Month: December 2005

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Supplied Chemical Agents to Saddam »»

RELATED DIARIES ::

I ran into this little piece of surreal mainstream press whoredom last night, and could not resist bringing it to the attention of BT. It is a piece of media business as usual, but important nonetheless. I harbor no illusions that this situation will change in America…Operation Mockingbird (The PermaGov takeover of the media) is now so embedded in the basic fabric of our society that in a sense it IS that society…but if the opposition is to change the way things are working here even a little bit we MUST remain aware of just how twisted the whole mainstream media has become.

Read on.

The article is titled U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers, and it is in the “Media” section of the paper. I am sure most of us are familiar with the story. It has recently been exposed…please notice that exactly who did the exposing or for what reasons is never emphasized in the broad outline of the story as we are fed it in the mainstream media… that the U.S, military has been running a “multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends.”

The purveyors of this merchandise is one Lincoln Group.

Note well the words “documents from the Pentagon show.” From where or whom those documents have appeared (or for what reason they are appearing only now) is never mentioned. Gotta protect those “sources”, right?

Sound somehow familiar?

And then one step later we go right on through the looking glass with the Good Grey Lady. Right on down the old rabbit hole to Queensland.

Queer Street, as boxers refer to what happens after a knockout punch.

OOOOOOoooooo, those bad, BAD Lincoln Group people!! Subverting freedom of the press like that!!!

This “…appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.”

Why…MONEY has even changed hands!!!

Come ON here, fellas!!!

This is the same newspaper, owned and administrated by the same people, that kept Judith Miller busy churning out a high level version of the same boilerplate pap regarding the invasion of Iraq for three years. Do you think it possible that money…or its journalistic career equivalent in power, access and prestige…did not change hands in THAT effort? Hell, once Ms. Miller had been thoroughly exposed as an administration plant and had to be dumped for public relations reasons, her golden parachute ALONE (An undisclosed amount, but…hey, this IS the big leagues, right???) would probably be sufficient to keep me and my descendants in the clover for a couple of generations if properly administered.

And here these clowns are, throwing this garbage out with the straightest of faces to be unthinkingly consumed by the sleeping middle class media pigs of the world over their morning coffee and croissants before they troop off to work shoring up this massive establishment of deceit and misdirection that we laughingly call “America”.

Please.

And the military stonewalls.

The story will eventually disappear down the lie hole along with literally thousands of other piece of shit stories that have no impact whatsoever on what is happening except to keep the public is a state of complete confusion over who is really running the game and under which shell the media con game pea REALLY resides.

The article goes on to flap its gums about this dastardly effort, but once the reader accepts the basic premise of the story…that the mainstream media is ever on the lookout for such rancid examples of planted journalism…the damage is done. The readers go right into their usual NY Times trances, and mission accomplished.

So once again I mention this idea.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

And I suggest to almost anyone who has even the slightest immediate negative reaction to the presentation of such an idea…that all of us need to go cold turkey and kick the media habit immediately, that we need to stop mainlining this shit straight into the veins of our information system until we are completely and forever cured of the addiction… that if you do not consider EACH AND EVERY PIECE OF MEDIA INFORMATION THAT YOU CONSUME with a completely critical eye, you are in a state of media hypnotism that is past all understanding once the trance hits.

It is a DRUG, people. And you can refuse that drug once, twice, three times in a day, consider yourself immune to its temptations, and then while you are thinking that you are safe and secure, simultaneously belly right up on to the bar and down a double that goes straight to your limbic system. And then there you jolly well are, aren’t you. RIGHT back in Wonderland with Alice and the boys in the band.

You must first get to a point where the logo

(or any OTHER mainstream media logo…the Woodward…errrr, Washington…Post, CBS, CNN, etc.) causes an almost allergic reaction in your very being. An automatic and complete cessation of belief instead of the ongoing and completely automatic surrender of DISBELIEF that we have all been taught so well and so thoroughly since early childhood when confronted with the Howdy Doody media show.

“What time is it, kids? It HOWDY DOODY time!!!”

“YAAAAAAAAY!!!”

ZZZZzzzzzz….

I am telling you…achieving this state of ongoing and complete media disbelief is the most dangerous and truly revolutionary thing that ANY of us can do right now. If this in the Information Age, then any revolution must take place on an informational level.

And the idea of a NEWSTRIKE!!!…an internal, individual and complete NEWSTRIKE!!!, just for STARTERS…is informational rebellion at its highest level.

George Orwell’s “1984” was just a sketch, a cartoon compared to the mind control apparatus in place in the U.S.A. today. (Hmmm…USA Today. Sounds somehow…familiar.)

It might better be called the U.S.H.

The United States of Hypnosis.

And there are mighty damned few of us who are completely free of that trance state.

Look within.

Have you internally believed ONE THING that the media has told you over the last 10 years or so?

Do you refer to Bush as “President” Bush?

Do you root for the Yankees or some other team of bread and circus performers?

Watch ANY TV show with an accepting and uncritical eye? Even the most apparently innocuous ones?

EVER buy a brand name ANYTHING when you have a choice not to?

Unconsciously let the droning TVs in waiting rooms (and WAY too often in living rooms and bedrooms as well) spew their subliminal societal rank and file-ism into your brain?

Then you are a junkie.

“Not ME, bro”!!! I’m just sniffin’!!! Just skin poppin’, baby. I’m no junkie!!!”

Right.

Kick.

Go a year or two without reverting.

Go ahead.

I dare ya.

A last word from that NY Times story:

Right.

You think it’s any different right here at home?

“If asked.”

OK

So ask.

But…who ya GONNA ask?

Ghostbusters?

Spookbusters.

You must ask YOURSELF.

Information rebellion.

The REAL “last frontier”.

(Fade out to Star Trek theme. And thanks SO much, Gene Roddenberry. For Mr. Spock. Mr. SPOOK. Drop the fuck out, folks. It really DOESN’T compute.)

Later…

AG

I had a Little Golden Book when I was six which told the story of the grasshopper and the Ant. This was no entomological treatise. The Grasshopper in my book, for some reason, played the fiddle while wearing a top hat. He fiddled for the ant who danced to his tune all summer long. Then in the fall the ant began stockpiling food and digging tunnels while the grasshopper kept fiddling. In the first cold snap of winter the ant was fat and happy underground while the grasshopper froze to death while wearing a little scarf.
Clearly the story promotes the stoic perseverance of the ant over the thrill of being a Grasshopper, but ants are mindless, soulless drones. The death of one ant is of no more important to another ant than it is to us humans. At least grasshoppers can become locusts, and although I’ve never been clear on how that happens, it does add an element of dangerous adventure to having a thorax. But the moral of the story book seemed to be that ants keep passbook savings accounts and 401ks while grasshoppers invest in hedge funds.  Good little boys and girls want to be ants. But the truth is our heats are with the grasshoppers.  

One in five U.S. taxpayers makes less than $17,000 a year – and half of those make less than $11,000 per year. To those in the bottom 20% of our economy savings accounts are little more than a myth. And remember, these are poor folks who make enough to pay taxes. There are grasshoppers worse off than them. The next highest 20% of tax payers average only $22,000 a year income. To families at this level stock investments are something they hear about on TV ads, which is the same way they hear about health insurance. All these folks, 40% of all U.S. taxpayers, are grasshoppers by circumstance.

The true middle income of America is actually $36,400 a year. If you are a single grasshopper and childless you can live pretty well on that income, unless you live in a big city. Grasshoppers in the fourth 20%, who average $59,700 can live comfortably in the big cities, but an offspring or two and they effectively drop down a level – still grasshoppers, if occasionally displaying bursts of ant characteristics.  

The bottom 14% of the top 20% of U.S. taxpayers average about $103,000 a year. That is very good money, unless winter should come early in the form of a couple of weeks in an Intensive Care Unit. I.C.U can run through medical insurance limits and then swallow another one hundred grand in less than a month. Even Americans making $100,000 a year are still only one serious illness away from bankruptcy.

The top 1% of all U.S. taxpayers have an average income of $1, 205,000 a year. At one million a year you need binoculars to see bankruptcy. At last our grasshopper can afford to metamorphous into an ant – unless, of course, they invested heavily in WorldCom or Enron, in which case they’re just another grasshopper waiting for winter to pick them off.  

Meanwhile 60% of all U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1996 through 2000. By 2003 the remaining 40% who couldn’t find accountants smart enough, or couldn’t buy a congressman with enough pull to fix the tax code for them and still paid taxes, they supplied just 7.4% of Federal Revenues. That is the lowest corporate share since 1934. Anyone grasshoppers here remember what else was going on in 1934?

Corporate profits in 2003, however, were at all time highs. But despite that golden age of corporate profits, very quietly in October of 2004, without any fanfare and almost no press coverage The Republican Congress passed and George Bush signed into law a new business tax code that cut corporate taxes by a further $177 billion dollars a year. Does this seem wise, Grasshopper?

Also in 2003 the U.S. government took in $1.85 trillion in revenues, 92% of it from the pockets of individuals, in the form of personal income taxes. Unfortunately, at the same time the Republican congress and president spent $2.39 trillion.

As of midnight, December 1st, 2005 our national debt was $8, 107, 096, 961,245.23. By midnight December 2nd it will grow by almost another three billion dollars. Your personal share of that debt, grasshopper, is $27,218.23.  To pay that debt right now, before it grows any higher, would leave the middle of the middle class grasshoppers in America with just $8,181.77.

And nobody can live on that.

Part One of Three Parts.

I said in a comment the other day (quite seriously) that I feel like I take from this site so much more than I give to it.  In the last week or so, promotions for my book have sapped almost all my time away from doing constructive things here.  Still, you guys have become like an on-line family to me.  The outpourings at our collective losses.  The shared joy of our individual triumph.  The stories.  The gossip.  One big pond.  And thinking about that made me certain that I ought to share this.

I got the second review of my book yesterday, from the Lansing State Journal (a fairly large daily in Michigan).

The reviewer is a professional.  I respect his opinion very much (though I don’t know him personally — having only met him by chance while doing book marketing).  I have always known his columns to tell it like it is.  I think he must read five to ten books a week.  And he usually reviews them three at a time (a blurb for each).  Which makes his treatment of my novel all the more special.  Here is what he had to say:

E.L. lawyer scores with thrilling novel
Review

By Ray Walsh | For the Lansing State Journal

“Direct Actions” by East Lansing attorney Terry Olson is a thought-provoking legal thriller that could be ripped from tomorrow’s newspaper headlines.

The well-designed, self-published debut novel deals with civil rights, eco-terrorism and controversial Homeland Security measures.

Jeremy Jefferson is serving as a public defender in the fictitious town of Milton, Mich., after having grown tired of working for an expensive Detroit law firm.

He’s handed a legal hot potato when he’s assigned to defend Zeb Radamacher, a teenager who was caught at the scene of a vandalized and firebombed super-store development site.

While he acknowledges his part in the vandalism, Radamacher claims he’s innocent of the firebombing; soon others are implicated and unexpected violence erupts.

Jefferson runs into a variety of problems defending the teen, especially when tough terrorist charges are added that increase the crime’s penalties significantly.

New facts come to light, Jefferson himself is arrested and challenging courtroom efforts ensue. Further complications develop when Jefferson becomes emotionally involved with Allison Demming, a pretty newspaper reporter.

Sleazy and oddball characters abound, including an ineffective attorney, a radical preacher, judges with agendas and sneaky politicians with ulterior motives.

Olson skillfully covers considerable territory, although occasionally the reader may learn more than he needs to know about courtroom proceedings, a public defender’s daily workload and assorted behind-the-scenes dealings.

Ray Walsh, owner of East Lansing’s Curious Book Shop, has reviewed crime novels and noir thrillers regularly since 1987.

Someone read it yesterday and e-mailed me an attachment they had scanned (it is hard to find stuff on the LSJ site, though I’ve got the link now).  It was hard for me to get past the headline (since I’m familiar with the reviewers work — and respect it as true).  I had goosebumps for thirty minutes.  No lie.

Good reviews probably don’t translate to good sales for a book like mine.  But they can’t hurt.  And this has been a pretty breathless week for me.  Thanks for letting me share it with you.  And thanks for all the help along the way.

I suggest a valuable mental exercise for every contributor who sincerely believes that there is nothing wrong with prostitution, that there should be no quibbling about the perfectly reasonable exchange of sex for money, etc.  Here it is:  every time (every single time) you hear someone, including yourself, use prostitution or sexual accommodation as a metaphor for spinelessness, gutlessness, venality, dishonesty, vacuity, weakness etc. — stop and issue a verbal correction.

When someone refers to the corporate media as “presstitutes,” interrupt and tell them that there is nothing wrong with prostitution, it is an honest profession and quite separate from corruption or cowardice.  When someone talks about spineless Democrats despicably “rolling over for” the Bush regime or the US press “going on its knees” to Bush, remind them that there is nothing at all demeaning about submitting to male sexual demands, particularly if money changes hands.  Every time someone calls a politician “corporate whore”, tell them how legit a career prostitution is or should be, and how unfair it is to invoke it as a casual insult.  Every time someone says “lies like a whore” or “whores around” or “what a cocksucker” or “he’s Cheney’s bitch” or “that sucks” or “I wouldn’t just bend over for that” or “jeez we really took it in the shorts that time” or any of the plethora of other everyday expressions that reveal a reflexive equation of sex and domination, receptivity and inferiority… interrupt the conversation, and defend the whores.

All the above, and most of what follows was written by European Tribune contributor DeAnander. I was planning to write today about World AIDS Day, but was struck by some of the content provided in several threads started (by AgnesaParis) in recent days over at the European Tribune about the sex trade, prostitution and the accompanying violence:

Legalising prostitution : a lesser evil ?
Evils of the world : of sexual slavery
The human body: yet another consumable?

There is an amazing wealth of information, polite discussion and links in these threads, so I can only encourage you to read them. I’d like to quote a few extracts by DeAnander, who is quite knowledgeable about the topic (but there are several other notable contributors, notably myriad about the Australian experience of legalisation of prostitution):

the harm done to women in prostitution is not merely a byproduct of the illegality of the trade and the secrecy, repression and coercion typical of an illegal business.  Harm is also the commodity being sold.  In the legal brothels of Australia, a woman can lose income if she refuses painful anal intercourse with a client;  her only other option is to charge more for enduring the painful experience.  I suggest the reader — particularly the hetero male reader — might wish to think seriously about how much a well-endowed man would have to pay him to cooperate with such a demand — would it be more than $500 AUD?  How much would it be?  What would it be like to make a living catering to such demands, several times a day?  To lose significant money by insisting on only “safe” or ordinary sex?  To be offered big bonuses for risking HIV infection by not insisting on a condom?  How much money would one have to earn to make it worthwhile?  Would it be preferable to other “dirty” jobs like bricklaying, ditch-digging, or cleaning toilets?

And more fundamentally, is there any such thing as a “fair price” for hurting and demeaning another person?  Perhaps we can calculate one by asking, What price would you or I pay to have our daughter, or any other woman we cared about, spared from such an experience?  What would we pay in ransom to get our daughter safely out of such a situation?  I’m thinking five figures, six figures, heck, most parents would pay whatever was asked, if they had to go into debt for the rest of their lives.  Why are not prostituted women paid these kinds of sums, if that is the fair-market price for the various harms they are expected to endure?

The question of why so many men wish to hurt or demean women is a far larger one.  The scope of a discussion of patriarchy, misogyny, and their bearing on male sexuality as constructed in various cultures around the world, is so vast that I doubt a whole forum could hold it, let alone one thread or diary.  (Head over to Stan’s place and join the brawl in progress.) I would suggest that for the moment, rather than fleeing to idyllic fantasies of Bonobo-land, those concerned with social justice should accept the prevailing Hobbesian realities: that many men enjoy hurting women and find sex inadequate unless it includes bullying and hurting;  that these men are very likely to try to buy access to “disposable” women and children for anonymous use, so as to avoid the complications and loss of reputation involved in being a known batterer or abuser within a community;  and working from these distressing but well-attested realities, figure out how to curb this tendency and protect our society’s most vulnerable women and children from it.  Figuring out how these men got to be this way and how we could raise boys to be less violent and hateful towards girls and women, would be a fine project;  but that’s a multigenerational effort.  In the meantime there is actually-existing abuse and suffering to be addressed, and no easy answers.  

Certainly criminalising the prostituted women themselves is absurd and misogynist.  They are either free agents engaging voluntarily in sexual trade, or victims of coercion, and in neither case are they coercing or doing harm to others.  Perhaps what should be criminalised is “profiteering off the sexual labour of another person” (there have been laws like this in the past prohibiting pimping specifically).  And of course existing laws against kidnapping, rape, assault and GBH should be applied without prejudice to offences against prostituted women (fat chance of that, in a world where male police, judges, lawyers and politicians are often among the men abusing the prostitutes, but it’s a nice idea).

The paper on choice, law, and prostitution is S Anderson, “Prostitution and Sexual Autonomy:  Making Sense of the Prohibition of Prostitution”, from Ethics July 2002.  I don’t think it is available online, unless you have access to Lexis/Nexis or something similar.  Which is a pity as it is one of the best discussions to date of the debate between normalisers and abolitionists.

And again this:

It is a post-Enlightenment, rights-oriented outlook that tells us it is not appropriate for a businessman to tell his secretary to dress sexy for the office, or to do his holiday shopping for him;  we draw a basic distinction between the kinds of services that are appropriately exchanged for money, i.e. ‘what is in my job description,’ and those which are, or should be, a reflection of intersubjectivity and reciprocity.  We look down on people who use sexual favours to get ahead in academia or the workplace.  We don’t want to work for bosses who grope the staff, or make pay raises conditional on a quick shag in the storeroom.

If we take a classic laissez-faire neoliberal approach to prostitution and say that there are no services which it is inappropriate to exchange for money, and that therefore performing sex for money is no different from typing or canning fish for money — hey, it’s just supply and demand, rational actors completing a transaction like any other in a free market — then how do we at the same time maintain that the secretary should not be required to fellate the boss?  After all, if there is nothing shaming or demeaning about performing sexual acts on persons for whom one has no intimate affection, no basis of trust or love, then why should this not be in her job description right along with shorthand and typing?

But instinctively we know that using the lever of money-power to coerce sexual service is a qualitatively different type of transaction from paying for 8 hours of someone’s time to translate documents or wash cars.   Permitting extreme physical intimacy from an untrusted and unloved Other or stranger, on their terms, according to their demand, requires a renunciation of fundamental human boundaries, the acceptance of a profound violation of personal space and bodily/emotional integrity.  Having at the same time to maintain a pretence — an artificial persona — only adds to the alienation.  Anyone who has ever worked Reception for 8 hours a day can tell you how wearying and crazy-making it can be to smile brightly and make nice with often obnoxious strangers all day, even when you are having trouble at home or not feeling very well — to have to put on an act all day long;  imagine having to provide them with the most intimate sexual services as well.

We can judge the depth of our attachment to personal integrity by the shock, outrage, and/or fear that we feel when we read about (or heaven help us, experience) male/male prison rape and prostitution.  When men in prison must submit to sexual service in order to survive or to get along or to earn money, we consider this a tragedy and a horror, a dreadful indictment of an inhumane prison system, a damaging and traumatising experience — even when some degree of (constrained) choice is involved, we know that rape and the threat of rape are forever hovering to sway that choice.  And we know that vanishingly small numbers of men would make those choices if they were free, on the outside.

But we are supposed to believe that women and girls — who live in a society not so different from prison society for men, where an unprotected female without wealth is at high risk for rape, and where the protection of one man (however exploitative) may seem better than being “thrown to the wolves” — take no harm from the same experience.  To believe this, seems to me, is to believe that men are somehow more real human beings, with more dignity and sense of self and self-worth, than women;  which, if I may speak strongly for a moment, is the fundamental assumption of a bigot — whether racial religious, or sexual.  To assume that another person’s self-respect and dignity are inherently of less worth or importance than another’s is surely the base assumption of anti-democracy, the root of caste and feudal class and race slavery.

When men are treated as sexual merchandise by other men in prison, we are deeply shocked and understand that this experience could wound and scar an individual’s soul and pride for life.  We understand the same when men are coerced into playing out pornographic scenes in Abu Ghraib.  When the coercion used is money rather than guns (or money and guns and fists in many cases), and the coerced or constrained person is female, for some reason we collectively believe that she is miraculously resilient and tough and ultra-balanced enough to take no harm from relinquishing her physical boundaries and allowing the occupation and use of her body by an untrusted other.

Again, all the above is not written by me, but by DeAnander, and certainly deserves a wider distribution.

Please ponder her words – and there’s lots more in the 3 threads linked to above.

There’s big bucks involved in ‘speculation’ on controling weather. Many have called it just Tin Foil foolery. I beg to differ.

I find the HAARP project fascinating in many ways, on many levels. Apparently, so does the military, and a few big corporations.

For those who are also interested in the ‘changing weather patterns’ check this site out: Weather Wars.

I’m gonna keep harping on HAARP ‘weather’ you like it or not.

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Follow the lead below the fold »»

So, it’s all coming down to it. I gotta vacate the premises. Yeah, they are going to hand me a nice check because the value of my house has gone up quite a bit…but I still gotta vamoose. I will definitely be around off and on tomorrow. And I might manage to touch base wit y’all on Friday. But from Saturday until Tuesday I am going to be radio silencio. No interconnectivity whatsoever. Totally cut off except for frantic phone calls to Susan.

And then I gotta set up the Boo (sort of) bachelor pad and put everything in its place, and settle in, and get a feel for the new lifestyle. I gotta explain to the real BooMan where his bisquits are and where I keep his chow. He can’t operate without a firm understanding of these things. I suppose I couldn’t either.

I’ve been on this site nonstop for 8 months. I’ve never been cut off for more than 24 hours before. So, make sure Shirlstars and Diane101 are doing well, and don’t let Man Eegee make off with all the chorizo. I hope MilitaryTracy’s health improves and Brinnainne gets through all her hassles with the finances. Supersoling better make sure the Giants smack the Tuna on Sunday.

Susan can always get in touch with me. And if Fitzmas comes early, I’ll be logging in from Starbucks or the library. To jpol, StevenD, and Jerome, thanks for all the help and support. And to Susan? Well, she’s Susan. She knows.

see and check for yourself
here is the oddites and problem that needs resolved..
 or exposed IF CENSORSHIP
 (all due respect to the folks at ‘boo’ as this problem is either within or possibly outside control of B.Tribune?)

1)upon visiting http://www.juancole.com
 history professor at Michigan University
his blog “Informed Comment” was referenced by
Steve Clemons site http://www.thewashingtonnote.com
as providing good details about the al-jazeera bombing report

HE REFERENCES A TIMELINE FROM HTTP://WWW.BOOMANTRIBUNE.COM
@ http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/23/19120/600
CAN YOU PRINT THIS WITHOUT BROWSER CLOSING?
OR CAN YOU FIND IT IN A SCROLL ARCHIVE SEARCH
OF RECENT DIARIES??
 @ www.boomantribune.com a ‘Kos’ spin-off

a)this report is not archived in time sequence,
at the site!! as is the next ‘timeline’ on Fallulah
as referred to in my post on a CNN RePort in GDiscussion.
and more disturbing when you go print preview on this
blog report OR TRY TO PRINT IT…
**
**
*
*
!
 SBC/YAHOO SERVER FINDS ERROR AND SHUTS DOWN AUTOMATICALLY
it has happened 3 times,
…developing…..
….and i just thought about
dragging the text into an e-mail
 and to try to save it for HardFile !

here is Juan Coles’ blog entry with the link to Booman Tribune

I hope someone else can try it to see if we
have multiple cases and witnesses
to Tom-FooLery ?surrounding this report being flagged or targetted??
2nd instance where a GREAT STORY IS NOT in the archived time sequence
 and you can only find it by chance if someone else mentions it !(coming…)

JUAN COLE:Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Bush as Press Assassin?
Baathist in a Mirror

The Mirror broke the story on Tuesday that a secret British memo demonstrates that George W. Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera’s offices in Doha, Qatar, in spring of 2004. The subject came up with Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK, and Blair is said to have argued Bush out of it.
Despite attempts of British officials to muddy the waters by suggesting that Bush was joking, another official who had seen the memo insisted, “Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men.”
The US military bombed the Kabul offices of Aljazeera in mid-November, 2001.
The US military hit the Aljazeerah offices in Baghdad on the 9th of April, 2003, a year Bush’s conversation with Blair.* That attack killed journalist Tarek Ayoub, who had a 3 year old daughter. He had said earlier, “We’ve told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying `TV.”’ Given what we now know about Bush’s intentions, that may have been a mistake.

Fatima Ayyoub, the 14-month-old daughter of the Al Jazeera correspondent, Tareq Ayyoub, is seen in front of a photograph of her father who died in a U.S. missile attack in Baghdad. — Reuters

When the US and the UN shoe-horned old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi into power as transitional prime minister, he promptly banned Aljazeera in Iraq. The channel still did fair reporting on Iraq, finding ways of buying video film and doing enlightening telephone interviews.
There have long been rumors that the Bush administration has pressured the government of Qatar to close the channel down.
One of the misdeeds attributed to Syria or pro-Syrian forces is the attempt to assassinate the Lebanese journalist and fixture on LBC, the Lebanese satellite channel, May Shidyaq (Chidiac). If the British report is true, Bush really is just a Baathist in the mirror.
Aljazeera is a widely misunderstood Arabic television channel that is mainly characterized by a quaint 1950s-style pan-Arab nationalism.

 It is not a fundamentalist religious channel, though it does host one old-time Muslim Brother, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Its main peculiarity in local terms is that it will air all sides of a political issue and allow frank criticism of Middle Eastern politicians as well as of Western ones. It is the only place in the Arab media where one routinely hears Israeli spokesmen (speaking very good Arabic, typically) addressing their concerns and point of view to Arab audiences.
Most of Aljazeera’s programming is presented by natty men in business suits or good-looking, chic Arab women in fashionable Western clothes. (I see the anchors every day and am stricken at the idea of them being blown to smithereens by an American “accidental” bombing!)

 A lot of the programming is Discovery Channel-style documentaries.
The news is often criticial of the United States, though the journalists like controversy and are perfectly capable of asking fundamentalists and nationalists from the region very hard questions. The channel is one of the few places where you can sometimes see frank debate among Sunni Arab, Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis (the Lord knows we don’t see it on US news!) Some Aljazeera journalists may have been sympathetic to radical Muslim groups, but mainly on nationalist and anti-imperialist grounds. These people don’t look like adherents of political Islam for the most part.

Ironically, after one of the early-morning Aljazeera news broadcasts EST on Wednesday that discussed the Bush plot against the channel, the next show was about recently released American movies, including “Jarhead” (about a Marine during the Gulf War), which showcased the films enthusiastically and may as well have been an infomercial. It was jarring, the effusiveness about American soft power after the admission of the dark side of US military power.

Plotting to assassinate civilian journalists in a friendly country is certainly against the law, and if Bush is ever impeached, this charge will certainly figure in the trial. Who knows, maybe the murder of Tarek Ayoub will be added to the charges. His daughter must be 5, now.
There is a detailed and very valuable timeline of Bush administration- Aljazeera relations at Booman Tribune.
—
oops, I had misread the date as 2004 in an earlier version
posted by Juan @ 11/23/2005 06:35:00 AM 37 comments
ALERT! comment…slueths?
Let’s also not forget this incident:

BOOMAN STORY THAT COULD BE flagged for real-time censorship!
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/23/19120/600
Bush V Al-Jazeera: Fact or Fancy?
by jpol
Sat Nov 26th, 2005 at 07:58:11 PM EST
***********
2)Fallulah- Its’ Not Just The White Phosphorus…
important *keeper diary from BooMan Tribune.

Fallujah: The Big Picture w/Update

by Steven D
Mon Nov 28th, 2005 at 02:06:23 PM EST

 http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/28/132143/83

INTRO:
With all the ongoing discussion and debate over the use of White Phosphorus munitions by our troops in their attacks on Fallujah, and the controversy over whether that use as described by US military sources was legal under American and international law, I believe we have lost our focus on what is the far more significant and important question: namely what really happened to the citizens of Fallujah when American forces besieged the city in April, and then followed that up with a more extensive assaults in September and November, 2004.
The questions regarding the deployment of white phosphorus munitions in the attacks on Fallujah are certainly interesting in their own right (Were they used? How? Against who? Was it legal?), and they have ignited anew the moral and ethical issues regarding the manner in which we are waging war in Iraq.
Ultimately, however, much as its deployment operates on the battlefield, the debate about white phosphorus only serves to obscure the reality of the Fallujah saga. Because in the big picture, it isn’t whether our military’s use of certain weapons was illegal or immoral, but whether the attack on the city itself was illegal and immoral.
CONCLUSION:
My training was as a lawyer, an advocate. And as an advocate I take a position and support it with the best evidence I can muster. And the evidence that I’ve gathered makes it clear to me that despite what the Generals and Bush loyalists have told us, we do indeed target Iraqi civilians, and we do so indiscriminately. We do so with white phosphorus to choke and burn and terrorize them, and with thermobaric bombs* to destroy their homes, crushing all who may be inside under the rubble.
But we also target them with sniper rifles and .50 caliber machine guns, with mortars and tank tracks and every other weapon we have available in our arsenals. We even use hunger, and thirst, and the deprivation of medical care as weapons. And all against those whose only crime was to live in a nation governed by Saddam Hussein at the time George W. Bush was President of the United States.
And that is the true significance of the assault on Fallujah and, indeed, of the Iraq War as a whole. It’s all bad, from white phosphorus to starvation tactics to the destruction of an entire city reminiscent of the way Nazi soldiers operated when they met resistance in WWII.
Simply put: The biggest threat out there is not them, it’s us.
 http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/11/28/132143/83

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Iraq: two journalists were killed when a US tank shelled Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel on April 8 2003
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US swells Iraq media death toll
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Patrick Barrett
Friday April 23, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1200911,00.html

Iraq: two journalists were killed when a US tank shelled Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel on April 8 2003

The US military has been blamed for the deaths of almost a third of all the journalists and media employees killed in Iraq since the start of the war last year.
The total number of media workers killed in Iraq this week rose to 28 including 24 journalists, with the shooting by American soldiers of two employees of US-funded TV station al-Iraqiya.
US forces have been confirmed as responsible for seven deaths, including employees from the BBC, Reuters, Arab TV stations al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera and Spanish station Telecinco. In addition, the US military has been implicated in the shooting of two further media employees, the ITN correspondent Terry Lloyd and an Iraqi cameraman employed by the US ABC network, who was shot in Falluja last month.
According to figures compiled by Associated Press and press watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists, half of all the journalists and media workers killed during the hostilities in Iraq have died since the beginning of this year.
A total of 19 media employees have been killed since George Bush formally declared the end of the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime at the beginning of May last year.
Controversy over the extent to which the US military has been responsible for the deaths of media employees operating in Iraq comes as reports surface of mistreatment meted out to employees of al-Jazeera by the US military.

In one case, al-Jazeera cameraman Salah Hassan has accused the US of detaining him for a month, during which he claims he was beaten, verbally abused and kept in solitary confinement.
Hassan, who was arrested in November last year following an attack on an American convoy, claims he was addressed only as “al-Jazeera” or “bitch” by US soldiers and at one stage was forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for 11 hours and repeatedly kicked when he collapsed.
He was eventually released on a street outside Baghdad still dressed in the vomit-stained jump suit US guards had forced him to wear during his incarceration.

Hassan’s case and the arrest of 20 other al-Jazeera journalists has served to aggravate the already strained relations between the US military and the Arab news channel.
Last week the Doha-based station accused the US military of “threatening” the media in Iraq and pressuring journalists into presenting a US-biased view of events in the country, after a spokesman for the US military accused the station of being “anti-coalition”.
US commanders have been furious with al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya for repeatedly broadcasting footage of civilian victims of the violence in Falluja, where Iraqi rebels are fighting US Marines. The US had claimed that the majority of those killed and wounded had been armed insurgents, but al-Jazeera ran reports that US snipers had fired deliberately on women and children in the town.

Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said viewers should switch off al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya and watch a “legitimate, authoritative, honest news station”.
“The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources,” he said.

Other allegations circulating in Iraq suggest that US soldiers have deliberately shot at Arab journalists and demanded the removal of an al-Jazeera reporting team from Falluja as a condition for a recent cease-fire in the town.
A spokesman for the coalition said he was unaware of Hassan’s case but that the coalition and the US military’s relationship with al-Jazeera was the same as with any other media organisation.
“It’s entirely open. There is no question that they go and target journalists or cameramen or whatever,” he said.
All of the 14 journalists and media employees to die in Iraq this year have been Iraqi or Arabs working for Middle Eastern or western media companies.
The latest journalist to die, Asaad Kadhim, and his driver Hussein Saleh worked for al-Iraqiya, the TV station set up by the coalition to help promote press freedom in the country.
Mr Kadhim and Mr Saleh were shot on Monday by American soldiers as they drove away from an interview with Iraqi police. Jassem Kamel, an al-Iraqiya cameraman who was wounded in the shooting, claimed a US soldier punched him in the face before he was given first aid.

The incident follows the shooting of two journalists from al-Arabiya by US soldiers at a checkpoint in Baghdad on March 18.
A Ukrainian cameraman working for Reuters and a cameraman for the Telecinco TV station, Spaniard Jose Couso, were killed in April last year when a US tank fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
A Kurdish translator working for the BBC was also killed in April last year when a US aircraft bombed a convoy of US special forces and Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1200911,00.html

Journalists in danger
22.04.2004: ITN shuns Iraq medal
15.04.2004: Japanese journalists captured in Iraq
14.04.2004: Iraqi kidnappers release French journalist
14.04.2004: US military ‘pressuring’ journalists
14.04.2004: French demand release of missing journalist
14.04.2004: Kidnaps blow to rebuilding efforts
08.04.2004: Reuters issues Iraq safety plea
23.03.2004: Stop ‘needless’ Iraq deaths, says Reuters boss
13.01.2004: US military ‘brutalised’ journalists
07.01.2004: 42 journalists killed in 2003
ITN’s Terry Lloyd and crew
22.03.2004: ITV journalists ‘killed by US troops’
22.03.2004: Wife of missing cameraman fights on
10.09.2003: Mirror defends Lloyd story
10.09.2003: ITN rejects new Lloyd claims
10.09.2003: Lloyd killed by US helicopter fire, claims Iraqi
27.05.2003: MoD opens ITN Iraq inquiry
16.04.2003: Wife of missing ITN man in fresh appeal
15.04.2003: Lloyd ‘caught between crossfire’
03.04.2003: Powell responds to wife of missing cameraman
03.04.2003: US and UK ‘know what happened’ to Lloyd and his crew
25.03.2003: Wife in plea for missing ITN cameraman
24.03.2003: BBC takes care after journalist’s death
24.03.2003: Colleagues mourn ITN reporter’s death
24.03.2003: ITV stands down crews after Terry Lloyd is killed
24.03.2003: Terry Lloyd obituary by David Mannion
24.03.2003: Terry Lloyd obituary by David Nicholson
BBC’s John Simpson survives attack
11.11.2003: Libby Brooks talks to John Simpson
09.04.2003: Simpson: journalists ‘taking a hammering’
07.04.2003: Simpson recovering from ‘friendly fire’ attack
07.04.2003: Simpson: ‘I saw the bomb come down’
Journalists under attack
12.12.2003: Iraq strike injures two journalists
13.06.2003: Thompson was ‘thorn in MoD’s side’
30.05.2003: BBC brings in ‘safety tsar’
02.05.2003: Watchdog condemns Iraq deaths
25.04.2003: Powell defends attack on Baghdad hotel
16.04.2003: First female journalist dies in Iraq
15.04.2003: Toll rises as Argentine reporter dies
14.04.2003: CNN defiant after Tikrit firefight
11.04.2003: ‘I didn’t want to die,’ says Times man
10.04.2003: Editors blast Rumsfeld over ‘reckless’ US strike
10.04.2003: Al-Jazeera crew attacked in Detroit
09.04.2003: Straw to seek explanation for journalist deaths
09.04.2003: ‘We were almost lynched’, say journalists
09.04.2003: Fury at US as attacks kill three journalists
09.04.2003: Ukraine mourns dead journalist
08.04.2003: US claims killings were ‘self defence’
08.04.2003: Military accused of targeting non-embedded journalists
08.04.2003: Army admits firing on hotel
08.04.2003: US: press deaths ‘unfortunate’
08.04.2003: Second journalist dies after hotel strike
08.04.2003: Reuters man killed in US attack
08.04.2003: Journalists injured as Baghdad hotel attacked
08.04.2003: Al-Jazeera claims military ‘cover up’
08.04.2003: Al-Jazeera cameraman killed in US raid
07.04.2003: Spanish and German reporters killed
04.04.2003: US journalist killed in Iraq
Kaveh Ibrahim Golestan and Stuart Hughes
20.05.2003: Do not rely on embedded journalists, urges BBC man
08.04.2003: BBC producer has foot amputated
03.04.2003: BBC film maker killed by landmine
04.04.2003: Obituary: Kaveh Golestan
War toll
13.09.2004: Journalists killed, missing and held in Iraq
09.04.2003: Media casualties of other conflicts
09.04.2003: Iraq – the most dangerous war for journalists
Farzad Bazoft
18.05.2003: Writer hanged by Iraq ‘no spy’
18.05.2003: Donald Trelford: Simply a journalist after a scoop
Interview with wife of missing cameraman
01.05.2003: ‘Whenever I dream about him, he is still alive’
NBC’s David Bloom
07.04.2003: Blood clot kills NBC’s star correspondent
08.04.2003: Obituary: David Bloom
Channel 4 News’ Gaby Rado
13.06.2003: Rado among winners at media awards
27.05.2003: Amnesty creates award in honour of Rado
31.03.2003: Viewers and colleagues pay tribute to Rado
31.03.2003: Gaby Rado obituary by Jon Snow
Comment and analysis
15.06.2003: Philip Knightley: Turning the tanks on the reporters
13.04.2003: Stuart Purvis: Showing courage in line of fire
10.04.2003: Steve Bell: Drawing fire
24.03.2003: Matt Wells: Journalists in the line of fire
08.04.2002: Nik Gowing: ‘Don’t get in our way’
MediaGuardian.co.uk special report
Iraq – the media war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1200911,00.html

crossposted @ http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=8165

Say What You Will
Say What You Must
..but the…CAUSE of Causes
Is J U S T .