profit. Productivity. Product. Make. Consume. What do you do with the waste product that is the natural and inevitable consequence of reckless productivity and conscious-free consumption? You flush it, or hide it somewhere out of sight and pretend it isnt there, or if you can, you burn it or recycle it into something profitable. In the United States, we dispose of commerces human waste product by putting it in uniform, sending it out to kill or torture those in our way, or we put our human waste in prison, destroying generations of families, and thereby insuring that the cycle that began with slavery will endure.

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No. 73 – May 18

WHY ABU GHRAIB SHOULDN'T SURPRISE US
By Doug Stokes, naspir.org
What is perhaps most surprising about the abuses committed against civilians at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is the fact that they came as a surprise at all. The ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ found by Major General Taguba has a long history within the tradition of US imperial policing of third world nations. The primary means for this policing had traditionally been counter-insurgency warfare which has always sought to contain and destroy social forces considered inimical to US interests.

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No. 72 – May 17

CEOs IN MATING DANCE WITH THE MEDIA
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
It was the ultimate train wreck of a free press,” Christopher Byron says of the Great Bull Market of the late Twentieth Century. “Everything conspired to turn working business reporters into cheerleaders with pom-poms.” Byron should know. He’s one of the best business writers around, having reported for more than thirty years at places like Esquire, Playboy and New York magazines. He currently hosts a syndicated radio show, writes a column for the New York Post, and spins out best sellers like the recent Martha Inc.

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No. 71 – May 16

TWO VERSIONS OF THE TRUTH
By James Cusick, sundayherald.com
Why eight-year-old Hanan Saleh Matrud was killed is not clear. Hanan lived in Karmat Ali, an area known to be hostile to coalition forces in Iraq, when on August 21 last year a patrol from the First Battalion of the King’s Regiment were “engaged” by several stone- throwing mobs.
A British soldier fired a warning shot into the air to disperse the stone throwers, which they did, according to the army. But “a number of minutes” later the patrol noticed “a girl who had been cut across the abdominal area”. The girl was Hanan and she was still conscious, but the wound was serious. She was taken to the Czech hospital in northern Basra where she died the next day.

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No. 70 – May 16

THE PYTHON OF THE CHRIST
By Ian Bell, sundayherald.com
So what did Monty Python’s Life Of Brian ever do for us? Twenty-five years after the film was first picketed by nuns and banned by local councils who thought that banning things was the meaning of life, it’s a good question. Is a movie that once had the incendiary power of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch still potent? The Pythons think so. Terry Jones, Brian’s director, recently and merrily confessed that the film’s re-release in the US is a shameless attempt to cash in on the success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ. The actual anniversary of the first showing does not fall until August, but a premature Second Coming has been arranged for Brian in the hope that outrage still equals publicity. With 90 million Americans claiming to be born again – “Yes! We’re all individuals!” – it shouldn’t take a miracle, whether by sacred shoe or holy gourd.

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No. 69 – May 11

WAITING FOR 'TORTURE FATIGUE'
By Bill Berkowitz, alternet.org
Two weeks after photos depicting torture in Abu Ghraib prison became public, the right-wing media machine is telling America to get over it, already. According to the conservatives, the inhumane treatment of detainees is turning into a scandal because the liberal media are prolonging the attention, allowing lefty “Bush-haters” to politicize and capitalize on the affair. And all this hand-wringing will only hurt the troops in Iraq.

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No. 68 – May 10

LET'S NOT BE BEASTLY ABOUT AARONOVITCH
By Michael Rosen, socialistworker.co.uk
I’m writing to you today on behalf of SOTWOI (ELS). The initials stand for Supporters Of The War On Iraq (Ex-Lefties Section), a group with some very prominent members. You’ll remember that John Reid was once in the Communist Party, Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Byers used to describe themselves as International Socialists and David Aaronovitch is used to describing himself. I wonder if you could spare a thought this week for these people as they struggle with their present difficulties. You’ll remember that they made enormous sacrifices to help all those waverers out there who wondered if sending British troops into Iraq was a good idea. Aaronovitch had to cope with being paid several hundred pounds a week to tell us in his Guardian column that as a result of his support for the war, some of his best friends had stopped talking to him.

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No. 67 – May 2

THE TORTURED SILENCE OF THE MEDIA ELITE
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
With Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s announcement of an “independent review” board to examine the “abuse” of Iraqi prisoners, we now have three self-described “independent” panels at work. All are stuffed with insiders unlikely to be too critical of the government. It is clearly time for a fourth. Military failures, intelligence failures and 9-11 policy failures are all being probed to some small degree, but where is the investigation of mainstream media’s failure to report on the torture of Iraqis when it became known months before?”

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No. 66 – May 10

LIMBAUGH AND TORTURE 'LITE'
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
Will someone please put a bag over Rush Limbaugh’s head? Last week, as the world stared transfixed at images of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of American soldiers, and editorials in virtually every major American newspaper– across the ideological spectrum – denounced the practice as torture, Limbaugh leapt to its defense. To the drug-addled radio host, it’s morally acceptable to dehumanize people by sticking bags over their heads, stripping them, freezing them, hanging them by their wrists, attaching electrodes to their genitals but (here’s where the “lite” part comes in) only pretending you’ll turn on the juice – all because “we’re at war with these people.”

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CAN AFRICA EVER BE SAVED?
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
"The scar on the conscience of the world,” Tony Blair has called it. These days he might, of course, have been talking about Iraq, but he was in fact referring to Africa, that other beleaguered place for which he hopes to forge a new global consensus to tackle its immeasurable problems. Blair’s latest mission "to save Africa" was given its official launch last Tuesday following the first meeting of his international task force, billed as a “strong and powerful agitator for change”. Listening to the Prime Minister’s remarks at this inaugural get-together of the “Commission for Africa”, one could not help wondering what many ordinary Africans I have met in some of the continent’s most impoverished and violent places would have made of it all.

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No. 64 – May 7

WISHING UPON A STAR
By Michael Moore, michaelmoore.com
Thank you for all the incredible letters of support as my film crew and I once again slog our way through the corporate media madhouse. Does it ever end? Are we ever going to get control of our “free press” again? Can you wish upon a star? The Disney spin machine has been working overtime dealing with this censorship debacle of theirs. I don’t think they thought they would ever be outed. After all, they know that all of us are supposed to adhere to the unwritten Hollywood Code: Never tell the public how business is done here, never let them have a peek at the man behind the curtain. Disney has been hoping for nearly a year that they could keep this thing quiet. As I promised on Wednesday, here are the details behind my sordid adventure with the Magic Kingdom . . .

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No. 63 – May 6

MUZZLING MICHAEL
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
When the fattened cats at Disney put the kibosh on Michael Moore’s new film, “Fahrenheit 9-11,” they did more than censor an artist. Gagging Moore is only the latest maneuver in suppressing some most uncomfortable facts: the Bush Administration’s killing off investigations of Saudi Arabian funding of terror including evidence involving a few members of the bin Laden family in the USA. I know, because, with my investigative team at BBC television and The Guardian of Britain, I wrote and filmed the original reports on which Moore’s new documentary are based.

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No. 62 – May 5

LIFE, DEATH AND FARCE AT THE AGM
By Emma Mayhew, nasper.org
Two men dressed as Tony Blair and BAe Chair Dick Evans in a bed together on the pavement outside the QEII Conference centre in London. It must be time for the highlight in any anti-arms trade protester’s diary – the annual farce that is the BAe Systems AGM. Tony and Dick’s snuggle on the streets of London was, of course, designed to highlight the intimate relationship between the government and the arms industry. But this was just one of a whole series of issues which campaigners were plotting to ask as we shuffled through the tight security of the Conference Centre. Once through the x-ray machines that ensured the BAe Board would not be faced with any of their own products we settled into our seats at the foot of a stage decorated ironically by plastic peace lilies, as patently false as the new BAe slogan plastered across the stage, “innovating for a safer world”..

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No. 61 – May 2

THE PICTURES THAT LOST THE WAR
By Neil Mackay, sundayherald.com
It’s an image that would do Saddam proud. A terrified prisoner, hooded and dressed in rags, his hands out-stretched on either side of him, electrodes attached to his fingers and genitals. He’s been forced to stand on a box about one-foot square. His captors have told him that, if he falls off the box, he’ll be electrocuted. The torture victim was an Iraqi and his torturers were American soldiers. The picture captures the moment when members of the coalition forces, who styled themselves liberators, were exposed as torturers. The image of the wired and hooded Iraqi was one of a series of photographs, leaked by a horrified US soldier inside Saddam’s old punishment centre, Abu Ghraib – now a US PoW camp.

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No. 60 – May 2

VANISHING VOTERS
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb... First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this “scrub” list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half – about 54 percent – are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there’s no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush’s operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters.

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No. 59 – May 2

FOOD AND EVIL
By Vicky Allan, sundayherald.com
Joanna Blythman knows what it is to feel like a zombie. As undercover research for her book, Shopped: The Shocking Power Of British Supermarkets, she worked for a week on the check-outs of a Scottish branch of Tesco. During those long, monotonous shifts under the striplights, packing and scanning, she would reach a state of trance-like boredom, “spaced out, as though dulled by drugs”. She recalls the experience as we queue at the check-out of a different supermarket, trolley sparsely piled with toilet rolls – the few items she can bring herself to buy in the place. It’s the endless repetition of the script, “Have you got a Clubcard?”, the humiliation of having to call someone to your cashdesk because you wanted to go to the toilet, the dehydration, the absence of daylight and fresh air, the “discordant symphony of repeat beeping”. “I really feel for them,” she says, as we queue, gazing along the rows of Stepfordian figures, mechanically lifting and swiping. “You become like a robot. You can’t help it, this is what the place does to you.”

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No. 58 – April 30

THE GENERAL AND THE JOURNALISTS
By William Scott Malone, navyseals.com
CBS 60 Minutes II’s Wednesday report alleging Iraqi POW abuse by U.S. forces has spawned headlines around the world. Six US military personnel now face court martial and the Army brigadier general in charge was suspended from duty. But in a little noted announcement at the end of the program, Dan Rather, amongst other things, the Managing Editor of CBS News, made a statement that was perhaps even more extraordinary.

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No. 57 – April 26

BLOOD-SOAKED BUREAUCRATS
By John Maxwell, jamaicaobserver.com
In Haiti, on January 24, 1991, the family of 24 year-old youth leader, Yvon Desanges, found his body just outside their gate. They knew him by the clothes he was wearing, his face too badly mutilated to be recognised. There was a rope around his neck. His hands were tied. His eyes had been gouged out. His tongue had been cut out. He had been stabbed so many times it was impossible to count the wounds. He had been shot several times. His abdomen had been slit so that his guts spilled out onto the street. Ten years later, youths like Yvon Desanges are still being slaughtered for the same reason, sometimes by the same people. Their mothers, sisters and girlfriends are being raped, their houses burnt.

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No. 56 – April 25

KEBABS OVER BAGHDAD
By Torcuil Crichton, sundayherald.com
A happySt George’s Day it is not. For George Galloway, Iraq war iconoclast, expelled Labour MP, tabloid-branded traitor, Friday should have been spent in Amsterdam doing what he does best – speaking at a peace conference. Instead, he has to ruin the Dutch organisers’ day just as The Sun ruined his. Galloway, who is trying to fight his way back from political isolation , has been shot down again by accusations on The Sun’s front page that he pocketed more than £1 million from Saddam Hussein. Galloway is furious, exasperated and, for once, unable to reach for the libel lawyers – something he finds particularly galling because he has a enviable record of winning in court. This time the allegation that Saddam rewarded him with cash- redeemable vouchers under the UN food for oil programme was made in the US congress under a parliamentary privilege that allows the “grand lie”, as Galloway describes it, to be repeated with impunity across the globe.

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No. 55 – April 25

VANUNU: THE FALLOUT
By Neil Mackay, sundayherald.com
There was more than one reason for the Israeli government rekindling its long-standing hatred of Mordechai Vanunu as he walked out of Shikma prison in the town of Ashkelon on Wednesday at 11.10 in the morning. The resurgent hatred isn’t just down to the fact that Vanunu is seen by the Israeli government as the nation’s worst ever spy – a traitor who blew the whistle on the country’s secret nuclear weapons programme in 1986 – a crime for which he served 18 years in jail, with 11 of those in solitary. Israel has been dreading the release of Vanunu for quite a different reason: the government knew and feared that Vanunu’s release would re-ignite the international clamour surrounding Israel’s covert nuclear weapons programme. Israel was right to be worried. Almost immediately after Vanunu walked to freedom, the eyes of the world turned to concerns surrounding what is happening within the high-security walls of the Dimona nuclear research centre in the Negev desert – the very facility which Vanunu exposed as a nuclear bomb production plant almost two decades ago.

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No. 54 – April 24

MEDIA MALFUNCTIONS
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
BAGHDAD, Iraq (Associated Press) – U.S. troops shot to death two employees of U.S.-funded television station Al-Iraqiya [correspondent Asaad Kadhim and driver Hussein Saleh] and wounded a third [cameraman Bassem Kamel] in the central city of Samara. Last weekend, while MoveOn.org raised more than $750,000 at “Bake Back the White House” bake sales across the country, Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, had a different fundraising effort on his mind. Henninger’s Friday Journal column was devoted to publicizing the efforts of Jim Hake’s Spirit of America, an organization looking to raise $100,000 to help counter the “hooey” presented by Al-Jazeera television.

By Henninger’s estimation, the biggest problem the Coalition Provisional Authority has faced in Iraq is its inability to win the “the war of ideas, images and public relations.” To improve the situation, the First Marine Expeditionary Force and U.S. Army in Iraq intend to “equip and upgrade seven defunct Iraqi-owned TV stations in Al Anbar province – west of Baghdad – so that average Iraqis have better televised information than the propaganda they get from the notorious Al-Jazeera.”

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No. 53 – April 21

MEDIA'S EARLY-WARNING SYSTEM WAS SWITCHED OFF
By Philip Smucker, mediachannel.org
Who would have believed after Osama bin Laden’s heinous attack on American soil thirty-one months ago, that the Saudi’s terror network would be offering a “truce” to Europe and expanding his operations across the globe? Or, who would have believed – even last year this time – that Iraq would be a magnet for jihadists from across the Middle East and that American servicemen would be fighting street to street? Go figure. Well, actually, some folks did figure. Indeed, looking back over the last three years, there is a strong case to make for doubting the optimists and listening more closely to the pessimists.

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No. 52 – April 15

CNN TO AL JAZEERA: WHY REPORT CIVILIAN DEATHS?
By Julie Hollar, fair.org
As the casualties mount in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, Qatar-based Al Jazeera has been one of the only news networks broadcasting from the inside, relaying images of destruction and civilian victims – including women and children. But when CNN anchor Daryn Kagan interviewed the network’s editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al-Sheik, on Monday (4/12/04) – a rare opportunity to get independent information about events in Fallujah – she used the occasion to badger Al-Sheik about whether the civilian deaths were really “the story” in Fallujah.

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No. 51– April 14

THE SPINNING GROUNDS
By Bill Berkowitz, workingforchange.com
On April 9, 2003, after President Bush’s troops marched triumphantly into Baghdad, one of the war’s most memorable media moments took place; the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square. As staged and phony as the event actually was, at the time it appeared to symbolize massive Iraqi support for the U.S.-led invasion. But as Newsweek reporters Christopher Dickey and John Barry report in the April 12 edition of the magazine, this year’s memorable images are not nearly as triumphant: “Last week a mob in the dusty Iraqi town of Fallujah gave us a new and horrifying image to remember this war by, murdering four American civilian security men, burning them, butchering them, dragging them through the streets, then hanging pieces of them from power lines and the girders of a bridge.”

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No. 50 – April 12

HOW THE MEDIA MUZZLES THE 911 STORY
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
Janet Jackson went from being a cartoon on TV to playing one this past weekend. The singer who outraged one America with her “costume malfunction” during a Superbowl half-time show, giving new meaning to the phrase “boob tube,” delighted another America when she appeared costumed as a Condoleeza Rice look-alike on Saturday Night Live. Janet as Condi captured the well-rehearsed calculations so evident in the National Security Advisors’s stellar performance before the 911 Commission even if her shtick ended with another sophomoric, but this time, electronically concealed “breast reveal.” The comedy bit spoofed the Made for TV qualities of Condi’s filibuster-like appearance by inter-cutting the actual footage of Chairman Tom Kean’s pro-forma welcome to Ms. Rice with Janet Jackson’s mimicking her feigned smiles and tense body language.

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No. 49 – April 10

MISREPORTING THE IRAQI INVASION
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
It’s the oldest story in the world: What goes up must come down. All the bluster, PR, “positive” press, bullying, distortion, deception, and military tough-guy bluster cannot keep a flawed policy afloat. The invasion of Iraq, sold as the “liberation of the Iraqi people,” was always a B-rate production with a bad script, flawed characters, and no third act. Despite all the Bremer ballast served up about how only a handful of Saddam-worshipping, al-Sadr-loving, Al-Qaeda-following fanatics stand in the way of a U.S.-imposed democratic paradise, the reality on the ground suggests otherwise. A Sunni-Shia opposition movement is emerging, and gathering steam.

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No. 48 – April 12

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No. 47 – April 12

OH DRAT! (OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT)
By Andrew Robinson, naspir.org
I’ve certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest here! At the expense of testing everyone’s patience, I feel I should reply to some of the critics of my note (see previous Voices commentary, Down With The Thought Police). Firstly, my point was to defend someone else’s method of advocating his views, not to insist that all of us have to go around swearing all the time... Similarly, I would stand up for a right to go naked, but I choose not to exercise such a right, for reasons which have to do as much with cold winds and trapped extremities as with social norms... This is why I phrased my defence of swearing in a (mostly) curse-free language. My point is not to pick a fight about this as a central issue of political action, but simply to suggest that Naspir should resist pressures to enforce such norms within a community self-defined as critical/radical.

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No. 46 – April 5

DOWN WITH THE THOUGHT POLICE!
By Andrew Robinson, naspir.org
A reply to a discussion in the Naspir (Network of Activists Scholars of Politics and International Relations) discussion group, which began when a contributor wrote a pre-Easter rant attacking Christianity and its heritage as a combination of bigoted ideas and fraud. Among other things, he alleged that Jesus was a misogynist and encouraged men to “act like unfaithful randy fuck-machines”, and that Christianity was the cause of genocide against the Native Americans, the Jews and others, as well as the burning of heretics, religious wars, etc. Controversial, certainly – but instead of trying to rebut his accusations, critics denounced the writer for his offensive language, both in terms of his use of swear-words and his “vile and inaccurate attack” which one contributor denounced as hate-speech.

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No. 45 – April 5

REPUBLICANS WILL BE OUTSPENT
By Rory O’Connor, mediachannel.com
George Bush’s media ace Mark McKinnon claims John Kerry and his allies have millions more than his guy. He says the Democrats break the law to get the cash. Whose is bigger? Everybody assumes George Bush’s is. But ask the president’s media director, Mark McKinnon. He says the guy with the biggest war chest is John Kerry. OK, the money isn’t technically coming from Kerry’s campaign, but so what? MoveOn.org, the Media Fund, and America Coming Together are raising millions to bash Bush.

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No. 44 – April 2

CONDOLEEZA'S CRIMES
By Glen Ford & Peter Gamble, blackcommentator.com
Although the 9/11 Commission will not lay a glove on her, Condoleezza Rice is finished as a Black political asset of the White Man’s (War) Party. Colin Powell, a much smarter and cagier opportunist, will likely escape this administration still clutching his devalued aura, having hoarded some small measure of political capital for himself. This is not true for Condoleezza Rice. Her complete and abject identification with her master leaves Rice with nothing of her own to claim.

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No. 43 – March 28

FAILED PLEDGES NO BARRIER TO ANC WIN
By Fred Bridgeland, sundayherald.com
Wandering through the fetid dirt lanes of this township, 40 miles west of Johannesburg, it would be easy to think that South Africa’s ruling African National Congress will inevitably lose the country’s third all-race presidential and parliamentary elections in two weeks’ time. Kids play, paddle and defecate in open sewers clogged with unspeakable detritus. Zodwa Ngomana, dressed somehow in impeccable starched white, tells the Sunday Herald on her way to church: “There are only seven water standpipes for 80,000 people in this part of town.”

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No. 42 – March 18

KOSOVO & IRAQ: SAME BOMBS, DIFFERENT LIES
By David Edwards, medialens.org
The truth about the invasion of Iraq was perhaps best summed up by Ray McGovern, one of the CIA’s most senior analysts: “It was 95 per cent charade. And they all knew it: Bush, Blair, Howard.” (Quoted John Pilger, ‘Universal justice is not a dream’, ZNet, March 23, 2004)
One might think that exposés of this kind would lead the media to take a fresh look at some of the US-UK governments’ earlier claims justifying war. Consider, for example, the 78-day NATO assault on Serbia from March 24 until June 10, 1999, said to have been launched to protect the Albanian population of Kosovo. What is so striking about the US-UK government case for war against Serbia is the familiarity of much of the propaganda. In a key pre-war speech on March 18 last year, Blair said of Iraq: “Looking back over 12 years, we have been victims of our own desire to placate the implacable... to hope that there was some genuine intent to do good in a regime whose mind is in fact evil.” (‘Tony Blair’s speech’, The Guardian, March 18, 2003)

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No. 41– March 18

BUSH & BLAIR: BLOOD BROTHERS
By James Cusick, sundayherald.com
In difficult times politicians tend to dump convention and tradition. That Tony Blair did not reach for the telephone and offer congratulations to Senator John Kerry on his recent triumph in becoming the Democrat’s man to challenge George W Bush for the United States presidency later this year, is therefore no surprise. Equally there should be no surprise that the Prime Minister and his senior advisers have quietly informed key Labour Party personnel that they should keep out of the US presidential campaign. Well advanced plans for senior Labour figures to begin holding a series of talks with Kerry’s close advisers were also quickly killed off. Blair isn’t just choosing his American friends carefully these days. The horrors in Madrid last week – and the misjudged attempts by the ruling right-wing government to influence the general election by deliberately misinforming the Spanish electorate in the hope of securing another term in office – helped put the Socialist party, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, in power.

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No. 40 – March 18

US BUILDS GANGSTER STATE IN HAITI
By Glen Ford & Peter Gamble, blackcommentator.com
"Henceforth, the Haitian authorities will not allow other countries to trample upon the rights of Haitians,” huffed Gerard Latortue, the erstwhile South Florida “consultant” and talk show host installed as Prime Minister by foreign soldiers and homegrown gangsters who were at that very moment snuffing out the rights and lives of Haitians. Latortue on Monday executed his first grand act of international diplomacy by severing diplomatic ties with Jamaica and suspending membership in the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) in protest of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s extended visit to Jamaica.

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No. 39– March 18

9/11 NONSENSE
By William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org
The attacks of September 11 have become, morosely, a political football. The Bush for President campaign is running commercials that display burning towers and the faces of brave firefighters, said firefighters being played by actors. Despite outraged howls from real firefighters, who were joined in rage by family members of 9/11 victims, the commercials continue to run. Bush believes his leadership in the aftermath of the attacks should be a campaign issue, and so there it is. In truth, however, September 11 became a political football on September 11.

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No. 38 – March 18

BOMBING THE PEACE PROTESTORS
By David Edwards, medialens.org
Before last year’s war on Iraq, Media Lens reported the extraordinary level of establishment opposition to the attack. Writing in the Financial Times in January 2003, Douglas Hurd, former Conservative Foreign Secretary, argued that the war ran “the risk of turning the Middle East into an inexhaustible recruiting ground for anti-western terrorism”. (Financial Times, January 3, 2003). Anatol Lieven, a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote that the Bush administration was pursuing “the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism,” inspired by fear of lethal threats. America, Lieven warned, “has become a menace to itself and to mankind”. (‘The Push for War’, Anatol Lieven, London Review of Books, October 2002).

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NEW - No. 37 – March 16

THE PALESTINIAN ROMEO
By Uri Avnery, gush-shalom.org
Arna Mer was a tempestuous and exciting woman. She was the daughter of a professor of medicine, who had already become a legend in his own lifetime. As a young woman she joined the legendary Palmakh fighters of the underground army, and since then the Keffiyah affected by them became her trade-mark. After the 1948 war she joined the Communist party, then the most hated group in Israel, and married an Arab party functionary. Her two well-known sons, Juliano and Spartak, bear revolutionary names.

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Uri Avnery's columns now have their own place. Click here to go to download page.

NEW - No. 36 – March 15

LEARNING FROM THE BROKAW HOAX
By Rory O’Connor, mediachannel.org
How can you be sure that the news you see on television and read in newspapers and magazines is real and true? We live in an age of media scandals, as we were reminded by last week’s media blitz – Katie Couric, Larry King, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Mathews – by Jayson Blair, The New York Times reporter who made up much of what he published in the “paper of record.”
We will remember again this week, while marking the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and a war that led to persistent charges that the media doesn’t tell us the whole truth. This is the story of another controversial invasion – and another extraordinary example of media make-believe. Let’s call it “The Brokaw Hoax.”

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NEW - No. 35 – March 14

FIVE ARE FREE, BUT NO REMORSE FROM BUSH
By Trevor Royle, sundayherald.com
Guantanamo Bay and its inmates at Camp Delta have produced the great unspoken topic of this year’s US presidential campaign: it is the problem that dare not speak its name. The remaining inmates await trial by special military tribunal, the building for the hearings has been completed, a chief prosecutor and defence counsels have been appointed and the judicial procedures have been worked out. Military lawyers have been appointed to defend five of the detainees in the first tribunals of this kind to be held since the second world war. But the Pentagon still refuses to say when it will give the green light to begin the process.

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No. 34– February 29

THE GHETTO INSIDE
By Uri Avnery, gush-shalom.org
It is easier to get the Jews out of the ghetto than to get the ghetto out of the Jews!” – this dictum of the early Zionists is now assuming a new meaning. Israel is cutting itself off from the world and enclosing itself in a ghetto, and not only physically. In The Hague, the proceedings of the International Court of Justice on the Separation Wall have started. Sharon’s people understand that they have no chance of winning and have decided, therefore, to boycott the session. Instead of arguing their case before the court, they decided to organize a street event, in the spirit of the classic Israeli maxim: “If your case is weak, raise your voice!”

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No. 33– February 25

REASONS TO BE FEARFUL
By Ian Bell, sundayherald.com
When the age of reason ended, most people were too stupid to notice, or too busy believing claptrap. Francis Wheen, fortunately for us, was not among them. His journalism has long been a rearguard action against the collective retreat into fantasy and superstition, political or religious. Here he administers a purgative dose to all those who peddle cultural snake oil.
How did we get to the 21st century more or less intact as a species while giving credence to so much utter tosh? You name it and, these days, someone believes it. Faith and gullibility are now interchangeable. Cults are rife, homicide in the name of belief commonplace, and sheer fantasy a “core value”. America has loosed a born-again bonehead on the world while Britain entertains an effortlessly sanctimonious premier who has yet to master the commandment that covers fibbing.

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No. 32 – February 25

THE INTERN ON PAGE ONE
By Timothy Karr, mediachannel.org
She smiles from page one of Tuesday’s New York Daily News. Her face is closely cropped, wrapped in 240-point Arial; “I’M NO MONICA” the headline declares. The lead spills to page three, where the 27-year-old Columbia grad Alexandra Polier denies rumors linking her romantically to Senator John Kerry. The allegations of an affair, made public last Thursday by conservative rumormonger Matt Drudge, had ignited an online firestorm that, over time, spread from right-wing websites to foreign tabloids, and ultimately into U.S. mainstream press.

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No. 31– February 22

THE HORRORS OF HAITI
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
It all happened in a mad terrifying rush of rocks, bullets and machete-wielding maniacs. From the corner of my eye I saw Sunday Herald photographer and colleague Stewart Attwood hit by a rock. With blood from a nasty head wound running down his neck and shirt, he struggled to get to his feet and away as a gunshot rang out, the bullet instantly smashing into a stationary car close by. Another American photographer, who moments later toppled beside Attwood, was struck down by blows from a group of mad-eyed “chimères” – hired thugs and supporters of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide – who had rushed towards us. In the midst of the maelstrom, as anti-Aristide protesters and foreign journalists alike fled in every direction, I became separated from my colleagues. Suddenly, in a narrow side street, I found myself fending off blows to my neck and shoulders – luckily from the flat side of a machete – before running into a labyrinthine marketplace with three chimères chasing behind me.

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No. 30 – February 22

THE NOT-SO-FUNNY FARM
By Ian Bell, sundayherald.com
When the jury is still out, you can’t have a verdict. You can have opinions, even faith, but until those who have studied the evidence reach a firm conclusion your views are not worth a great deal. Being a new Labour minister, even a prime minister, does not grant you supernatural powers of prophecy and insight denied to the rest of us. That’s the nub of the argument where genetically modified crops are concerned. The government knows only too well that a large majority of people don’t want their food modified. It knows, too, that if the public’s questions were properly addressed and properly answered, opposition would probably melt away. Show beyond doubt that the stuff is safe, in this age of mad cow disease and Sars, and we might just swallow it. Instead, according to papers leaked last week, the Blair administration intends to allow the first crop of GM maize in the name of British science regardless of what the public thinks. A government that claims to be in the middle of a “Big Conversation” with voters has decided to turn off its hearing aid.

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No. 29 – February 22

SHARON'S DANCING BEAR
By Uri Avnery, gush-shalom.org
Once upon a time there was a popular kind of street show: a bear would dance for the amusement of passers by, who would throw coins into his box. The bear was big and frightening, but his clumsy movements made people laugh. He was much stronger than his master, who kept him on a chain, but submitted to him completely. A wonder to behold.
The national symbol of the United States is the eagle. The bear, as everybody knows, is the national symbol of Russia. But looking at the Sharon-Bush relationship, it is the old master-and-bear show that inevitably springs to mind.

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No. 28 – February 22

KILL BILL? NO THRILL!
By Denis Beckett, citizen.co.za
You’ve seen Kill Bill on the bus shelters – the blonde star in a grand prix tracksuit with a samurai sword. (Either Props or Costumes must’ve got a wrong e-mail). It’s all over the press, in phrases like “TARANTINO’S TRIUMPH — PAGES 2, 3, 6 – 7, 10 & 12.” The word “brilliant” appears repeatedly, with superlatives, as in absolutely brilliant, amazingly brilliant, astoundingly brilliant. The impression I got was of a violent movie, brilliantly handled so as to make the violence a light-hearted, merry kind of violence. Additional brilliance apparently lay in the “referencing” by which the film borrows techniques from prior films so filmgoers can have detective fun whispering “Look, Mabel! That’s from Slicing Off Noses, 1989.” This was intriguing. If we in the print world “borrow”, we are called plagiarists and sent to the back doors of restaurants.

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No. 27– February 22

REMAKING AMERICA IN WAL-MART'S IMAGE
By Glen Ford & Peter Gamble, blackcommentator.com
The only competition that exists among the corporate players at the commanding heights of the American economy, is the race to determine who can squeeze the workers first, and hardest. Nothing illuminates this reality more starkly than the southern California supermarket strike and lockout, now in its fifth month. Displaying a class solidarity that would make Mao Tse-tung’s Army blush a deep red, a united front of grocery chains is determined to destroy the middle class dreams of 70,000 union workers. The Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons chains and their subsidiaries claim underdog status, as they grind $10 an hour workers into the dirt. “Wal-Mart is coming, Wal-Mart is coming!” they cry, moaning that the non-union retail behemoth’s labor costs are about 20 percent lower than industry norms.

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No. 26 – February 20

YES. MINISTER
By Uri Avnery, gush-shalom.org
In one of the episodes of the outstanding British TV series “Yes, Minister!” the Permanent Undersecretary, Sir Humphrey, teaches his minister how to use Commissions of Inquiry: Take an honorable retired judge, a doddering old fool, and put him in charge of the inquiry, with a sizable honorarium. Help him to arrive himself at the required conclusions. Feed him the appropriate facts and hint at a peerage. From there on, everything will work out as desired. At this moment, three parallel but separate commissions of inquiry are at work: one American, one British and one Israeli. All three are supposed to find out why the intelligence community supplied the government with false information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

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No. 25 – February 20

CHILD SOLDIERS OF UGANDA'S STOLEN ARMY
By Fred Bridgland, sundayherald.com
Spare pity for parents among the Acholi people of northern Uganda. They are living a real version of the fable of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, only many times worse. Since the mid-1980s, an estimated 20,000 of their children have been snatched by a crazed visionary, Joseph Kony, who – in training camps in Sudan – has transformed the young people into Africa’s most terrifying army and sent them home to kill their own parents and relatives. Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has created such terror that 1.2 million Ugandans are now internal refugees, huddled into refugee camps across the north and centre of the country.

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No. 24– February 19

THE ONE YOU'VE BEN WAITING FOR
By William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org
Nicole Frye and Bryan Spry are dead because of George W. Bush. Both died in Iraq. Both were 19 years old. William Ramirez was also 19 years old, as was Holly McGeogh. Luis Moreno and Nathan Nakis, Jeffrey Braun and Jason Wright, Joey Whitener and Steven Acosta and Rachel Bosveld, all were 19 years old when they died in Iraq. Ryan Thomas and Michael Mihalakis were 18 when they died in Iraq. They join the 544 American soldiers who have been killed there in less than a year. They were lied to, as were we all, and now they are forever young in death. The lie they, and we, were fed still sits on the White House website.

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No. 23– February 18

A BONE IN THE THROAT OF THE MILITARY PRISON
By Adam Keller, refuz.org.il
Early morning at one Tel-Aviv’s main arteries. On one side the Twin Towers of the Azrieli Commercial Center. On the other side, a monster of concrete and glass being constructed to house the expanding Ministry of Defence. In between, a group of demonstrators holding up the placards “Release the Prisoners of Conscience”. Leaflets were handed out to the big stream of mostly rear-echelon soldiers on their way to the morning shift. At nine, not far from there – in the courtroom of the Military Appeals Court – a surrealistic scene – the testimony by Colonel Major Ochana, Deputy Commander of the Israeli Military Police Corps.

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No. 22 – February 18

PUBLIC OPINION: NO VALUE
By David Cromwell, medialens.org
In 1794, George Washington confided to Alexander Hamilton, a fellow architect of the nascent US republic forged upon democratic ideals, that he had “long since learned to hold public opinion of no value.” Just over a century later, in 1898, US Senator Albert Beveridge publicly disparaged the notion “that we ought not to govern a people without their consent.” The “rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed,” he declared, “applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the [native American] Indians without their consent, we govern our children without their consent.”
These are but two examples of elite disdain for public opinion and genuine democracy. The tradition is long and dishonorable . . . .

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No. 21– February 18

MEDIA IGNORES US WAR CRIMES HYPOCRISY
By Peter Phillips, projectcensored.org
During the first week of December 03, US corporate media reported that American forensic teams are working to document some 41 mass graves in Iraq to support future war crime tribunals in that country. Broadly covered in the media, as well, was the conviction of General Stanislav Galic by a UN tribunal for war crimes committed by Bosnian Serb troops under his command during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992-94. These stories show how corporate media likes to give the impression that the US government is working diligently to root out evil doers around the world and to build democracy and freedom. This theme is part of a core ideological message in support of our recent wars on Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Governmental spin transmitted by a willing US media establishes simplistic mythologies of good vs. evil often leaving out historical context, special transnational corporate interests, and prior strategic relationships with the dreaded evil ones.

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No. 20 – February 17

BREAKING UP THE BBC, PART 2
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
To my surprise, The London Sunday Times’ story (Breaking up the BBC, Voices No. 19) on the plans to dismantle the BBC was not picked up widely in this country or even in Britain. It took a day and a half for Matt Drudge to link to it. Will this story, in the end, be ignored or regarded as a ho-hummer, or some deserved payback for the ludicrous findings of Lord Hutton? So far it does not seem to even be on the radar of our own media critics. I do think it is important to state that in defending the BBC’s right to exist as an independent broadcaster, I am not in any way arguing that the BBC is without fault or that its reporting is superior on every subject. Far from it.

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No. 19 – February 16

BREAKING UP THE BBC
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
Add the initials BBC to the growing list of casualties of the war on Iraq.
Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times reports with a concealed smile fogging a disguised self-interest that the British Broadcasting Corporation, as we have known it, and the world has loved it, may soon be no more. The world’s most respected news organization may become the latest target of the Blair Witch project. Is this for real? Or is it a trial balloon to test reaction or prepare public opinion? We don’t know but don’t rule any devious strategy out. Here's the story . . . .

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No. 18 – February 11

BUSH SPIKED PROBE OF 'MR STRANGELOVE'
gregpalast.com
On November 7, 2001, BBC Television’s Newsnight and the Guardian of London reported that the Bush administration thwarted investigations of Dr. A.Q. Khan, known as the “father” of Pakistan's atomic bomb. This week, Khan confessed to selling atomic secrets to Libya, North Korea, and Iran. The Bush Administration has expressed shock at disclosures that Pakistan, our ally in the war on terror, has been running a nuclear secrets bazaar. In fact, according to the British news teams’ sources within US intelligence agencies, shortly after President Bush’s inauguration, his National Security Agency (NSA) effectively stymied the probe of Khan Research Laboratories, the Pakistani agency in charge of the bomb project. CIA and other agents told BBC they could not investigate the spread of “Islamic Bombs” through Pakistan because funding appeared to originate in Saudi Arabia.

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No. 17 – February 9

RETURN TO AFGHANISTAN
By Reese Erlich, alternet.org
Derrill Bodley was visibly nervous as he walked towards the mud-walled house on the fringes of Kabul. Would the woman remember him? Would he be able to emotionally connect with her again? Two years ago, almost to the day, Derrill visited this home with a delegation of other Americans who had lost relatives on Sept. 11. The non-profit group Global Exchange had arranged a meeting in January, 2002, between the Americans and some of the Afghan victims of the war on Afghanistan. This time around, he is on a two-week journey to meet with dozens of aid workers, UN officials and ordinary Afghans.

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No. 16– February 9

MEDIA WAS AWOL. WAS BUSH?
By Rory O'Connell, mediachannel.org
After being absent without leave for years, the mainstream media is finally demanding answers to perennial questions about President Bush’s military service. This week – more than thirty years after joining the National Guard, and four years after occupying the Oval Office – Bush suddenly agreed to ‘meet the press’ and discuss the issue with Tim Russert. Was Bush a “deserter,” as gadfly filmmaker Michael Moore recently charged? Was he AWOL for a year, during a time when 500,000 Americans were fighting in Vietnam, as the Boston Globe’s Walter V. Robinson reported four years ago? Or is it true that “The president fulfilled his duties. That’s why he was honorably discharged,” as White House spokesman Scott McClellan told the Associated Press last week?

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No. 15– February 8

PRIME MINISTER WHO HAS LOST THE NATION'S TRUST
Editorial, sundayherald.com.org
On both sides of the Atlantic it is becoming increasingly clear that both the British and US public are fast losing trust in their leaders. When it comes to being asked to support their calls for going to war, we are not in a position to verify the intelligence upon which they claim they must act. When we later are told that the intelligence was flawed and that the head of the CIA, George Tenet, claims he never said there was an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and that, anyway, the reports of weapons of mass destruction were “faulty” due to poor human intelligence on the ground, then we all know that the game is up. That’s why the polls on both sides of the Atlantic show that Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush are fast losing the trust of the people. Yesterday, an NOP poll for The Independent found 54% of the public think Blair “lied” – yes, that is the word they were asked to give their opinion on – “to the nation” over Iraq. And the public has also lost any trust in Blair’s attempts to placate their concerns with his new Butler Inquiry into the failure to find any WMD. The poll showed 68% believe it will be another whitewash. Finally 51% believe Blair should go, while the Tories move into the lead over Labour. In short, the public have had enough of having the wool pulled over their eyes.

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No. 14 – February 5

WAR COVERAGE'S BIG LIE - CENSORING THE HORROR
By Rory O'Connor, mediachanel.org
There’s been a lot of talk in the media lately about lying. Best-sellers from both the Bill O’Reilly right and the Al Franken left denounce "Lying Liars" and announce "No Spin Zones.” Other books either decry (Bernie Goldberg) or deny (Eric Alterman) supposed bias in the media. And most media criticism of the attack on Iraq has centered on contentions that President Bush and top advisers like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld played fast and loose with the truth in their stated reasons for the run up to war – from weapons of mass destruction that cannot be found to spurious stories of connections between Saddam and Osama and Iraq and Al Qaeda..

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No. 13 – February 5

WAR WITHOUT WEAPONS
By Ray McGovern, tompaine.com
Today marks the first anniversary of what history will say was a sad day for our country – the day on which Secretary of State Colin Powell peddled corrupt intelligence to “prove” that Iraq posed a military threat that required a “preemptive” attack. Now the whole world knows there was nothing to preempt. Powell’s triumph at the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, was a pyrrhic victory. Until then, Powell was the only senior U.S. national security official with some residual credibility on Iraq. But he proved to be the martinet, saluting to orders to put his credibility on the line. It has now evaporated under the klieg-lights bathing U.S. weapons-searcher-in-chief David Kay, the only senior official so far to admit that the quest for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq is a fool’s errand.

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No. 12 – January 30

I AM RESIGNING
By Andrew Gilligan, bbc.co.uk
I am today resigning from the BBC. I and everyone else involved here have for five months admitted the mistakes we made. We deserved criticism. Some of my story was wrong, as I admitted at the inquiry, and I again apologise for it. My departure is at my own initiative. But the BBC collectively has been the victim of a grave injustice. If Lord Hutton had fairly considered the evidence he heard, he would have concluded that most of my story was right.

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No. 11 – January 30

WAR ON THE BBC
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
He did not say, “hello,” or even his name, just left a one-word message: “Whitewash.” It came from an embattled journalist whispering from inside the bowels of a television and radio station under siege, on a small island off the coast of Ireland: from BBC London. And another call, a colleague at the Guardian, said, “The future of British journalism is very bleak.”

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No. 10 – January 30

HUTTON WHITEWASH LEAVES BLAIR IN DOCK
By David Miller, counterpnch.net
The Hutton report gave an immediate political victory to the Blair government. But the all-embracing nature of the whitewash means that a spectre is haunting the Blair government. By bracketing off the issue of the reliability of the September 2002 dossier and – not widely noticed – whether the government knew it was unreliable, he fails to put the government in the clear in the wider court of public and world opinion.

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No. 9 – January 21

SELLING TO AMERICA
By Danny Schechter, newsdissector.org
It was the night of a new moon, the bad moon rising, a cosmic sign, I am told, for negative forces of metaphysical energy. It was the night that the Empire struck back. It was the night that America’s Republican Guard and its cocky Commander in Chief declared war one more time. This time it was a two-front war – war on the Democrats as well as on them evil terrorists, who are always out there and seemingly ready to pounce. America this evening is a nation called to great responsibilities. And we are rising to meet them.

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No. 8 – January 21

NO CHILD"S BEHIND LEFT
By Greg Palast, gregpalast.com
Go ahead, George, and lie to me. Lie to my dog. Lie to my sister. But don’t you ever lie to my kids. Deep into your State of the Siege lecture last night, long after sensible adults had turned off the tube or kicked in the screen, you came after our children. “By passing the No Child Left Behind Act,” you said, “We are regularly testing every child ... and making sure they have better options when schools are not performing.”

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No. 7 – January 19

STRANGE EMBEDFELLOWS
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
Like politics, media makes for strange bedfellows – but surely none stranger than Al Franken and White House communications director Dan Bartlett. Administration officials like Bartlett share the left-wing’s analysis that the most pervasive problem with American media today is its corporate bias, according to New Yorker staff writer Ken Auletta, whose “Annals of Communication” column appears regularly in that publication.

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No. 6 – January 17

MOVEON OUT, WHITE HOUSE IN
By Timothy Kerr, mediachannel.org
The nearly 100 million viewers expected to tune in to next month’s Super Bowl on CBS will be served up ads that include everything from beer and bikinis to credit cards and erectile dysfunction. They will also see a spot from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. What’s missing from America’s premiere marketing spectacle will be an anti-Bush ad put forth by upstart advocacy group MoveOn.org. The group had hoped to buy airtime to run “Child’s Pay”, a 30-second ad that criticizes the Bush administration’s run-up of the federal deficit.

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No. 5 – January 14

WAR'S PREACHERS
By Robert Dreyfuss, tompaine.com
In their book, “An End to Evil”, Richard Perle and David Frum present us with a long To-Do List. And they seem like they’re in a hurry. Iraq, of course – in their view at least – has already been checked off. Still to come: It’s time for the United States to “overthrow the terrorist mullahs of Iran”; force regime change in Syria by “interdict[ing]” Syria’s arms supply, cutting off its oil supply, and conducting “hot pursuit” raids into its territory; launch a “comprehensive air and naval blockade of North Korea” and plan a “preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities”; and promote the dismantling of Saudi Arabia by supporting a breakway Shi’ite minority state in that country’s eastern province, which just happens to be where the oil is.

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No. 4 – January 13

NAZIS FOR PRESIDENT
By Rory O'Connor, mediachannel.org
I bet you didn’t know the President of the United States is a Nazi. So is his leading opponent. That’s right – George W. Bush and Howard Dean are in league with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, respectively. The latest flap in the silly season leading up to November’s election began when the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org posted two brief television spots comparing President Bush to Hitler on its website.

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No. 3 – January 10

INSIDE THE WAR ZONE
By David Pratt, sundayherald.com
It seems like an age ago. The sights, the sounds and smells. I’m often asked what I remember most about the war in Iraq, and always it comes back to the same thing – people. Not that the war is really over of course. Sure, Saddam’s statue was toppled and hauled along the ground while I was there, but then what was that next to the ignominious real-life end of the great dictator’s reign two weeks ago?

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No. 2 – January 10

FIGHTING THE MEDIA WAR IN 2004
By Danny Schechter, mediachannel.org
In 2003, media practices that once were casual complaints became issues around which millions were organizing. The outcry against the pathetic cheerleading that called itself TV coverage of the war in Iraq, and the battle to stop new FCC rules demonstrated that there is a large constituency for media activism and organization. Media activists led the fight. More than 2,000 converged in November on Madison, Wisconsin to signal a commitment to make media reform a central concern. It was an impressive, energetic and strong statement.

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No. 1 – January 5

TWO LOUD WORDS
By William Rivers Pitt, truthout.org
There have always been ‘third-rail’ issues in American politics, subjects that, if touched upon, will lead to certain political death. For a long while, and until very recently, Social Security was one of these issues. A new one, surrounding the attacks of September 11, has been born in this political season. If September 11 is discussed, the only allowable sub-topic to be broached is whether or not the Bush administration is capable of keeping us safe from another onslaught. Friday’s edition of the Boston Globe had a case in point on the front page. An article titled ‘For Bush, Readiness is Key Issue’ stated that, “In speech after speech, President Bush has emphasized his administration’s pledge never to forget the lessons of Sept. 11. He says the top goal of his administration is to prevent another attack."

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