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Cheerleading for War
Cheerleading for War |
by Stephen Lendman March 24th, 2011 When America goes to war, managed news goes with it spreading rumors, half-truths, misinformation, and willful deception about targeted nations, regimes and leaders, whether despots or democrats. Whoever first said it, the first casualty of war is truth, and then some as John Pilger once observed saying:
Journalism is the first casualty.
Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship and willful misreporting that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies.
Censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries.
Managed news jeopardizes free and open societies by substituting fiction for facts, carefully filtered reports for truth, and cheerleading propaganda for real journalism.
As a result, wars of aggression are called liberating ones.
Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good, and patriotism means going along with lawless governments, reigning death and destruction on defenseless nations for imperial, not noble, reasons.
Media support backs them, notably in America where dominant electronic and print reporting marches in lockstep with government policy, right or wrong.
As a result, dominant information sources (the major media) are in crisis as leading media scholar/critic/activist Robert McChesney once observed, saying:
Going to war is arguably the single most important decision any society can make.
The track record of the US news media in the twentieth century is that they often went along with fraudulent efforts to get the nation into one war or another" from WW I to today.
Each time with no exceptions:
Administration(s) in power believed that (truth wouldn't enlist) support (for) war.
So they lied.
The Pentagon Papers (exposed it about Southeast Asia) in shocking detail.
Post-9/11 through Obama's war on Libya: "The very debate over whether to go to war" is absent.
Obama decides.
The media salute, and public opinion is manipulated to say amen.
Never discussed are justifiable reasons, choosing diplomacy over militarism, America acting as judge, jury and executioner, and cui bono fruits of war.
Without them, they'd be none.
Said another way, absent the power and profit benefits, who'd wage them, especially capitalist America, generously enriching war profiteers that fund politicians for bottom line friendly policies.
As a result, government is unaccountable to the electorate.
Democracy is the best money can buy, and wars are always imperial, not liberating ones, especially ones America wages.
Today, round the clock media coverage supports them. Long before television, media critic AJ Liebling said, "People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."
Today it's mostly TV, the dominant managed news source, supporting power, not truth, functioning as a propaganda system for elitist interests, especially on matters of war and peace.
Cheerleading 101
A March 21 New York Times editorial headlined, "At War in Libya" highlights it, saying:
Col Muammar el-Qaddafi has long been a thug and a murderer who has never paid for his many crimes, including the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
Thug and murderer, yes.
Downing Pan Am Flight 103 proved false.
He had nothing to do with it, clear evidence The Times suppresses to willfully lie to readers.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was bogusly convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, then released last August because of terminal cancer and sent home to Libya.
In fact, Scottish judges who convicted him knew he was innocent, saying so in their final opinion.
In addition, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission's investigation uncovered multiple reasons for believing his conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice, including no credible evidence of his involvement.
No witnesses, video, documentation, fingerprints or other corroboration linked him to the bomb inside a suitcase downing the plane.
Even the court admitted to the case:
"The absence of any explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase might have been placed on board KM180 (Air Malta to Frankfort) is a major difficulty."
Further, misreporting claimed Gaddafi admitted fault.
In fact, he said Libya would take responsibility for the crime, solely to have international sanctions against him lifted.
The dominant media know it, including The Times, but never reported it.
Instead, they distort, exaggerate, lie, and, and suppress uncomfortable truths to support state and corporate interests, even at the cost of innocent lives.
As a result, The Times editorial praised Obama's decision to bomb, never questioning why, whether alternatives should have been considered, or rule of law considerations.
Instead, it admitted:
no perfect formula for military intervention
the importance of "us(ing) it sparingly
abstaining in Bahrain, Yemen, other regional uprisings, and Occupied Palestine is justified.
In contrast it called Libya "a specific case" saying Gaddafi:
is erratic, widely reviled, armed with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism
Ignoring other worse regional despots than him, notably Israeli leaders armed with nuclear weapons, other sophisticated ones, no shyness about using them, regularly attacking Palestinians, besieging Gazans, and waging lawless wars on Lebanon and Gaza with impunity.
In fact, Times and other major media reporters, op-ed, and editorial writers wholeheartedly support them, a chilling example of hypocrisy and biased journalism.
On March 23 Washington Post editorial headlined, "Confused in Libya," saying:
The only solution to Libya's crisis.... is the removal of Mr. Gaddafi from power. (Obama) still seems to lack a coherent strategy for accomplishing that aim.
While ignoring other worse regional ones, he needs to:
(E)xercise US leadership.... many (unnamed) Arabs have been puzzled and even outraged by (his) manifest reluctance to support a revolution (in fact, a US/UK-instigated insurrection), aimed at overthrowing one of the region's most vile dictatorships.
On March 20, a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined, "GOP on Libya: What's Obama's Goal?" saying:
Republican lawmakers are glad (Obama) is intervening in Libya, but they're not happy with how (he's) carry(ing) out (his) decision to do so."
The same day, House Speaker John Boehner said Obama:
Has a moral obligation to stand with those who seek freedom from oppression and self-government for their people.
Something that is in fact absent throughout the region, yet unmentioned in media commentaries or official statements.
Fox News contributor Bill Kristol wants ground troops in Libya as well as bombing.
Ahead of hostilities, convicted Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams called Obama's response "feeble....a non-response," promoting war based on false information he cited.
Bill O'Reilly headlined a commentary, "Getting Gaddafi," wanting him ousted for the wrong reasons.
Other figures on the left and right agree, supporting a lawless agenda to do it.
Peter Dale Scott expressed other concerns, comparing Libya to Iraq, saying:
Both countries had a monstrous dictator.
Both were subjected to no-fly zones.
(They) don't deter the dictator.
In due course, this evolves into a massive intervention in which the government is overthrown and the opposition goes into an internal civil war while simultaneously attacking the invaders.
Diana Johnstone asked "Is This Kosovo All Over Again?" saying:
Despite enormous differences, disturbing similarities include:
As a result, expect protracted hostilities ahead, perhaps killing thousands, injuring and disabling many more, and causing widespread destruction and contamination from toxic munitions.
Once ended, Gaddafi may be gone, either dead or tried like Saddam then killed, and Libyans left no better off than Iraqis and Afghans, suffering horrifically under imperial occupation, a fate no one deserves.
thepeoplesvoice.org — click here
Right or wrong, vilifying a leader
The 'we must do something' chorus
Evoking 'crimes against humanity (and) genocide'
'Leftist (narrow vision) idiocy,' mindlessly cheerleading for war;
'Refugees,' using over-the-top unexplained exaggeration
Resurrecting bin Laden, despite compelling evidence he's dead
Spurning negotiations, mediation, and diplomacy to pursue war, Washington's favorite pastime.
©2011 by thepeoplesvoice.org |
Use of nuclear weapons would mean the end of humanity!
Meanwhile, coinciding with the release of Fidel's speech, there has been extensive coverage of the EU Parliament's 'human rights' prize granted to Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas.
Almost every single major Western news media has published the same Associated Press report out of Havana.
Visibly, nuclear war is not front-page news.
The overriding threat of war and destruction is overshadowed by a barrage of media disinformation.
The military agenda is presented as a humanitarian endeavor.
War criminals are rewarded for their contributions to World peace.
The corporate media is complicit in its biased coverage, particularly with regard to the loss of life resulting from the US-NATO led war in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The lie prevails.
In an utterly twisted logic, war is presented as a means to preserving World Peace. |
Media Blackout on Nuclear War
click here |
In a Nuclear War the Collateral Damage would be the Life of All Humanity
click here |
Throwing a non-Illuminati newspaper to Israel/American territory in occupied Palestine
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On the Road with Ahmadinejad in Lebanon
click here |
| US ISRAEL MASS WAR CRIMES Israel Caused Holocaust Palestine Lebanon US Israel massacres — desire to kill one and half million people They keep sucking off the teat of America and the banking systems of Europe |
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Atrocities Lebanon and Palestine
In their sickness they do this
Missiles to rain down upon Palestine women children and men |
June 21, 2008
The Russert Send-Off
George and Laura Bush at the public wake
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
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I n the old days, when a journalist met his final deadline, friends would gather round the grave, toss in a few memories, then make off to the bar for liquid comfort and disrespectful stories about the dear departed.
Contrast this with the send-off for Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief and 17-year maestro of “Meet the Press”, who dropped dead of a heart attack last week.
He got funeral ceremonies a pope and most U.S. presidents would envy: a private funeral with this year’s two presidential nominees sitting side by side on Russert family orders, with the Congressional leadership in the neighboring pews.
George and Laura Bush at the public wake.
Thousands at the memorial in the Kennedy Center.
With Washington and New York’s media and political elites massed in respectful homage.
Was Russert so extraordinary a fellow, to elicit so tumultuous a farewell?
Surely not.
He could be a sharp interviewer, but I can’t remember any occasions when I said to myself, “ Russert has given me a whole new insight into the way the world works.”
There are many journalists and broadcasters I would put miles ahead of him.
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Russert was a protege of Moynihan and a very close personal friend — many have said they were like father and son.
Carl Ginsberg, who’s done excellent work on Moynihan down the years, sent me the following note on this relationship.
No matter what, the purveyors of capital never seem to be characterized as being irresponsible
“A few years ago, in the course of promoting his book, Russert said that he — Russert — always made a point of getting home for dinner when in town to be with his son, Luke.
The point was that even a busy and powerful dad can — and should — be attentive to his child.
This was part of the Moynihan-tainted dogma about family Russert recycled for years: if poor blacks just made more of an effort with their families they could set their lives straight, help the kids and join respectable society.
Moynihan once told me regarding black conditions, ‘it's beyond economics... we can't help them.’
It’s interesting that no matter how many sub-prime mortgages were sold through financial sleight of hand, packaged and resold (at a reported profit of 40per cent every two months at its height) and how many somersaults Moody's did to give those mortgages — dubbed "collateralized debt obligations" — AAA rating (the rating agency 20 per cent owned by Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett, who today is sitting on $35 billion in cash)...
And no matter the simple fact that the reason that poor people stretched for those mortgages was in desperation to get out of the clutches of miserable landlords...
No matter what, the purveyors of capital never seem to be characterized as being "irresponsibility."
Nor are their families ever scrutinized for their behavior.
But Moynihan — and Russert — couldn't stop pointing the finger at irresponsible blacks.”
Russert was an insider, with a useful line in presenting himself somewhat to be an ordinary Joe from Buffalo (his hometown, where the flags have been flying at half mast).
He didn’t have enemies, (which for a journalist is not an impressive credential).
So this nice, popular insider was a fine advertisement for two professions — journalism and politics — whose collective ranking in public esteem is down there with salesfolk for subprime mortgages.
No wonder they made haste to offer Russert to the people as the hero-journalist.
In hailing Russert, they got to hail and to ennoble themselves.
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But Russert was part of the Amen Chorus for a war that sent countless men, women and children to their deaths
I was in Virginia the weekend after he died and the lead editorial in a local paper had this to say:
"Tim Russert was the kind of newsman to which every journalist aspires; which every journalist wishes to emulate."
His conduct on Meet the Press was:
"Fair and courageous, balanced and tenacious.
Liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Russert held everyone accountable to the people of America.
He demonstrated the highest qualities of professional journalism as well as the highest qualities of humanity....
A deeply religious man, a dedicated family man, a true American patriot."
Now Russert had the power, the clout and the venue to ask tough questions in the run-up to the war in Iraq which began in March, 2003.
There were plenty of serious people with informed views about whether or not Saddam Hussein really had nuclear missile to level London and bio-weapons to kill millions.
But Russert was part of the Amen Chorus for a war that sent countless men, women and children to their deaths.
When it mattered, he entertained no dangerous differences with the White House line.
Was this a performance worthy of “a true American patriot”?
Did this “true American patriot” commanding the attention of millions every week not open his mouth to lament the fact that the U.S. government has been trashing the Constitution and tossing the Bill of Rights in the toilet?
Negative on that one too.
We’ve had seven years of craven, culpable journalism - across the mainstream board.
No one honors the reporters at Knight Ridder newspapers, who were among the few ones in the mainstream press, pre-war, to hammer away at the WMD lies.
They never led off Russert's or anyone else's show.
Russert was managing editor and host of Meet the Press, host of The Tim Russert Show on MSNBC, senior vp of NBC News, NBC Washington Bureau Chief, and regular political analyst on the Today Show, The Nightly News.
So he was as responsible as anyone for the press collusion with the Administration.
But now that the administration is looking bad, he's not a collaborator but a tenacious knight, jousting with them, 'truth-telling', getting 'the bad guys' for 'we, the people' .... |
Published on Thursday, April 26, 2007 by Working For Change
When Journalism Became Transcription and Reporting Disappeared
by David Sirota
Bill Moyers’ PBS special last night on the media’s complicity in pushing America to war was so powerfully upsetting that I am forced to resort to using mid-1990s NBA metaphors to describe it, if only because describing it without a metaphoric buffer is just too depressing.
This production was the documentary equivalent of Tom Chambers famously jumping over a screaming Mark Jackson and hammering down one of the greatest, most in-your-face slam dunks in history.
To call the media’s complicity in the Iraq War a conspiracy is an insult to conspiracies, because it wasn’t hidden - as Moyers shows, it was all out there for everyone to see.
The problem was, Beltway reporters didn’t want to see it.
No one wanted to get into an argument with the president
As New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller famously admitted, in the lead up to war most self-respecting Washington journalists who wanted to stay on the White House Christmas card list refused to ask tough questions because “no one wanted to get into an argument with the president.”
What’s really disturbing, however, is not even what this documentary says about the past - but what it says about the state of journalism today.
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In interview after interview after interview, we hear top journalists and opinionmakers declare that they believe journalism is no longer about basic, hard-scrabble reporting or getting scoops.
As the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus says, most reporters today actually try to avoid getting scroops because they “worry about sort of getting out ahead of something” and - gasp! - making their friends inside Official Washington mad at them.
So rather than, say, do the real work of reporting news, journalism has become a profession that is almost entirely about PR, transcription and packaging Establishment spin for news copy.
This is why, for example, many of the highest-profile political “journalists” like Joe Klein and David Broder never bother to actually report anything anymore - but instead spend most of their time pontificating on horse race polls and campaign gossip, expecting us to believe that’s real “news.”
I’m a blue-collar guy from Buffalo - Russert multi-million-dollar journalist
This kind of attitude, as Moyers shows, goes straight to the top.
Take, for instance, NBC’s Tim Russert - the Washington Bureau Chief of NBC NEWS.
I stress the word “news” because, remember, “news” is supposed to be reported in the trenches, not transcribed in a television studio.
Russert loves to brag about coming from Buffalo (often ending his shows with some irritating quip about the Buffalo Bills) because he believes it gives him some sort of working-class cred and more importantly distracts viewer attention from the fact that he is a longtime Washington insider and multi-million-dollar journalist.
And at one point, he brags to Moyers that “I’m a blue-collar guy from Buffalo - I know who my sources are [and] I work ‘em very hard.”
But then when Moyers asks him why he gave Vice President Cheney such a free pass to come on Meet the Press and spew blatant lies about Iraq’s WMD - lies that news organizations like Knight Ridder were exposing but people like Russert were ignoring - we get this gem from Russert:
“There were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.” |
Would have been available to any reporter who called
Moyers quickly noted that at least some reporters “didn’t wait for the phone to ring,” and that CBS’s Bob Simon said that sources debunking the WMD case “would have been available to any reporter who called.”
And that makes Russert’s entire sob story fall apart like a house of cards.
Russert wants us to believe that he’s just “a blue-collar guy from Buffalo” who works sources very hard.
Yet, apparently, “working sources very hard” means not even picking up the phone to make a call, but instead sitting in a comfortable Washington office waiting for people to call him, and in the meantime giving Cheney as much airtime as he wanted to spew lies.
What made you present yourself as a Middle East expert
Then there is the interchange with The New Republic’s Peter Beinart, who since cheerleading for the war and berating war critics, has been rewarded with a Time Magazine column and a post as a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Moyers asks Beinart “what made you present yourself as a Middle East expert” in the lead up to war?
Beinart admits that despite his preening around as an expert, he’d never actually been to Iraq, but nonetheless insists that he is “a political journalist.”
So Moyers naturally asks that as a “political journalist” what kind of reporting did he do to make sure his prewar cheerleading was substantively sound.
Here’s Beinart’s answer:
“Well, I was doing mostly, for a large part it was reading, reading the statements and the things that people said.
I was not a beat reporter.
I was editing a magazine and writing a column.
So I was not doing a lot of primary reporting. But what I was doing was a lot of reading of other people’s reporting and reading of what officials were saying.”
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Not picking up the phone or doing primary research is actually being rewarded
So here we have one of the Iraq War’s leading cheerleaders actually telling us that his entire method of backing up his case was all about amplifying official Washington through brazen transcription.
He actually sits there and tells Moyers that as a self-described “political journalist” his primary method of reporting on the issues he presented himself as an expert on was by not reporting at all.
This is what journalism has become today - and the worst part of it is that people who follow this Russert-Beinart method of sitting in comfortable Washington offices not picking up the phone or doing primary research is actually being rewarded as we speak.
Moyers, channeling a fantastic piece by Jebediah Reed in Radar Magazine, notes that most of the people who regurgitated the Washington Establishment’s debunked case for war have actually been rewarded with even more prominent positions in the media.
And while these desperate-for-attention media icons like Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman are happy to throw themselves in front of cameras for almost any opportunity to promote themselves, they categorically refused to talk to Moyers for his PBS special.
I went to journalism school because I thought journalism was about sifting through the B.S. in order to challenge power and hold the Establishment accountable.
Bill Moyers and the folks I’ve worked with at McClatchy Newspapers who Moyers highlights show that that long tradition still exists.
But the fact that they are such rare exceptions to the rule also show that the incentive system in journalism today is to reward not the people who challenge power, but the people who worship it.
And though Tim Russert and Peter Beinart and Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman can kick back in Washington with their six figure salaries and tell themselves that they are really Important People, what we have seen is that they are part of a new journalistic culture that is threatening to destroy what once was a truly noble profession and undermine our democracy. |
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NATO WAR CRIMES |
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Four generations of a family killed by new US attack
Nine people including women and young children have been killed in a bombing attack by US forces in Kapisa province.
The news comes shortly after US forces are accused of killing 10 village people on Sunday in Nangarhar province.
Journalists have stated that US troops confiscated their photos and video footage of the aftermath of the violence.
Kapisa province deputy governor Daud Hashimi said the nine dead civilians included five women and three children.
He said the raid was carried out by Nato forces.
Nato have denied any involvement.
A US military statement said US-led NATO forces had 'dropped two 2,000-pound (900-kilogram) bombs' during an air attack on village people in Kapisa.
Village people say that the NATO US coalition forces bombed the mud-brick home, killing nine members of the same extended family.
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President Hamid Karzai condemned US NATO killing on Sunday in which US forces fired indiscriminately at civilians in the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Eight Afghan village people were killed by US forces, 35 village people were injured.
Reporters say that as the Americans left the scene along a busy highway, US forces fired on the village vehicles.
Thousands of local people took to the streets on Sunday protesting what had happened.
The puppet Afghan authorities in Kabul have stated that they have launched an 'investigation' into the circumstances of the US attack.
The Associated Press news agency has complained to the US military over journalists saying US soldiers deleted footage of the aftermath of the Nangarhar violence.
Freelance journalists working for the Associated Press in the eastern province of Nangarhar stated that troops erased photos and video they had taken.
This video captured the attack including showing a vehicle in which three people were shot dead.
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Published on Saturday, April 7, 2007 by the lndependent/UK
The True Story of Free Speech in America
by Robert Fisk
Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers.
No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father.
At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls — monitored, of course — and he was growing steadily weaker.
Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.
Tried, however vainly, to communicate real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs
The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government.
But according to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons — al-Arian’s family was driven from Palestine in 1948 — and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring “to murder and maim” outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in “Palestine”.
He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.
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Al-Arian’s $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a dream.
The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.
In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal.
Because the FBI wanted to make further charges, al-Arian’s lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any further prosecution.
Arriving for his sentence, however, al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed by deportation - found Moody talking about “blood” on the defendant’s hands and ensured he would have to spend another 11 months in jail.
Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank.
Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonored and refused to testify.
He was held in contempt.
And continues to languish in prison.
A man with no face stares at me … pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move
Not so, of course, most of America’s torturers in Iraq.
One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a “contract interrogator”, who has bared his soul in the Washington Post — all praise, here, by the way to the Post — about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation “facility” of the 82nd Airborne Division.
Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning “by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes”.
Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep:
“A man with no face stares at me … pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move.
He begins to cry.
It s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me.
He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.” |
British army abuse in Basra
Thank God, Fair didn’t write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about The Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra.
They quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony Marchant’s play might affect the now happy outcome of the far less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 “Servicepersons” — by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis.
As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra — I suppose we must always refer to his demise as “death” now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder — I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys are during interrogation.
It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture.
The Iraqis know all about it — and who knew all about Mousa’s fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.
All about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us
Because it’s really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us.
It’s to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands.
And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country’s schools.
Now the principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq.
Entitled Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and others — including a 19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq — to create their own play.
To no avail.
The drama might hurt those “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak”, proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High’s principal.
And — my favorite line — Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal time to ensure the play would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students”.
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Make Iraq perfectly explicable
And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty’s point.
Students who have produced Arthur Miller’s The Crucible were told by Mr Canty — whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded — that it wasn’t their place to tell audiences what soldiers were thinking.
The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with offers to perform at other venues.
Personally, I think Mr Canty may have a point.
He would do much better to encourage his students to perform Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a drama of massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honor killing.
It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut.
A “legitimate instructional experience” if ever there was one.
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
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IMMINENT THREAT TO IRAQI LAWYER BADEE IZZAT AREF
7 April 2007 |
We have received information that the liberty and life of Badee Izzat Aref, prominent Iraqi lawyer to Tariq Aziz and several members of the government of President Saddam Hussein, is in danger.
Aref has been under US house arrest for 17 days and the Maliki government is demanding he be handed over by US authorities to face charges of defaming the Iraqi judicial system following comments he allegedly made on the unfair trials and summary executions of President Saddam Hussein and others.
Given the Maliki government's eagerness in summarily executing its political opponents — including their lawyers — we have firm reason to believe that Aref is in immediate danger of being tortured and/or assassinated.
On 21 June 2006, lawyer Khamis Al-Obaidi, defence counsel for late President Saddam Hussein, was tortured and assassinated in Baghdad, joining lawyers Sadoun Al-Janabi, killed in October 2005, and Adel Al-Zubaidi, killed in November 2005.
In all cases, witnesses alleged the Iraqi government was involved. Al-Obaidi was the ninth person connected with the trial of President Hussein to be killed.
Throughout the proceedings of the Iraqi Special Tribunal lawyers were repeated threatened.
This fact alone is testament that all defendants before the Iraqi Special Tribunal faced unfair trials.
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The United States is directly responsible under international law
We remind occupation authorities that Badee Izzat Aref is a protected person under international humanitarian law, which governs the US occupation, and has guaranteed rights under international human rights law.
International humanitarian and human rights law outlaws torture and summary execution, incommunicado detention, the ill treatment of detainees, or denial of access to legal counsel.
Further, Aref — as a human rights defender — is additionally protected by the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders.
It is a grave violation of international humanitarian law to put protected persons in danger by consciously handing them over to any party that might violate their fundamental human rights.
Given the appalling human rights record of the Maliki government, we believe that Aref will be subject serious violations of his human rights — including his right to life — unless there is urgent intervention on his behalf and US authorities respect their duty to protect him.
The BRussells Tribunal demands assurances of the wellbeing, liberty and security of Badee Izzat Aref.
The US occupation is directly responsible for Aref's welfare and must guarantee his security.
The imminent danger faced by Badee Izzat Aref illustrates once again that the US-Maliki plan for Iraq has failed and that all they can now propose is repression and executions.
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April 6, 2007
The Pro-Israel Bias of NPR
By FELICE PACE
Scott Simon, Madeline Albright and Spin |
S cott Simon, host of NPR's Weekend edition Saturday, has done it again! He has managed to do yet another NPR News interview focused on the situation in the Middle East in which he completely ignores the central influence of the Palestinian People's plight.
This time (3/31) it was an interview with former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
Ms. Albright was obviously there to articulate the Democratic Party's foreign policy positions.
Simon asked first about Iraq then moved on to the recent speech King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia delivered at the Arab League Summit.
He focused on Abdullah's criticism of Arab leaders for letting others define reality on the ground in Arab countries.
But Simon spoke as if that comment was focused only on Iraq.
Saudi King spent two paragraphs on Palestine and 2 lines on Iraq
Actually the Saudi King listed 5 examples (in order) Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Somalia; Abdullah spent two paragraphs on Palestine and 2 lines on Iraq (see the text of Abdullah's speech).
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Albright — like Simon — has Zionist wax in her ears
Albright went right along with Simon.
While admitting that "clearly there is something that's a burr under the saddles of the Saudis" and noting that Iraq was "part of it" she professed to know nothing more about what is bothering the "hard to read" Saudis.
But King Abdullah, who is prime minister as well as king, has been clear and direct.
Albright — like Simon — has Zionist wax in her ears.
Mr. Simon then moved on to Iran and the nuclear issue.
Once again, however, there was no mention of the role the military debacle Israeli Defense Forces suffered in Southern Lebanon or Israel's oppression of the Palestinians play in empowering Iran's hard liners.
Again Ms. Albright colluded with Simon.
While she sympathized with Iran feeling "surrounded" by nukes she failing to mention that Israel's possession of nukes is also a key to nuclear ambitions in Iran and throughout the region.
These omissions are particularly noteworthy in a week which saw the UN Security Council reiterate its call for a nuclear free Middle East within the very resolution that imposed new sanctions on Iran for its nuclear programs.
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It appears clear that content areas and content limitations for this interview were negotiated in advance.
Or it could be that Simon and Albright have so internalized Zionist prohibitions on discourse that no overt agreements were necessary.
For the Democratic Party as for NPR it is forbidden to discuss Palestine-Israel in the same interview as one discusses Iraq, Iran or the Middle East in general.
— Critical aspects of US foreign policy
It is Zionist control of American Mainstream Media and American Politicians that explains the passion with which King Abdullah attacked American Middle East policy last week.
Arab leaders, like the vast majority of Arab citizens, understand that this self-censorship reflects the power exercised by American Zionists who remain firmly in control of American public discourse concerning the Middle East.
US relations with Arab societies and governments will remain troubled so long as the American Zionists remain in control of US Middle East policy.
As Madeline Albright demonstrated on NPR, the Democratic Party offers no alternative in this regard.
What Arab leaders and their citizens want is an American Administration capable of serving as an honest broker in the Middle East.
This can not happen so long as Zionists continue to control critical aspects of US foreign policy. |
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Folly and peril inherent in American Zionist Project
The question for those who recognize the folly and peril inherent in the American Zionist Project is how to end its control of US Middle East policy.
It appears clear that we must engage Zionism on its own ground.
While this includes electoral politics, control of public discourse is critical.
If it is exposed to the light of public scrutiny Zionist control of politics and policy will erode and ultimately fail.
And so those who would change US Middle East policy have embraced Independent Media and creative public actions as means to educate and awaken US public opinion.
But this, I believe, is not sufficient.
We must also train ourselves to recognize mass media self-censorship and to challenge it wherever and whenever it arises.
When making a donation to ones local NPR affiliate....
NPR in general and Scott Simon in particular are examples.
Whenever Mr. Simon fails, through either omission or commission, to follow the principles of good journalism in his reporting on the Middle East he must be taken to task through comments to NPR, articles in publications like "Counterpunch" and, for example, when making a donation to ones local NPR affiliate.
The edifice of American Zionism was not constructed in a day or a year.
Consequently, those of us who would dismantle it must dedicate ourselves to a campaign of "endless pressure endlessly applied."
This is the manner in which Zionist power rose in America in the post-war era and this is essential if we are to end its hegemony with respect to US Middle East policy.
Comments in bold — Kewe — TheWE.biz
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Published on Wednesday, April 4, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV
by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”
The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years — his last years — are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968.
Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped.
But they’re not shown today on TV.
Why?
It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
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In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies.
Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities.
He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” — including economic rights.
For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective.
An edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring
He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic.
In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — a year to the day before he was murdered — King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
(Full text/audio here. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm) |
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.”
King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 — and loudly denounced it.
Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection”
Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.”
The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign.
He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington — engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be — until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights.
Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.”
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Congress hostility to the poor
King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities.
He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” — appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.”
How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty.
They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.
And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media.
No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. |
Dr. Martin Luther King — War and Militarism — Photos and images Iraq Vietnam 1967 |
Too Much Criminality, Too Little Time!
By Jim Kirwan
Al-Jazeerah, April 3, 2007 FLASH: Stop the War! Which Congress can do anytime it wants, without impeachment, and without stopping funds. Congress, by the powers granted in the Constitution, declares wars, and also has the power to declare when those wars are over. So, Congress can declare “the war and the US occupation of Iraq are over, and the president shall remove US forces from that country.” Beyond the war, this Congress needs to Question a number of things, on the record, and in public: if the nation is to pull back from the brink of total annihilation. With so long an absence, between the traditional role of Congress and the newly subordinate role that two successive Congresses have taken, in the last six years, in their constitutional non-oversight of the executive: for the alleged government of the US. The decider has forgotten how American government is supposed to function. Bush needs a wake-up call. In fact he needs several! He is not a Monarch or a King, nor is he a legitimate dictator; he is a self-proclaimed Absolute Ruler (in his mind) over all that he surveys. The constitutional role of the Congress is to challenge this creature whenever he exceeds whatever real authority that the office supposedly gives him. In his recent statements: filled with sophomoric rhetoric about “show-trials” and “witch-hunts,” intermixed with “fishing-expeditions” and a lot of other dated stuff that has nothing to do with the substance not-being demanded, by the Congress in this sordid affair: Bush is apparently planning on returning to the Nixon-Watergate years when such language was current, but totally ineffective. Gonzales The decider also needs to explain what he did on 911 and why he did not follow secret service protocol on that day when he was supposedly told of the attacks, in the Florida grade school. Why did he disappear, and why did Air Force One not have its escorting fighters until the plane was over an hour out of Florida — that’s a violation of military protocol for protecting the president, especially if the nation has just been attacked? In the matter of Alberto Gonzales, the current Attorney General, who wrote the torture memos and fired the eight US Attorneys, before he and Bush could be implicated in a pending prosecution for possible criminal behavior. |
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That charge is serious enough, but it’s made even more mysterious by this:
“In DOJ documents that were publicly posted by the House Judiciary Committee, there is a gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings.”
This speaks to possible Obstruction of Justice, and is not something that “honorable public figures” engage in. Everyone connected with this affair needs to be sworn, and must testify publicly, if there is to be any credibility left in this government.
Pelosi
In the matter of the Speaker of the House of Representatives: Nancy Pelosi has just sold out the American public, by making a deal with AIPAC that savaged any chance to separate the Congress from the illegal and unilateral war in Iraq, and the coming invasion of Iran.
Her decision flies in the face of the Congress and the people, and should damn her in the eyes of the world, for capitulation and collusion with Bush & Israel.
If and when Iran is attacked, Nancy Pelosi will forever bear the blood-stains of all that shall die there. . .
Pelosi sold out the American public
“When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her allies in the Democratic leadership initially accepted that spending legislation designed to outline an Iraq exit strategy that should have also included a provision barring the president from attacking Iran without Congressional approval: they opened up a monumental discussion about presidential war powers.
As such, the decision by Pelosi and her allies to rewrite their Iraq legislation to exclude the statement, regarding the need for Congressional approval of any military assault on Iran sends the worst possible signal to the White House.
It is not too much to suggest that Pelosi's disastrous misstep could haunt her and the Congress for years to come.
Here's how the speaker messed up:
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“The Democratic proposal for a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq included a provision that would have required President Bush to seek Congressional approval before using military force in Iran.
It was an entirely appropriate piece of the Iraq proposal, as the past experiences of U.S. involvement in southeast Asia and Latin America have well illustrated that when wars bleed across borders it becomes significantly more difficult to end them.
Under pressure from some conservative members of her caucus, and from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and from lobbyists associated with neoconservative groupings that want war with Iran, Pelosi agreed on Monday to strip the Iran provision from the spending bill that has become the House leadership's primary vehicle for challenging the administration's policies in the region.”(1)
Cheney
In the matter of the Vice-President of the United States:
Dick Cheney has secretly created an entirely separate government under his sole direction, outside the organizational charts of the government of this country.
He will not answer any questions concerning who he has employed or in what capacities these people might be working.
He has an entirely separate intelligence organization that reports only to him.
It is rumored that he has a shadow version of the Department of State, and that he has ‘people’ within the Bush cabal that keep him abreast of developments, in order to facilitate secret contracts and other perks for his people, who do not necessarily represent the best interests of this country or its people.
To date Mr. Cheney has overseen the development and implementation of US Energy policy for the United States, yet he has refused all attempts to reveal who he consulted with, to create these key policies.
Oil companies are now reaping record profits that have shattered all previous profits ever reported; not just by one but by any group of corporations. (2)
9/11
However perhaps the most serious potential charge against Cheney has to do with his role in the 911 attacks.
He has said that he was in his office overseeing several war games with the US Military on that September morning.
Cheney is not a trained military officer, and as Vice-President he has never had any official military role to perform, in government.
Yet on 911 Cheney was directing the war games that were identical to the actual events that played out in New York City on that day, and during that exact same time frame.
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The tapes made for the war-games had to pre-date 911 by several months — and they had to come to the Northeast Air Corridor from NORAD headquarters command. Congress needs to subpoena the Vice-President and the Commander of NORAD to appear before Congress in Open Session — in order to explain this to the nation, and their parts in what happened to those fighter-interceptors that never appeared on 911.
Dick Cheney needs to be Impeached—NOW!
Corrupted White House, including charges against Pelosi and Dick Cheney.
Justice system itself.
Unfinished business of 911
Katrina
Blackwater
It might seem like a great deal to ask of congress—but it’s been six long years since any oversight functions were exercised: so there’s a huge backlog.
But there is no more important business for this Congress to attend to now, than the issues surrounding war and peace, including charges against Pelosi and Dick Cheney.
There is also the grave and potential corruption within the Justice System; not to mention the unfinished business of 911, Katrina & Blackwater in New Orleans, along with the missing funds from the Bush-wars that could almost bring this nation back to solvency; if that money and the other misplaced or misspent funds allocated to those who hold the secret no-bid contracts, could ever be located.
Congress should not waste time over the posturing of the corrupted White House, or its beaten and besieged occupants.
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Congress should caucus and then begin to line up the witness lists, and begin issuing subpoena’s for “all the president’s men and women” who have each played a part in the obscene theft and perversion of this nation.
If Congress can’t or won’t do the job, then the public will have to decide what to do with them, because they really have no other job than protecting the Constitution, which they failed to do in 1871, and now they’re failing again to even slow the rot that is consuming what’s left of the United States.
This may look like an impossible task, but if the Congress goes forward immediately, they might find that the public is not nearly as disinterested in these proceedings as it might now appear to be.
Depending on both the depth of the investigations and the outcomes, there might actually be a resurgence in the public’s view, as to what it might be possible to save.
Of this once proud nation. . .
1) John Nichols: Pelosi, Dems stumble badly on Iran:
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/index.php?ntid=123667&ntpid=3 2_ Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Private Mercenary Army http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/20/1337226 |
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US black budget special operations — continuing in Iraq
March 21, 2007
Bomb rips through Kia passenger bus in Baghdad, as mysterious bombings increase. Russian expert cites US special services as source of sectarian tension in Iraq. In a dispatch posted at 1:20pm Makkah time Tuesday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a bus carrying civilian passengers exploded in the Baghdad district of al-Karradah according to an announcement by the puppet police. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported the source as saying that a bomb went off in a Kia vehicle in a shopping center near the al-Karrahda area, which is predominantly Shi‘i. The source said that two people were killed and four more wounded. The injured were ambulanced to nearby hospitals.
The bombing was one of a growing number of mysterious attacks that have rocked Baghdad on a daily basis, killing or wounding thousands of Iraqis amidst claims that regional powers are attempting to keep sectarian violence raging in the country.
Since no groups of the Resistance take responsibility for the mysterious blasts, suspicions are widely expressed that intelligence services are behind the bombing campaign.
Russian geostrategic expert Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov alluded to precisely this reality in an interview with the RIA-Novosti Press Agency correspondents Valery Yarmolenko and Zalina Tsopanova on Monday.
Ivashov, who is Vice-President of Russia’s Academy of Geopolitical Problems, reviewed America’s military and political defeat in Iraq and noted the failure of US troops to counter the guerrilla movement, despite America’s advanced technological edge and the primitive armament of the Resistance.
Ivashov remarked that, “the only thing that is working is not being done by the US troops but by their special services, namely to organize fighting between Shi‘ah and Sunnis.”
Mysterious car bomb explodes in Baghdad.
In a dispatch posted at 1:11pm Makkah time Tuesday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that a short while earlier a car bomb that had been parked by the side of a road in Baghdad blew up near the ash-Shaykh ‘Umar puppet police station, inflicting numerous civilian casualties.
The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the explosion killed or wounded 22.
The blast was also positioned close to an elementary school.
All the injured were taken to nearby al-Kindi Hospital as puppet police cordoned off the area.
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Over time I was increasingly shocked by the speed and ease with which many intelligent and seemingly competent members of the CFR [ Council on Foreign Relations ] appeared to eagerly justify policies and actions that supported growing corruption.
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The regularity with which many CFR members would protect insiders from accountability regarding another appalling fraud surprised even me.
Many of them seemed delighted with the advantages of being an insider while being entirely indifferent to the extraordinary cost to all citizens of having our lives, health and resources drained to increase insider wealth in a manner that violated the most basic principles of fiduciary obligation and respect for the law.
In short, the CFR was operating in a win-lose economic paradigm that centralized economic and political power.
I was trying to find a way for us to shift to a win-win economic paradigm that was — by its nature — decentralizing.
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The reader can appreciate why Wall Street would welcome someone as accommodating as Gorelick at Fannie Mae.
This was a period when the profits rolled in from engineering the most spectacular growth in mortgage debt in U.S. history.
As one real estate broker said, “They have turned our homes into ATM machines.”
Fannie Mae has been a leading player in centralizing control of the mortgage markets into Washington D.C. and Wall Street.
And that means as people were rounded up and shipped to prison as part of Operation Safe Home, Fannie was right behind to finance the gentrification of neighborhoods.
And that is before we ask questions about the extent to which the estimated annual financial flows of $500 billion–$1 trillion money laundering through the U.S. financial system or money missing from the US government are reinvested into Fannie Mae securities.
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James Forrestal’s oil portrait always hung prominently in one of the private Dillon Read dining rooms for the eleven years that I worked at the firm. Forrestal, a highly regarded Dillon partner and President of the firm, had gone to Washington, D.C. in 1940 to lead the Navy during WWII and then played a critical role in creating the National Security Act of 1947.
He then became Secretary of War (later termed Secretary of Defense) in September 1947 and served until March 28, 1949.
Given the central banking-warfare investment model that rules our planet, it was appropriate that Dillon
partners at various times lead both the Treasury Department and the Defense Department.
Shortly after resigning from government, Forrestal died falling out of a window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside of Washington, D.C. on May 22, 1949.
There is some controversy around the official explanation of his death — ruled a suicide.
Some insist he had a nervous breakdown. Some say that he was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel.
Others say that he argued for transparency and accountability in government, and against the provisions instituted at this time to create a secrete “black budget.”
He lost and was pretty upset about it — and the loss was a violent one.
Since the professional killers who operate inside the Washington beltway have numerous techniques to get perfectly sane people to kill themselves, I am not sure it makes a big difference.
Approximately a month later, the CIA Act of 1949 was passed.
The Act created the CIA and endowed it with the statutory authority that became one of the chief components of financing the “black” budget — the power to claw monies from other agencies for the benefit of secretly funding the intelligence communities and their corporate contractors.
This was to turn out to be a devastating development for the forces of transparency, without which there can be no rule of law, free markets or democracy.
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Protecting the brand with dirty tricks — Enforcement Terrorism The profitable liquidation of every place — Coutts, bank for British Queen and royals Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits |
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What Briody does not mention is allegations regarding Brown & Root's involvement in narcotics trafficking. Former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert once described his break up with fiance Teddy — an agent dealing narcotics and weapons for the CIA while working with Brown & Root, as follows:
“Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, Teddy was involved in something truly ugly.
She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran.
At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city.
The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.
“The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root.
The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root.
And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days.
Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.”
Source: "Halliburton’s Brown and Root is One of the Major Components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire" by Michael Ruppert, From the Wilderness
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Dark Alliance — The Story Behind the Crack Explosion The "Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong
Profoundest suspicions of white malfeasance were true |
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The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering.
Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital.
Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine.
Without growing organized crime and military activities through government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing.
The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison population.
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More reports of US special operations planting ' suicide ' bombs in cars
March 18, 2007
www.uruknet.de and www.roadstoiraq.com First reported in English by www.roadstoiraq.com An American sniper on the roof of one the buildings in Ahdamiya neighborhood opened fire on a small bus, the bullet caused the burning of the bus. The passengers who were traveling with the bus [a family] and the driver, miraculously managed to escape the fire.
He got suspicious because the Americans call him ask if he is already in the market
Iraqirabita tell a story about an Iraq interpreter working in an American military base was sent to the city by his bosses to by computer hardware, he took the car but he stopped by friends.
He got suspicious because the Americans call him every now and then asking him if he already in the market, he parked the car in the middle of nowhere and answered yes, few minutes after that the car exploded. The guy left the country after that to Turkey.
To see the Iraqirabita article in Arabic, click here
For more information in English on American black budget special operations money being used to set up so called suicide bombing, TheWE.biz reproduces the following from its archives — below.
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Sick strategies for senseless slaughter
The cat is out of the bag now
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by John Kaminski
May 27, 2005
The first hint came in Imad Khadduri's "A warning to car drivers" written in Arabic and posted on www.albasrah.net on May 11 (See. http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KHA505A.html ).
The dispatch was quickly picked up by two of the most realistic and reliable news sites on the Web, www.uruknet.info , which I try to read every day, and www.globalresearch.ca , which I try to read every week, since it offers less breaking and more analytical news.
Clear window who is perpetrating this inexplicable violence
Khadduri recounted a scam that opens up a clear window to seeing who is perpetrating all this inexplicable violence in Iraq.
Beyond the American attempt to pacify an outraged and abused nation through demonic destruction, and beyond the Iraqi attempt to resist this totalitarian takeover by a foreign conqueror, there are more than numerous acts of violence that simply can't be understood by straightforward explanations.
I mean, when a mosque blows up and Americans blame Islamic terrorists, whether Sunni or Shiite, it makes no sense.
Muslims never blow up their own houses of worship.
Or when reporters sympathetic to either the Iraqi cause of freedom, or even just general principles of international justice, are suddenly assassinated and the blame is placed on often imaginary Islamic extremists whose perspective is supported by these writers, how can anyone believe that Muslims did it, even thought this is what the Zionist American press and government continue to insist.
So who's doing all these demented deeds?
As if we didn't know ...
www.johnkaminski.com/ |
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Khadduri's report went like this:
Told him to report to an American military camp
"A few days ago, an American manned check point confiscated the driver license of a driver and told him to report to an American military camp near Baghdad airport for interrogation and in order to retrieve his license.
The next day, the driver did visit the camp and he was allowed in the camp with his car.
He was admitted to a room for an interrogation that lasted half an hour.
At the end of the session, the American interrogator told him:
'OK, there is nothing against you, but you do know that Iraq is now sovereign and is in charge of its own affairs.
Hence, we have forwarded your papers and license to al-Kadhimia police station for processing.
Therefore, go there with this clearance to reclaim your license.
At the police station, ask for Lt. Hussain Mohammed, who is waiting for you now.
Go there now quickly, before he leaves his shift work".
(http://globalresearch.ca/
articles/KHA505A.html )
The driver did leave in a hurry, but was soon alarmed with a feeling that his car was driving as if carrying a heavy load, and he also became suspicious of a low flying helicopter that kept hovering overhead, as if trailing him.
He stopped the car and inspected it carefully.
He found nearly 100 kilograms of explosives hidden in the back seat and along the two back doors.
The only feasible explanation for this incident is that the car was indeed booby trapped by the Americans and intended for the al-Khadimiya Shiite district of Baghdad.
The helicopter was monitoring his movement and witnessing the anticipated "hideous attack by foreign elements".
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She recounts:
"The last two weeks have been violent .... The number of explosions in Baghdad alone is frightening.
There have also been several assassinations — bodies being found here and there.
It's somewhat disturbing to know that corpses are turning up in the most unexpected places.
Many people will tell you its not wise to eat river fish anymore because they have been nourished on the human remains being dumped into the river.
That thought alone has given me more than one sleepless night.
It is almost as if Baghdad has turned into a giant graveyard.
The latest corpses were those of some Sunni and Shia clerics — several of them well-known.
People are being patient and there is a general consensus that these killings are being done to provoke civil war.
Also worrisome is the fact that we are hearing of people being rounded up by security forces (Iraqi) and then being found dead days later — apparently when the new Iraqi government recently decided to reinstate the death penalty, they had something else in mind.
One of the larger blasts was in an area called Ma'moun, which is a middle class area located in west Baghdad.
It's a relatively calm residential area with shops that provide the basics and bit more.
It happened in the morning, as the shops were opening up for their daily business and it occurred right in front of a butcher's shop.
Immediately after, we heard that a man living in a house in front of the blast site was hauled off by the Americans because it was said that after the bomb went off, he sniped an Iraqi National Guardsman.
I didn't think much about the story — nothing about it stood out: an explosion and a sniper — hardly an anomaly.
The interesting news started circulating a couple of days later.
Man taken away because he knew too much
People from the area claim that the man was taken away not because he shot anyone, but because he knew too much about the bomb.
Rumor has it that he saw an American patrol passing through the area and pausing at the bomb site minutes before the explosion.
Soon after they drove away, the bomb went off and chaos ensued.
He ran out of his house screaming to the neighbors and bystanders that the Americans had either planted the bomb or seen the bomb and done nothing about it.
He was promptly taken away.
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The bombs are mysterious.
Some of them explode in the midst of National Guard and near American troops or Iraqi Police and others explode near mosques, churches, and shops or in the middle of sougs.
One thing that surprises us about the news reports of these bombs is that they are inevitably linked to suicide bombers.
The reality is that some of these bombs are not suicide bombs — they are car bombs that are either being remotely detonated or maybe time bombs.
All we know is that the techniques differ and apparently so do the intentions.
Some will tell you they are resistance.
Some say Chalabi and his thugs are responsible for a number of them.
Others blame Iran and the SCIRI militia Badir.
In any case, they are terrifying.
If you're close enough, the first sound is a that of an earsplitting blast and the sounds that follow are of a rain of glass, shrapnel and other sharp things.
Then the wails begin — the shrill mechanical wails of an occasional ambulance combined with the wail of car alarms from neighboring vehicles and finally the wail of people trying to sort out their dead and dying from the debris.
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Then there was this one.
On May 13, 2005, a 64 years old Iraqi farmer, Haj Haidar Abu Sijjad, took his tomato load in his pickup truck from Hilla to Baghdad, accompanied by Ali, his 11 years old grandson.
Stopped at an American check point
They were stopped at an American check point and were asked to dismount.
An American soldier climbed on the back of the pickup truck, followed by another a few minutes later, and thoroughly inspected the tomato filled plastic containers for about 10 minutes.
Haj Haidar and his grandson were then allowed to proceed to Baghdad.
A minute later, his grandson told him that he saw one of the American soldiers putting a grey melon size object in the back among the tomato containers.
The Haj immediately slammed on the brakes and stopped the car at the side of the road, at a relatively far distance from the check point.
He found a time bomb with the clock ticking tucked among his tomatoes.
He immediately recognized it, as he was an ex-army soldier.
Panicking, he grabbed his grandson and ran away from the car.
Then, realizing that the car was his only means of work, he went back, took the bomb and carried it in fear.
He threw it in a deep ditch by the side of the road that was dug by Iraqi soldiers in preparation for the war, two years ago.
Upon returning from Baghdad, he found out that the bomb had indeed exploded, killing three sheep and injuring their shepherd in his head.
He thanked God for giving him the courage to go back and remove the bomb, and for the luck in that the American soldiers did not notice his sudden stop at a distance and his getting rid of the bomb.
"They intended it to explode in Baghdad and claim that it is the work of the 'terrorists', or 'insurgents' or who call themselves the 'Resistance'.
Taint the Resistance
I decided to expose them and asked your reporter to take me to Baghdad to tell you the story.
They are to be exposed as they now want to sow strife in Iraq and taint the Resistance after failing to defeat it militarily.
Do not forget to mention my name. I fear nobody but God, as I am a follower of Muqtada al-Sadir."
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
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Rumsefeld — Satanic shenanigans
The background and admission of guilt for such satanic shenanigans was clearly outlined in Frank Morales' piece on globalresearch.ca: "The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi 'Insurgents' — and Global Terrorism," by Frank Morales clearly demonstrates how Donald Rumsfeld said he was going to do exactly what these three sorry episodes show he actually did.
Morales writes:
Back in 2002, following the trauma of 9-11, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted there would be more terrorist attacks against the American people and civilization at large.
How could he be so sure of that?
Perhaps because these attacks would be instigated on the order of the Honorable Mr. Rumsfeld.
According to Los Angeles Times military analyst William Arkin, writing Oct. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld set out to create a secret army, "a super-Intelligence Support Activity" network that would "bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception," to stir the pot of spiraling global violence.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/MOR505A.html
We never got the full story on those ghastly beheadings of Nick Berg and others.
Nor have we ever understood who killed the American mercenaries in Fallujah that eventually precipitated one of the great slaughters in history.
Nor have we ever been able to discern if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi s actually a real person or just another bin Ladenesque boogeyman.
Nor if the al-Qaeda website which claims responsibility for various atrocities is not really run by the CIA.
Sinister genocide the Israelis continue to perpetrate
Provoking this type of violence also further conceals the sinister genocide the Israelis continue to perpetrate on the hapless Palestinians, which is exactly its point, as is the entire Iraq invasion and destruction, and as was the inside job mass murder on 9/11 in New York City.
The purpose of all these despicable acts is to conceal what the Israelis and the Americans have been doing all along to the entire Arab world, namely enslaving and destroying it.
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There is not now nor ever was an Arab terror threat.
That was all invented by Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kissinger, Brzezinski, Bush, Cheney, Sharon, Zakheim, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and Warren Buffett.
These people are all traitors to not only their countries but to humanity in general, and should all be slammed and RICOed into Guantanamo immediately.
And so should the government officials, media lackeys, and ordinary citizens who, by their complicity or their ignorance, support them.
Deliberate provocations to prevent peace
The main point in understanding these deliberate provocations to prevent peace is to understand how the American capitalist system, now hijacked by billionaires with no trace of conscience, thrives on war and profits from the misery of others.
The neocon murder menace has been for months ratcheting up the hyperbole about why we need to invade Iran — which some predict will happen in June — and just this week, rumors of troop movements in the Caribbean and lockdowns at Florida military bases appear to augur an imminent invasion of oil-producing Venezuela.
The overall plan is to create hell on Earth, and we are succeeding.
By our silent complicity and cowardly reluctance to oppose and stop this homicidal behavior in the name of profit, we are all accessories to mass murder and the destruction of human society, not to even mention the extinction of individual human freedom and the God-given right to be safe and secure in the homes of our choice.
So now that you know, what are you going to do about it?
You know if you do nothing, these same things will one day happen to you.
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How Palestine became “Israel’s Land”
Sonja Karkar, Women for Palestine
They were there when the Israelites invaded the land, occupied it, and held it intermittently as wave after wave of other conquerors came and went
For Palestinians, theirs is not the land of conquest, but the land of their roots going back to time immemorial.
Such a lineage does not rely on a biblical promise like the Jewish claim that God promised the land to Abraham and his descendants, and is therefore, the historical site of the Jewish kingdom of Israel.
It belongs to the people of Palestine by the simple fact of their continuous residence repeated through birth and possession going back to the earliest Canaanites and even those people living there before recorded history.
They were there when the Israelites invaded the land, occupied it, and held it intermittently as wave after wave of other conquerors came and went, and they were still there when the Romans put an end to Jewish Palestine by destroying Jerusalem in 135AD.
If a religious basis is sought, then the Palestinians can lay claim to being the descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael who is regarded the forefather of the Arabs.
But actually, Palestinian rights are enshrined in the universally accepted principle that land belongs to its indigenous inhabitants.
Thus, the modern day struggle for this land by European Jewish immigrants who have no connection with Palestine other than through their religion is a colonial enterprise that seeks sovereignty for an "external Jewish population" to the exclusion of the indigenous Palestinians who, regardless of faith — Jewish, Christian or Muslim — have lived together for centuries.
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State of Israel created in violation of very resolution which Israelis now look to as giving them sovereignty
Although eager to accept the UN Partition Plan of 1947 which recommended that 56% of the land be set aside for a Jewish State, 42% for an Arab state and 2% for an internationalised Jerusalem and its surrounds, the world has not said a word about the land that was seized by Zionist terrorists before the State of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948.
Through a series of shocking massacres, the territory assigned to the Jews suddenly became 77% resulting in more than 750,000 Palestinians being forcibly expelled and dispossessed of their homes, personal property and their homeland.
The Jewish State then came into being without waiting for the United Nations Commission — prescribed in the Partition resolution — to hand authority progressively over to the Jewish and Arab leaders for their respective states.
And after the 1948 war, Israel declared Jerusalem its capital in contravention of its internationally-recognised status of corpus separatum – a status that is still recognised.
Effectively, the new state of Israel was not only created in violation of, it continued to violate, the very resolution which Israelis now look to as giving them sovereignty.
The Arab state imposed by the UN Partition Plan without consultation and in contradiction to the UN charter — which should have upheld the majority indigenous Palestinians’ right to self-determination — has since been deliberately and methodically whittled away by Israel, leaving nothing but isolated non-contiguous parcels of land to some 4 million Palestinians.
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Land Day
Around 170,000 Palestinians remained in what became Israel, the largest number of whom resided in the Galilee area, originally a designated part of the Arab state under the Partition Plan.
These Palestinians also became the victims of Israel’s land grab policy.
Over 438,000 acres, which was more than the total Jewish land holdings at the time, were confiscated and a further 400,000 acres were marked for confiscation.
After Israel won the 1967 war, the total territory of Palestine came under Israel’s rule.
It annexed East Jerusalem, despite the Holy City’s internationally recognised status and began implementing its Jewish settlement program with a vengeance.
The Palestinians in Israel were increasingly aware of their precarious position politically and declared a national strike, known as "Land Day" on 30 March 1976 against Israel’s continuing ruthless land expropriation.
An affinity was quickly felt between Palestinians everywhere and "Land Day" was adopted as a sort of national Palestinian day which is commemorated by Palestinians and their supporters around the world each year.
This awakening of national consciousness had an unequivocal political message: end the occupation and allow self-determination of the Palestinians in a sovereign state living in peace side by side with Israel.
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Thirty-one years later, the message is till resonating, but the Palestinians are further away from seeing a solution than ever before.
Daily, Israel is taking a bit of land here and a bit of land there, to make all of Palestine "Israel’s Land".
The problem then will be, what to do with 5 million Palestinians with no land?
There are only a few possible, but criminal solutions — transfer, collective imprisonment, apartheid, and/or ethnic cleansing.
Alternatively, Israel can disengage from the West Bank to the 1967 borders or agree on a single, democratic state for all.
Without a just solution, the struggle for Palestine’s land will continue. |
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Protecting the brand with dirty tricks — 'Enforcement Terrorism' The profitable liquidation of every place — Coutts, bank for British Queen and royals Catherine Austin Fitts — Dillon Reid and Co. Inc. And the Aristocracy of Stock Profits |
Nanci Pelosi — U.S. House Democratic leader — Congresswoman California, 8th District
Speaking at the AIPAC agenda May 26, 2005
There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense.
In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.
The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.
For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....
In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'
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The United States will stand with Israel now and forever.
Now and forever.
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Ahmed and Asma, story of two children dying — Lest we forget |
Atrocities committed by Israel — graphic pictures What CNN never shows you |
Israel, chemical weapons and phosphorous bombs New and unknown deadly weapons used by Israeli forces Undetectable poison-needle gun for 'clean' assassinations |
Unspeakable grief and horror
...and the circus of deception killing continues...
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How do you like your news? Lightly Faked? Partial Fake? All Fake |
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Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
by Sheldon Drobny Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.
The lesson is clear.
Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.
Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.
She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.
She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.
Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.
She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.
And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.
The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.
The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any sense—either the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.
The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.
The majority ignored their basic conservative views supporting federalism and states' rights in order to justify their decision.
History will haunt these justices down for their utter lack of justice and the hypocrisy associated with this decision.
Sheldon Drobny is Co-founder of Air America Radio.
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Bush v. Gore Appointment of U.S. President by the U.S. Supreme Court — Raw political clout exercised by US Supreme Court |
The Dark Side Initiates — Click here Dark path initiates depend on the denial The five-percent manipulator class is composed of those on the dark path |
Twenty Questions Radio/TV interviewers avoid asking about Israel Which parts of the Declaration of Human Rights and Geneva Conventions don't Israelis understand? Why is Israel still stealing Palestinian land for more illegal construction? |
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For archive purposes, this article is being stored on TheWE.biz website.The purpose is to advance understandings of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. |
