As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in just such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– William O. Douglas

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time we have been asked to supply a dissident or ‘truth telling’ website with our Automatic Traversal Algorithm. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your — ah — establishment had much use for such software. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the dissident, adjusting his woolen beret and carefully putting away the mobile-phone with which he had been messaging his co-conspirators. “Your ATA can carry out any standard tree traversal involving up to one hundred million nodes, using the most efficient path. However, for our work we are interested in traversing actual routers and web-servers on the Net, not nodes of a data-structure. As we wish you to modify the code, the software will not only traverse nodes but also execute an instruction on each node.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Here’s my other b-card,” the dissident said, handing Wagner a business-card, a different one from that with which he had introduced himself.

“Hal L. Burton, Ph.D., President, Burton Microprocessor Research?” Wagner finished on a surprised note, reading the business-card. “I see — so that’s how you earn your money then, and I suppose freedissident dot-com is where you spend it.” Wagner warmed to his visitor. “You know, I, I …” he trailed off. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule under FEMA and the so-called ‘USA Patriot Act’, personal freedoms were severely restricted and it was not wise to express admiration for any dissident activity. Still, he said, “Actually, I visit freedissident dot-com quite often. You do great work, you’re gutsy folks.”

Wagner meant it. That website was only about three years old but had quickly developed a reputation for occasionally managing to expose government secrets and lies, and breaking suppressed news-stories. The government had tried to shut it down but had failed.

Burton smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Been in and out of prison for it.”

Wagner smiled too, feeling a new respect for his customer. “Hoder. Call me Hoder.”

“Hoder? Nordic?”

“You’re right. Norwegian and German extraction. So tell me, how I can help you — in any way.”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three years — since freedissident dot-com was founded, in fact. It is perfectly in keeping with your line of work, so I think you will be able to provide the solution after I explain it,” Burton began.

“Ooo-kay.”

“It is really quite simple. It’s because of the CPU-virus and worm menace that started a few years ago. Remember Stuxnet? — that was the grandpa. My team has made a self-learning firmware patch, a one-time universal patch that takes care of several entire classes of these damn things. Nobody will have to care about any CPU virus or worm for several years, especially with new server-boxes, and therefore new chips, not being available anymore. We want to traverse the Web and apply the patch to every web-server and router.”

“Excellent idea!” Wagner was enlivened. “So you wish to start at triple-a dot-com and work up to, say, uh, … zygote dot-org …”

“Exactly–”

“… not that the actual process would be executed alphabetically,” mused Wagner thoughtfully.

He had seen the immense benefits of Burton’s plan at once; it was the need of the day, literally. Only personal desktop computers were available to Joe Blow; these machines were made such that they could not be used as web-servers. Server-class computers and routers were strictly regulated and were not available to the general public. Apart from the government and the armed forces, servers could be sold only to businesses and they too had to fill out a variety of forms to establish ‘need’, and even so, permits were granted to a minority of applicants. All the personal and independent media websites in the country ran on repaired and re-repaired machines that were over ten years old. Ten years ago, after coordinated hostage-takings and bomb-blasts in Peoria, which were blamed on foreign ‘terrorists’, the Department of Homeland Security had demanded the law regulating servers and routers, and had been given what it had asked for. Wagner knew that it was critically important to take good care of the old machines that the general public and individuals were using, and to minimize their vulnerability to viruses and worms. Personally, he suspected that the N.S.A. was behind many of the viruses that regularly crippled free-thought and dissident websites.

“You know how the Baldur chip works, right?”

“In general, yes,” Wagner nodded. He thought back to the second Bush-Cheney administration when the Baldur chip had been invented and mandated as an etched integrated-circuit on every CPU. First, it had been the V-chip. Then, the RFID chip. It had been only a matter of time before something like the Baldur chip would be proposed, be legislated for electronic devices, and become ubiquitous — every web-server and router carried it now. It provided the means to disable or lock, and re-enable or unlock, any device it was on-board on by means of one kilobit lock or unlock instructions and an accompanying and suitable five kilobit key.

“Because it’s not possible to install a firmware patch when the CPU is operating, what we plan to do is to make two passes: on the first pass, we disable the CPU and install our patch. And on the second pass, we attempt to upgrade to a different version of the firmware patch by applying a delta on the old patch for any CPU that needs it, and re-enable the CPU. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why we need this dual-pass system, even if I knew all the technical details behind it.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on. I’m curious about, I mean, how are we supposed to crack those one-K instructions?” Not even any single government branch possessed those two one kilobit instructions’ bit-sequences. Each instruction was split up into three components. The Federal government was the custodian of the lower-order 512-bit-sequence, and the State governments and the Judiciary were the custodians of the higher-order bit-sequence with the 512 bits of each instruction equally split between them. This would be a first, if they pulled it off. And an underground effort, at that.

“We’ve hacked it,” Burton said with a trace of smugness. “That’s what we’ve been working on for the past three years. That, and the universal patch. But for the traversal, you’re the experts. That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course, to successfully unlock a chip, the re-enable code must be accompanied by — doesn’t the key … I mean that doesn’t it have to somehow mesh … in that there has to be a — an equivalence between the bit-wise ORs and the bit-wise ANDs between the one-K disable instruction and the key’s one-K chunks … ?” trailed off Wagner in a querying tone. He was not at all sure as to just how all this worked; he was a through-and-through Language Theory & Automata man. One or two of his specialists would certainly know this Baldur-chip business backwards, however.

Burton laughed. “I’m even more in the dark than you, but we’ve got that part nailed down. My boys are all set with the keys, the instructions, the whole shebang on that end. All we need from you is a guaranteed traversal of every node, every leaf, every router, every web-server on the Net in North America. And then they’ll be safe from these virus-making crazies.”

“Thanks to you.”

Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Thanks to us, if you must.” Shifting his weight to one side, he pulled out a chequebook from his hip-pocket. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Wagner replied, “Don’t even think about it, Hal — we’re in this together.” He smiled at Burton and rose to shake his hand.

The root reason behind these machinations was the fact that the World Wide Web was that greatest of ‘unknown unknowns’ — a random techno-sociological mutation in an otherwise (mostly) ordered and controlled world; an ‘unknown unknown’ whose unforeseen birth and stupendous power to capture and exhibit the evasive and coquettish Truth had thrown off-course, and was hampering, the march towards that unholy concentration of wealth and power — the ‘New World Order’ — which the European-originated money-lending power-elite clans had so carefully been planning for centuries.

This, thought Greg, was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to him. Chuck and he were both volunteers with an activist movement, ‘Winter Soldiers & Rainy-day Patriots’ — an apt twist of a two-century-old American concept — to restore (true) Republican government, and so the nature of this project and the linkage with freedissident.com gave him a good feeling. His thoughts drifted to the erosion of civil liberties. Besides a question of ideals, he had personal reason to be concerned: he had been detained in prison for a fortnight without any charges, simply for submitting a withering short-story about the government to a publisher — someone there had probably ratted on him. A number of laws contradicting and subverting the still-constitutionally ‘guaranteed’ free-speech were on the books now. These anti-constitutional laws had various sections — ‘dissent,’ ‘incitement,’ ‘sedition,’ and so forth. They had either been in existence since 2001 by way of un-American legislation or had been enacted during Bush-Cheney II or Clinton-Lieberman I. He was a boy when it had all started, but he knew that except for a few (true) patriots who invoked Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the majority of the populace, apathetic and afraid, had not bothered to challenge those repressive Totalitarian laws.

Greg heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck joined him on the balcony.

“Dude! Clean compile,” Chuck said. The software they had been working on that day had built successfully.

“Sounds good! Seems like we’ll beat the schedule. You told Shrub?” ‘Shrub’ was their private nick-name for Sam W. Jaffe who was nominally partnering them from Burton’s team. On their very first day, he had delivered a near-monologue about a documentary he had seen on the San ‘Bush-men’ of the Kalahari Desert. He had gone on a little too long for Greg’s liking, and had finished by telling Greg and Chuck that, in his opinion, ‘the Bush-man’s way of life is thoroughly depraved, degenerate, and inhuman.’ After that, Greg had started referring to him as ‘Shrub.’

“Yeah, he’s happy. I’m likin’ this so far. Wanna go get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They walked back into the office and out to the corridor.

“You seem kinda … a little subdued …” ventured Chuck after a couple of minutes, as they were descending in an elevator.

“Thinking about this project made me think of the Unpatriotic Act, FEMA, and all the shit that came after that,” said Greg, and cut loose with a few obscenities. “It’s perverse to have called something so un-American and anti-patriotic the ‘Patriot Act’!” he said loudly, and punched the elevator door as it was opening.

“Well, one reason was to fool the public into buying it, so that they would not protest against it,” said Chuck matter-of-factly. “Doing anything on New Year’s?” he asked hurriedly as they turned left at the Christmas tree in the main lobby, wanting to get Greg’s mind off the USA Patriot Act.

“Maureen and I are just getting together with a few friends. And being grateful we’ve made it a quarter of the way into the century … without blowing everyone up, despite all the carnage and mayhem. Hey, you and Janie, if you don’t have plans, why don’t you join us?”

“Aw-ight, thanks dude. I’ll tell her. Guess she’ll give you guys a call,” answered Chuck as they entered the cafeteria.

He picked up a bar of chocolate from the packaged foods rack. “Wonder which of the F3 this benefits,” he groused.

“Huh? F3? — what are you talking about?” Greg said, not comprehending.

“Dude! You mean you don’t know?! The F3 — that’s Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto — they’ve a lock on all foodstuffs. Throughout the Americas. Happened during Clinton-Lieberman II. Not even a giant like McDonald’s gets its beef now without it passing through one of the F3.” Chuck kept up with the minutiae of economic developments much more than did Greg who was naturally inclined to ideologies and abstract concepts.

“Oh!” Greg sighed and shook his head in disgust. He thought back to the second Hillary Clinton-Joseph Lieberman administration and the merger of the two political parties. Soon after their increasingly lockstep economic policies had become undeniable and obvious, the show ‘Democracy’ had been dispensed with and the Democrats and the Republicans had made their marriage official. It had ostensibly been ‘to foster inclusiveness, put an end to partisanship, and bring all Americans together under one tent.’ Exalted sentiments, tawdry reasons … and Totalitarian phraseology. The new combined party — the aptly-named ‘Federalists’ — pointed to the disorganized, little-known Constitution Party as evidence of a thriving ‘Democracy’. Standing at the packaged-foods rack, Greg subconsciously smiled wryly and shook his head in the midst of his ruminations that were triggered by Chuck’s little nugget, causing one or two people nearby to stare at him. The strange part of it all was that even though large bodies of voters would agree amongst themselves that they had voted for a Constitution Party candidate, that candidate would somehow almost never win the election. The Max McKinney crisis of the previous election was evidence of that. But the strangest thing was that frequently the media’s ‘scientific polls’ too would be at odds with an honest person’s investigation of reality. Everyone and their dog would tell you that they had voted for populist, popular activist Green, yet the ‘polls’ would show capitalist, well-connected businessman Gray holding a ‘twenty percent lead.’ It was as if normal, sane people were saying one thing to their friends and families but saying something else to these ‘pollsters’… .

“Howdy guys,” replied Sam, walking into their office. “Hal just sent me a secure message. He’s not sure if you’ve been told but absolute secrecy is essential for this project; if any governmental agency — any snoop — gets wind of it, they’re going to try to halt it, sabotage it, whatever.”

“You bet,” answered Chuck. “Hode — that’s our president, Dr. Hoder Wagner — told us. Yeah, I can imagine that the Pentagon warlord, the A-G — all those Anti-American dictatorial creeps — would not like web-servers and routers getting virus and worm-proofed.”

Their concerns were well-founded. For the past two decades, the government had maintained a network of informants within the general public, reminiscent of the long-gone U.S.S.R.

“Mum’s the word,” Greg chimed in. “So, where does Dr. Burton keep himself?”

Sam made no answer. Greg and Chuck stared at him, then glanced at one another.

“He usually, er, he has another concern that … that he spends his, um, time at,” said Sam uncertainly.

“If you mean freedissident dot-com, we know about it,” said Greg.

Sam looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure you did. Yes, these days he’s usually over there. That setup is in a basement, a townhouse near Tysons Corner.” Tysons Corner was an expensive commercial and semi-residential area in Northern Virginia, about half-an-hour’s drive from Washington D.C.

After a pause, Chuck said, “It’s odd that they — the government — didn’t take down at least some part of the Web by fiat. What I mean is that I’m surprised they haven’t really tried.”

“I suppose they know that … that if they messed with the backbone or the routers, the Web would go underground,” offered Sam. “People possess routers and web-servers. Activists would create an alternate mini-Web … like a bits-and-pieces Web.”

“You’re right, we could patch up something, hmmm …” Greg mused. “Yeah, one-oh-nine-B, cable hookups, plain old copper … all underground,” he continued; he was thinking out loud more than talking to Sam. “Though I wouldn’t have thought that they’d, I mean the Feds, woulda been able to think around that curve,” he finished, addressing Sam now.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your work,” Sam said, walking to the door. “The Web is a prized freedom and this project is important. In fact, it should have been done years ago — previous generation should’ve taken care of it.” Sam winked at them conspiratorially as he left their office.

“Shrub’s a funny guy,” said Chuck. “But he’s awright.”

“The previous effin’ generation was complacent. Complacent! Those dumb-asses kept blabbering about America being the most free country in the world even though that wasn’t true and even as our freedoms were gradually being … being chopped down, like a bloody forest being clear-cut,” said Greg, turning back to his computer. “Our freedoms are like the species: once plentiful, now declining.”

“Nice, that’s a good analogy, partner. Hey, how many species are there?” enquired Chuck. Responding to his own question, he continued, “After these climate-change-related extinctions, I think there’s, hmm … The Nine Billion Names of God … I mean, er, names of God’s creations,” he corrected himself, having taken a stab at flowery speech and felt embarrassed at the results.

“Uh, not billion, but million,” Greg said. “Nine million species.”

“Oh, yeah … ‘scuse me!” Chuck laughed at his mistake. “Though our freedoms have vanished at a rate far faster than the species,” he mused, on the same bent. “Ya know, I hacked into a Fed server one night and hit paydirt.”

“Welcome to the club,” grinned Greg. “But what do you mean, ‘paydirt’?”

“Yeah, was gonna tell you — it had a bunch of Top Secret white-papers and research reports. One was about freedoms, I’ll never forget that one. A complete list, and then some, of all the freedoms that man has and has had. Sociologists have determined that there’s precisely nine thousand freedoms.”

“Like?” prodded Greg curiously, swivelling in his chair to face Chuck.

“We-e-ell, it had all types of … of details; stuff about Paine and Mill and Nietzsche, and sociometrics and ethnograms and biostatistics … and I don’t know what — government’s technocrats have waded through all kinds of crap. They’ve concluded that 21st century humans have, or can have, exactly nine thousand freedoms. Like, just take one freedom, Communication. From plain talking to coded speech to music to … um, yes, ritual gift-giving to, what was it … gypsy-camp markers to smoke-signals, would you believe we have, if I recall correctly, exactly six-hundred and-seventeen modes of Communication? At least that’s what that research report says.”

“Six-seventeen? What were some of the others? I mean the other modes of Communication?”

“Gawd, I dunno. I remember they’ve, like, enumerated different ‘elemental’ freedoms within … what was it, a ‘group-level’ freedom, and those are within a ‘top-level’ freedom. Like ‘eye movements,’ ‘head movements,’ aah … yes, ‘muscle tone,’ ‘foot shifting,’ ‘finger-tapping’ and so on fell under ‘Body Language,’ which itself falls under a ‘top-level’ freedom, ‘Communication.’ Man, it’s freaky, I tell ya. Supposed to be a ‘research report’, but what with its different volumes it’s really like a book. It’s over three thousand pages.”

Sam appeared in the doorway of their office, looking a little flushed. “Hey, guys. Just on the news. The invasion got underway.”

“Oh, great! Now we’re killing Norwegians!” exclaimed Greg, opening a web-browser and going to news.yahoo.com.

“What’s the government-controlled media gonna call this? After all the ‘Oil Wars’, now the ‘Water Wars’?” muttered Chuck morosely.

“Um, yeah,” answered Chuck sheepishly.

Seeing Greg’s querying expression, a sly, insinuating grin spreading on his face, Chuck continued, “Hey, I found it in my pocket! I don’t know — perhaps it fell in … perhaps Janie put it there. So what?” he ended on a petulant note.

Greg clapped Chuck on the shoulder and laughed out good-naturedly at his defensiveness, setting Chuck laughing too.

“So nothing … dude!” he said, in a friendly way. “That first dynlib we built, the one for the disable-and-patch, it’s still just ‘oh dot d-n-l.’ We needed a name for it. I’ll call it ‘Mistletoe’.” Greg was referring to the dynamic-library which would, at run-time, disable or lock the CPUs on the first-pass and apply the anti-virus/anti-worm patch.

They turned back to their workstations, still working but easing off for the day.

“Damn!” said Chuck suddenly. “Hey, we gotta stress-test that random key-sequence generator I wrote before we leave for the day.” Glancing at the time, he continued, “Oh hell, Greg, Hode will be here soon. We should’ve started testing it earlier today.”

“Already banged the hell out of it. It’s good to go.”

“Oh … you did? Cool! Ya know, I wonder though that there’s no test-team. I mean what’s Hode thinking, and that guy Burton? We’re testing each others’ stuff. Should’ve had a couple of good QA guys.”

“Well … I suppose Hode knows that what we write doesn’t need testers,” said Greg with a touch of conceit. Grinning and crooking an eyebrow at Chuck, he continued, “I mean, in these past few projects, how many bugs — I mean material defects — have been found in what you and I have written? All that’s happened is that the QA guys have wound up getting an inferiority complex because they couldn’t find a single, real bug!”

Chuck smiled and shook his head, and both of them ended up laughing at Greg’s hot-shot ego-stoking. Though egotistical, his vanity was not misplaced; neither was Chuck’s caution: in the three projects that they had worked on together, the testers actually had felt dispensable — Greg and Chuck were not only exceptionally talented, they were also very careful with their coding and debugging. Yet the lack of an independent, professional Quality Assurance unit in any software project considerably increased the chances of a calamitous defect being discovered post-deployment — when the software went ‘live.’

After some time, Greg rose from his chair and stretched. However, with the first step he took, he stumbled, and awkwardly and noisily toppled across a chair. Startled, Chuck got up. Grasping the edge of the table, Greg got back on his feet and voiced an oath or two.

“Dude! You okay?” enquired Chuck. “You know I’ve seen you do this before … like, stumbling, lurching — maybe there’s a balance problem?”

“Yup, there is. Inner-ear problem. In fact, that’s what saved me from my — ah — ‘elective service’,” replied Greg, holding on to the table and grimacing at the words ‘elective service.’ “Not that I’d have enlisted, I’d rather rot in prison than kill innocents abroad.” Except for the spoilt brats of the super-wealthy and powerful, who somehow received unlimited deferments or took refuge in the National Guard, all males had to enrol compulsorily with the armed forces. The draft was back in force in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Except that it was not called ‘the draft’ any more. It was called ‘Elective Patriotic Service.’ Such Orwellisms were consistent with the by-then usual government practice of redefining old terms and inventing new ones to befog the minds of the people.

“Oh — okay.” Chuck looked on with some concern as Greg settled himself in his chair. “I was deferred because of my sciatica. Same here; I’d have chosen prison over getting brainwashed by the armed forces into massacring other peoples.”

He went on, slowly, “Ya know, it’s the armed forces themselves who shoulda bailed us out of this horror. Before it got to this point.” He was voicing a thought more than talking to Greg, blankly gazing into the distance.

“I can’t understand why the national guard, the army — they all … they all attack us, arrest us, when we simply demonstrate,” said Greg. “Are they crazy? Just for holding up signs?! Don’t they understand that we’re doing it for them besides for us? They’re the ones who get traumatized and sick and maimed for life, if not killed, in these wars and invasions!”

“That’s the way it goes — you know,” Chuck replied softly, resignedly. “The oligarchy and the Zioneocons, they make sure to recruit Afros and Hispanics from poor neighbourhoods, and those they call ‘hicks’ and ‘trailer-trash’. They’re expendable — cannon-fodder — to the powers-that-be.”

After a moment of silence, Greg said passionately, “Yes. Young guys all of them, and what a waste. Those stupid, stupid lame-brains. They’re made to feel special by being told they’re heroes, by being given their purple hearts and silver stars. Heroes on their two-bit military pensions, with amputated limbs, strange illnesses. And shattered consciences … or, or brutalized humanities from the horrors they perpetrate on innocent humans. But those corporate plutocrats and Zioneocons — the scum of humanity — they make their millions off those wars and laugh all the way to the bank.” Though conscientious and a true patriot as was Chuck, Greg was seldom quite so bitter.

Chuck said nothing; he knew that staying on the subject would only get Greg wound up. Greg was right, he thought. The public had at last realized that the mega-corporation’s main function was simply to be a front behind which the super-wealthy and the privileged few hid to further their narrow interests and accumulate ill-gotten wealth, and that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘pre-emptive’ wars had been nothing other than wars of loot and plunder for American corporate officers, stake-holders, and Zioneocons. Those ‘pen for hire’ writers who had sung to their tune earlier in the century had been rewarded with book contracts, positive publicity by the corporate-controlled media, and outright payoffs disguised as ‘grants’. But the few courageous writers who had exposed the truth had seen their works damned with faint praise or trashed altogether. And the writers themselves had had their names smeared and been hit with ruinous lawsuits; and those residing overseas had even been murdered by U.S. puppet-regimes or C.I.A. hit-men. Chuck shook his head as he gazed vacantly at his monitor, lost in his thoughts. Murdering writers had become a frighteningly commonplace activity for the American government after they, in concert with Royal Dutch Shell, had murdered Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa early in the century. Neither had had to face the consequences of their crime, for the American people had remained blissfully ignorant and unconcerned. They systematically had been deceived by the controlled media into believing that Arabs, Afros, drugs, ‘terrorists’, and other such hobgoblins hiding in the bush were the enemy, so as to divert their attention while the power-elite and the Zioneocons had been proceeding stealthily with their treacherous conquest of the U.S.A. and its economic structures and financial systems, all the while subverting the ideals of the founding fathers. American citizenry had finally woken up to reality, but it was nearly too late now… .

Chuck’s thoughts were suddenly but poetically interrupted by Greg; still in a fit of passion, he burst out in declamatory tones: “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, That old Lie! Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” He spat the words, with venom and bitterness.

Startled for a second time by Greg in twenty minutes, Chuck began “What was th—” when the door opened. It was Wagner.

“Hello, men,” he said, briskly walking into the room. “Now there’s a set of domains we don’t want to hit,” he said, coming up to them. “No dot-gov or dot-mil sites and apart from those, the ones written on this list. Doable, right?”

He showed them a printout; they looked at it. It had several hundred host-names or ‘domains’. Many of them were easily recognizable as being those of the largest and most powerful corporations and the rest were those of large corporate-controlled media, wealthy political foundations, and such.

“Can-do,” said Chuck, brow furrowed. “Just curious why.”

“Talked with Hal earlier today; he brought up a good point. We don’t want to virus-proof the government’s or military’s computers! And if these giant transnationals or big-media get hit with viruses and go down for a while, screw ‘em,” Wagner said with distaste.

“Oh yeah — cool!” replied Chuck. Greg grinned and nodded approvingly.

“Good. I just emailed it to both of you; encrypted of course. Stick it where needed. So, you guys ready? Meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“So? How goes it?” Wagner asked as they walked up to the elevators.

“How goes it? Great!” said Chuck. “To be honest, Hal’s guys have done all the donkey work. Greg and I have the easy part and we’re ahead of schedule. Web’s gonna get vaccinated now, thanks to the Baddler — I mean the Baldur chip. Jeez, what a weirdo name — why, why would they call it that!”

“It’s the name of some god … North European, perhaps; a god of beauty, light, and stars, I think,” Greg said, trying to be helpful, interpreting Chuck’s rhetoric literally. “And that’s apropos — you know, aren’t some websites stars of freedom dotting the vast night-sky of, of ignorance and obfuscation? …and web-servers dot the miles and miles of fibre, and … twinkle with knowledge and information.”

“That’s pretty, Greg,” nodded Chuck appreciatively and Wagner concurred.

Greg chuckled and said that he hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did as they entered an elevator.

Greg, Chuck, and Sam were having coffee and doughnuts in the office, a very early breakfast. They had reached the office by 3:45 a.m. on Monday and had set off the live run at four.

“Let’s see what the latest is from Norway … and also how that standoff with Brazil is developing,” said Greg, turning to his computer and bringing up a web-browser on his monitor.

“You guys think and talk a lot about wars and stuff,” commented Sam.

Greg looked at Sam and then looked through him. His face broke into a half-smile, a joyless smile; his eyes communicated the pain born of a compassionate humanity and carried a jadedness unnatural to their age of thirty-two years. He spoke very softly. “Sam, we Americans have been talking of warfare and dealing in wanton wickedness for over a century. We wouldn’t have to be talking about it and confronting it now if folks at the beginning of only this century hadn’t gotten things as totally out of hand as they did.”

Nobody replied.

“You know,” said Chuck, changing the subject, “I wonder why they asked us to randomize the keys the way they did. I mean, all the CPUs are going to be disabled for what — two, three hours? Nobody’s going to be able to crack any one-K key in even months so we might as well have used the same key for every CPU.” Chuck sounded perplexed. He looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Chuck, tilted his head, and shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Burton and his chief programmer decided.”

“I suppose they had a reason,” said Greg. “Or maybe they just didn’t think of it. Anyway, we’ll find out when Hal comes in this morning — we can ask him.”

“If he knows, if there was a reason,” said Chuck, still bemused.

“Speak of the devil…” said Sam as Burton walked in the door.

“Greg? Chuck? Pleased to meet you,” Burton said, pleasantly shaking hands with them. He gave each of them a business-card.

“Hal I. Burton, Ph.D.,” said Chuck, mis-reading the business-card.

“That’s ‘L’, not ‘I’,” corrected Burton.

“Oh! Yes, sorry. What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” Chuck asked amiably, trying to make small talk.

“My middle-name? Oh, that’s kind of embarrassing!” laughed Burton. “Blame my classicist parents! And their flights of fancy. But anyway, it’s Loki.”

“Huh! Loki. Never heard that name before.”

Greg, however, had. He frowned and smiled wryly to himself. ‘Baldur’. ‘Mistletoe’. And now ‘Loki’. A peculiar coincidence … eerie, in fact… .

Six military policemen silently entered the office and stood along a wall. Greg and Chuck, quite perplexed, stared at them, looked into their faces. Not that they found any variety or even individuality: each man had the blank, glazed, obedient face of an automaton who does as he is told; the face of an ever-increasing number of Americans, in truth.

“Change of plans, boys. We’re not starting the second pass this morning,” said Burton, as two men appeared in the dim corridor outside the door.

Greg and Chuck now looked at these two new arrivals. One of the men was elderly and squat and had a shuffling gait, the other seemed equally elderly but walked with a jaunty strut. They came into the office. Both men were remarkably ugly; their countenances bespoke the arrogance and corruption of unrestrained and untrammelled abuse of power.

“We are going to have to delay that second pass; indefinitely,” the ugly squat man said. Greg and Chuck realized with a sense of confusion that this new visitor was the Attorney-General, Sandler ‘Sandy’ Farm.

“And that’s strictly confidential, strictly confidential,” the ugly jaunty man offered, flashing that roguish grin he doled out like spare change to the fawning, vacuous hacks and flacks of the American media. He shook hands in a faux-friendly manner with Greg and Chuck. They were struck dumb, for this was the Secretary of War, Ron S. Field.

“After all, you are working for the Government of the United States of America so your absolute secrecy is required,” said Farm. His usually sullen — literally ashen — face was beaming, even cheery. “But I thank you gentlemen most sincerely for bringing this project to a successful closure.”

“I guess I can tell you now why we used different bit-sequences so as to manufacture unique five-kilobit keys for every CPU that’s being locked,” Sam said. He wore a smirk and it made him look both stupid and crafty at the same time. “Even if some bunch of idealists somehow cracks the standard re-enable instruction, it would take literally years of cracking for them to figure out the five-K key with which one particular CPU has been locked. And if they do, so what? You can’t use that same key to unlock any other — virtually any other — CPU.”

Chuck looked at Greg, not making full sense of it. Greg returned his gaze.

“You’re very smart engineers, breaking into government computers and reading our white-papers and research reports,” said Field. Nodding at Chuck, he continued, “If you had read that one all the way through — I mean ‘Mankind’s Nine Thousand Freedoms’ — you would have found out that here in America, fewer than several hundred freedoms now remain for the riffraff … I mean for the common man. The top-level freedom to think straight — ‘Unconstrained and Noise-free Cognition,’ they call it — that freedom’s, of course, the fundamental one, and it plus all its derivatives has been off the table for … what, over fifty years now.”

Everyone remained silent. Field went on, addressing both Greg and Chuck, “A small group of people have been working on this project to create voluntary free-slaves for more than two centuries — since shortly after the country was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your idealistic way of thought. And the Web, now –’The World-Wide Web’ is the linchpin freedom.”

“The Web was the linchpin freedom, was the linchpin!” Farm shrieked, punching the air in quite an uncharacteristic spasm of excitement. “That’s why — Yes, yes! — I, I wanted to be here! … when i-i-it it-happened!” he babbled, and started laughing in a manner that was quite maniacal. His face was twitching and his eyes were bulging and glinting as he cackled uncontrollably.

“What … what do you mean?” asked Chuck, distracted and repulsed by Farm’s demeanour. He was still not comprehending, or perhaps not wanting to comprehend. Greg realized in a flash that there would be no second pass. They had been taken. He fell back limply in his chair.

Burton answered. His demeanour too had changed, though in a different way. His very face seemed to have undergone a transformation — as if a snake had moulted its old skin. He looked triumphant, but apart from that emotion, base cunning, greed, and evil had manifest themselves, as if settling into their rightful home after a necessary absence. “I’ll tell you what he means. The Web and the Internet started off as the ARPANet. It was not meant for –and I’m not even sure how … the rabble managed to get it. But we know how to scaremonger the little people, we know how to control you, even if the process is slow and gradual. We’re the rulers, we want the Internet back, and this time we’ll keep it for ourselves. Forever,” he said, leaving nothing to interpretation.

“All right,” said Field, now wearing a cold, disdainful smile. “Time to clear out. You’ll be debriefed at a location in Fort Meade.”

“Hoder’s waiting there,” said Burton, smiling the smile of the serpent.

Someone switched off the lights. The room was now lit only by the corridor lighting seeping in and the glare of six or so computer monitors.

Chuck walked a step or two past Greg, and started to whistle but gave it up immediately. This roomful of hostile strangers silhouetted in the dim light of the monitors did not encourage such ebullience. Greg remained seated, he felt light-headed and nauseous. There was one thing whose loss he was never going to be able to get used to… .

At a signal from Burton, two military policemen walked up to Chuck and Greg to escort them out.

Chuck glanced at his watch. “Should take only an hour more,” he murmured over his shoulder to Greg. Then he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder how many hosts have been hit? It should be halfway through about now.” He felt a sense of desolation, a stark desolation, as he said that.

Greg didn’t reply so Chuck turned around to see why. Just a moment earlier, Greg had swivelled his chair to a nearby workstation, opened a web-browser, and typed in ‘news.yahoo.com’. Chuck could just see his face, a pale, drained oval staring at the monitor.

“Look,” whispered Greg, and Chuck looked at the monitor. (There is always a last time for everything. Even the Web.) Well knowing that all was lost, Greg had acted on emotion in bringing up that website, just for the sake of looking at it once more. But it was not to be. The familiar white-and-blue home-page loaded only partially before the web-browser froze –

‘Error: Server not responding.’

Across America, without any fuss, the Web was shutting down.

There have been a number of books written about this underground press. The granddaddy of them all is most certainly Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press by retired Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who began his journalism career as a member of Chicago’s groundbreaking Seed. More recent endeavors include John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and the just-released On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. Edited by Sean Stewart, On the Ground is essentially an oral history that features the recollections of several people that were involved with underground papers from around the United States. Unlike McMillan’s work which runs toward the academic side of things, Stewart’s text has a populist feel to it. The recollections are straight from the speakers’ mouths; sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and always honest.

The best part of the book are the graphics. As I read through the memories of the folks Stewart spoke with for On the Ground I was repeatedly surprised at how well I remembered various illustrations and photographs Stewart reprinted throughout the text. Like the papers his interviewees are remembering, the most striking thing about On the Ground is the layout. Even though I know the book was composed on a computer screen, the book looks as if it were laid out via the old cut and paste method by folks possibly stoned on weed and a day or two with minimal sleep–just like many issues of almost every paper Stewart discusses.

Being in the Movement and the counterculture was generally an upbeat experience. So was being in the Sixties underground media. Most folks were young and full of hope and those that were not necessarily young in years were where it counted–in their approach to life. Reporters did not cover stories as much as they took part in them and then wrote about it afterward. As Abe Peck says about working at The Seed: “We were very determined and unless something terrible happened–like [the murder of] Fred Hampton–up, just pretty upbeat.” Politics was omnipresent, whether it was at a very political paper like The Black Panther or a paper that had a more countercultural bent like The LA Free Press. This was because, as far as the authorities were concerned, everyone involved with the underground press–writers, printers, cartoonists, sellers and readers–were on the wrong side of the law and had to be watched. Sometimes, they were dealt with by methods legal and otherwise. This meant things like the stores selling papers being harassed by police and vigilantes; the withdrawal of advertising because of pressure from the FBI and other agencies; and assaults against persons involved by cops and others.

When Richard Nixon took over the White House in 1969 the repression of the Movement and counterculture intensified. Naturally, this meant that the media that represented these phenomena would be under greater attack. Black Panther papers were destroyed enroute to cities across the country and even to military bases overseas. Storefronts that newspapers worked out of were firebombed by vigilantes and shot at by police. Obscenity charges were brought against newspapers that then tied up the papers’ funds in court costs. High school underground press writers were thrown out of school and administrators suspended students selling and reading those papers. Although the reasons given for the expulsions usually had to do with attendance and other disciplinary infractions, the reality was that high school disciplinarians resented the threat to their authority and power. A friend of mine in Montgomery County, Maryland was suspended from the progressive John F. Kennedy High School for selling The Washington Free Press on campus. The issue in question featured a cartoon of a judge that had been involved in efforts to shut down the paper. The drawing showed the judge masturbating. Underneath the drawing was the phrase (made popular by the TV show Laugh-In) “here com da judge.” The cartoon was a response to a series of rulings made by the judge forbidding the distribution of the Free Press on high school grounds. These rulings and the school board decisions that preceded them were being challenged by the ACLU.

As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, many folks that had been on the front lines began to retreat for the sake of their sanity. Others just fell into the trap of individualism and self-satisfaction–an easy trap to fall into in the US of A. By 1974 or thereabouts, the curse of identity politics had taken over much of the political discourse on the left and effectively limited the reach of the Movement as people separated according to their gender, sexuality, and ethnic origins. Intentionally or not, this trend hastened the demise of the underground press and the movements it was a part of. However, its legacy remains. There are many websites and even some print journals that are more than observers of the protests and movements they report on. Journalist Alice Embree notes that “The underground press was the connective tissue; it spread the news …” When the papers began to fail, the connectiveness was lessened. The underground press was a vital part of what happened in the sixties. Sean Stewart’s wonderfully edited text On the Ground lets the reader know how and why that remains true. The striking graphics and compelling recollections in this text are at once a popular history and an inspiration.

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s right wing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

The bill effectively divides non-governmental organisations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel. The favoured ones, such as ambulance services and universities, will continue to be lavishly funded from foreign sources, chiefly wealthy private Jewish donors from the United States and Europe.

The “political” ones – meaning those that criticise government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax.

The grounds for being defined as a “political” NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.

One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organisations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.

At the same time Netanyahu wants the Israeli media emasculated. Last week his government threw its weight behind a new defamation law that will leave few but millionaires in a position to criticise politicians and officials. Mr Netanyahu observed: “It may be called the Defamation Law, but I call it the ‘publication of truth law’.” The media and human rights groups fear the worst.

This monkey must speak no evil.

Another bill, backed by the justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, is designed to skew the make-up of a panel selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with apppointees who share its ideological world view and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favoured candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organisations.

Senior legislators from Mr Netanyahu’s party are pushing another bill that would make it nigh impossible for human rights organisations to petition the supreme court against government actions.

The judicial monkey should see no evil.

At one level, these and a host of other measures – including increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and the recently passed boycott law, which exposes critics of the settlements to expensive court actions for damages – are designed to strengthen the occupation by disarming its critics inside Israel.

But there is another, even more valued goal: making sure that in future the plentiful horror stories from the Palestinian territories – monitored by human rights organisations, reported by the media and heard in the courts – never reach the ears of the international community.

The third monkey is supposed to hear no evil.

The crackdown is justified in the Israeli right’s view on the grounds that criticism of the occupation represents not domestic concerns but unwelcome foreign interference in Israel’s affairs. The promotion of human rights – whether in Israel, the occupied territories or the Arab world – is considered by Netanyahu and his allies as inherently un-Israeli and anti-Israeli.

The hypocrisy is hard to stomach. Israel has long claimed special dispensation to interfere in the affairs of both the EU and the United States. Jewish Agency staff proselytise among European and American Jews to persuade them to emigrate to Israel. Uniquely, Israel’s security agencies are given free rein at airports around the world to harass and invade the privacy of non-Jews flying to Tel Aviv. And Israel’s political proxies abroad – sophisticated lobby groups like AIPAC in the US – act as foreign agents while not registering as such.

Of course, Israel’s qualms against foreign meddling are selective. No restrictions are planned for right wing Jews from abroad, such as US casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, who have pumped enormous sums into propping up illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land.

There is a faulty logic too to Israel’s argument. As human rights activists point out, the areas where they do most of their work are located not in Israel but in the Palestinian territories, which Israel is occupying in violation of international law.

Privately, European embassies have been trying to drive home this point. The EU gives Israel preferential trading status, worth billions of dollars annually to the Israeli economy, on condition that it respects human rights in the occupied territories. Europe argues it is, therefore, entitled to fund the monitoring of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. More’s the pity that Europe fails to act on the information it receives.

Given the right’s strengthening hand, it can be expected to devise ever more creative ways to silence the human rights community and Israeli media and emasculate the courts as way to end the bad press.

Israelis are obssessed with their country’s image abroad and what they regard as a “delegitimisation” campaign that threatens not only the occupation’s continuation but also Israel’s long-term survival as an ethnic state. The leadership has been incensed by regular surveys of global opinion showing Israel ranked among the most unpopular countries in the world.

The Palestinians’ recent decision to turn to the international community for recognition of statehood has only amplified such grievances.

Israel has no intention of altering its policies, or of pursuing peace. Rather, Netanyahu’s government has been oscillating between a desperate desire to pass yet more anti-democratic legislation to stifle criticism and a modicum of restraint motivated by fear of the international backlash.

A cabinet debate last month on legislation against human rights groups focused barely at all on the proposal’s merits. Instead the head of the National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror, was called before ministers to explain whether Israel stood to lose more from passing such bills or from allowing human rights groups to carry on monitoring the occupation.

Deluded as it may seem, Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to turn the clock back 40 years, to a “golden age” when foreign correspondents and western governments could refer, without blushing, to the occupation of the Palestinians as “benign”.

Donald Neff, Jerusalem correspondent for Time magazine in the 1970s, admitted years later that his and his colleagues’ performance was so feeble at the time in large part because there was little critical information available on the occupation. When he witnessed first-hand what was taking place, his editors in the US refused to believe him and he was eventually moved on.

Now, however, the genie is out the bottle. The international community understands full well – thanks to human rights activists – both that the occupation is brutal and that Israel has been peace-making in bad faith.

If Israel continues on its current course, another myth long accepted by western countries – that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” – may finally be shattered.

• A version of this story was first published in the National, Abu Dhabi

Then he did something that is alien to United States corporate media culture. He behaved as an actual journalist and asked a tough, pertinent, no-holds-barred question. Here it is, as relayed by Husseini’s blog:

I want to know what legitimacy your regime has, sir. You come before us, representative of one of the most autocratic, misogynistic regimes on the face of the earth. Human Rights Watch and other reports of torture, detention of activists, you squelched the democratic uprising in Bahrain, you tried to overturn the democratic uprising in Egypt and indeed you continue to oppress your own people. What legitimacy does your regime have – other than billions of dollars and weapons?¹

Prince Turki, former Saudi intelligence supremo, former pal of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, former Saudi ambassador to the US, reacted by changing the subject.²

Were this to happen in the Middle East, Husseini would have been duly kidnapped by Saudi intel, tortured and snuffed out. Ask the remains of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. For much less — saying out loud in an Arab League meeting that King Abdullah was a traitor because he was encouraging the George W Bush administration to invade Iraq — the House of Saud did everything in its power, for years, to make sure Gaddafi was taken out.

Turki exhibits all the trademark democratic credentials of the House of Saud. He refers to the push for democracy in the Arab world as “Arab Troubles”.

After the Turki shoot

According to Husseini, on the same day of the news conference he received “a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club ‘due to your conduct at a news conference’. The letter, signed by the executive director of the club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting ‘boisterous and unseemly conduct or language’.”

Husseini, communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, which showcases critical journalism from all over the world, is a calm, thoughtful man with impeccable credentials. The accusation is not only bogus — it is downright pathetic.

Was this a one-off? Obviously not. Flashback to January 2009, at the same National Press Club, during a news conference by then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. When Livni was asked a tough question — once again by Husseini — the mike was cut, and the conference abruptly terminated. My cameraman, Sebastian Pituscan, was there with me.³

So this is how the much-lauded “freedom of the press” myth in the US actually works. If you perform the job of an actual journalist, telling truth to power, forget about attending press conferences at the White House, Pentagon or State Department. You won’t even be admitted in the building.

If you are an official from a “valuable ally” — such as the House of Saud or the regime in Israeli — you are assured a tough question-free pulpit anywhere you choose, especially if you’re fluent in English.

But if you are an official from a “rogue” regime, the maximum you can aspire is to be humiliated in public, as it happened to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University in New York. Especially if you don’t speak English, and most of what you say is lost in translation.

On the other hand, if you are a travelling US corporate media hack, you can get away with murder.

Example. During the Asian financial crisis, in 1997 and 1998, I went to countless press conferences where parachuted US hacks intimidated Asian leaders as if they were a bunch of hooligans (the hacks, not the leaders). Perky chicks emerging from some two-bit journalism school in the flyover states treated then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as if he was a child rapist, because he had established capital controls.

Mahathir turned out to be right — as Malaysia overcame the crisis much earlier than those, such as Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, that surrendered to the International Monetary Fund’s dreadful “adjustments”.

In 1989, Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square were hailed by US media as heroes standing up to tyranny. In 2011, American students protesting all across the country against financial tyranny are “lazy”, “bastards”, both, or downright criminalized.

United States corporate media could not possibly admit that repression in Tahrir Square by Egyptian riot police is exactly the same as repression in New York, Oakland, Portland or Boston by American riot police.

Still there’s no word from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization about setting up a “humanitarian” no-fly zone over selected Occupy sites in US cities. They are still consulting with the House of Saud.

1. See the blog.
2. Video of the exchange.
3. The exchange is here.

School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries.

It is the most challenged book four of the past five years, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

“It” is a 32-page illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, with illustrations by Henry Cole. The book is based upon the real story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins, who had formed a six-year bond at New York City’s Central Park Zoo, and who “adopted” a fertilized egg and raised the chick until she could be on her own.

Gays saw the story as a positive reinforcement of their lifestyle. Riding to rescue America from homosexuality were the biddies against perversion. Gay love is against the Bible, they wailed; the book isn’t suitable for the delicate minds of children, they cried as they pushed libraries and schools to remove it from their shelves or at the very least make it restricted.

The penguins may have been gay—or maybe they weren’t. It’s not unusual for animals to form close bonds with others of their same sex. But the issue is far greater than whether or not the penguins were gay or if the book promoted homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. People have an inherent need to defend their own values, lifestyles, and worldviews by attacking others who have a different set of beliefs. Banning or destroying free speech and the freedom to publish is one of the ways people believe they can protect their own lifestyles.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the most challenged books, according to the ALA, were J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, apparently because some people believe fictionalized witchcraft is a dagger into the soul of organized religion. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series was the 10th most challenged in 2010. Perhaps some parents weren’t comfortable with their adolescents having to make a choice between werewolves and vampires.

Among the most challenged books is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the vicious satire about firemen burning books to save humanity. Other books that are consistently among the ALA’s list of most challenged are Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Chocolate War (Robert Cormier), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Forever (Judy Blume), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), regarded by most major literary scholars as the finest American novel.

Name a classic, and it’s probably on the list of the most challenged books. Conservatives, especially fundamental religious conservatives, tend to challenge more books. But, challenges aren’t confined to any one political ideology. Liberals are frequently at the forefront of challenging books that may not agree with their own social philosophies. The feminist movement, while giving the nation a better awareness of the rights of women, wanted to ban Playboy and all works that depicted what they believed were unflattering images if women. Liberals have also attacked the works of Joel Chandler Harris (the Br’er Rabbit series), without understanding history, folklore, or the intent of the journalist-author, who was well-regarded as liberal for his era.

Although there are dozens of reasons why people say they want to restrict or ban a book, the one reason that threads its way through all of them is that the book challenges conventional authority or features a character who is perceived to be “different,” who may give readers ideas that many see as “dangerous.”

The belief there are works that are “dangerous” is why governments create and enforce laws that restrict publication. In colonial America, as in almost all countries and territories at that time, the monarchy required every book to be licensed, to be read by a government official or committee to determine if the book was suitable for the people. If so, it received a royal license. If not, it could not be printed.

In 1644, two decades before his epic poem Paradise Lost was published, John Milton wrote a pamphlet, to be distributed to members of Parliament, against a recently-enacted licensing law. In defiance of the law, the pamphlet was published without license. Using Biblical references and pointing out that the Greek and Roman civilizations didn’t license books, Milton argued, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable create [in] God’s image,” he told Parliament, “but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God.” He concluded his pamphlet with a plea, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

A century later, Sir William Blackstone, one of England’s foremost jurists and legal scholars, argued against prior restraint, the right of governments to block publication of any work they found offensive for any reason.

The arguments of Milton and Blackstone became the basis of the foundation of a new country, to be known as the United States of America, and the establishment of the First Amendment.

Every year, at the end of September, the American Library Association sponsors Banned Book Week, and publishes a summary of book challenges. And every year, it is made more obvious that those who want to ban books, sometimes building bonfires and throwing books upon them as did Nazi Germany, fail to understand the principles of why this nation was created.

The school was going to make the Presidential speech available to students, but allow the partisan and/or bigoted parental crowd to shield their probably already-sheltered offspring from anything threatening the pale (as in white, conservative and “good”) worldview that they themselves espouse and do everything in their power to instill in their children.

The image of former President George W. Bush (looking dazed and meek) sitting in a classroom full of kids while the terrorists attacked on 9/11, came to mind. Had that school contacted all their pupils’ parents to make sure it was okay to let Bush into their school for a press op? How would those children and or parents have been treated if they had refused to give their Commander-in-Chief audience?

Do they have a Gitmo for children?

When I first got the notice that children’s middle school was taking precautions regarding President Obama’s speech, I wasn’t surprised. I simply viewed it as another step in the baneful ossification of the Republican electorate. Fox News doesn’t encourage an informed American worldview. Dissenting voices confuse things. Contradictory viewpoints are anathema.

It’s much easier to despise President Obama if you ignore him. It’s much easier say he’s not an American or a Christian if you don’t listen to him speak. It’s much easier to claim he’s a Muslim and a terrorist if you’ve never watched him try to communicate his thoughts.

As long as all you expose yourself or your kids to is the opinions and views expressed by Fox News (or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck), it’s easy to maintain a conservative worldview because the indoctrination settles over you in layers, day after day, week after week. Eventually the sediment of close-mindedness ossifies and neither you nor your sheltered children have much of a chance of viewing President Obama as anything other than a dangerous interloper who must the enemy.

This kind of rigidity is not conducive to cognitive, much less intellectual development. Intelligence needs to be well-rounded, tested and, if possible, demonstrable. Single, slanted sources (as we now know from the lead up to the Iraq War) are not reliable or trustworthy.

If you don’t like President Obama, that’s your prerogative. I’m not a huge fan myself of late. If you don’t want to watch the address he makes to our children, fine. Ignore it. But don’t demand that your kids go to school or be at school with their eyes half-closed and their minds half open. They should be trusted to decide these things for themselves. We should love them enough to give them a chance.

My kids are too young to have sedimentary worldviews and I don’t want their minds or spirits fossilized before they’ve had a chance to be properly formed—by them—not me.

The problem with the “American conversation” these days is that we are not conversing. Too many people on both sides are simply talking to themselves or talking only amongst themselves.

This is the kind of atmosphere that usually makes it easier to lynch folks. This is the form of tunnel vision that created McCarthyism. This is the stunted thought process Nazi Germany was born of.

Closed minds and hearts may be more American than open minds and hearts these days. But they shouldn’t be. Especially when it comes to our children.

It reminds me of the old Eastern contemplation that asked “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is Fox News.

Right now the sound of one hand clapping is either side of any issue only listening to what it has to say.

For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination.

The media – at least the supposedly left wing component of it – should be cheering on this revolution, if not directly enabling it. And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it. Indeed, progressive broadcasters and writers increasingly use their platforms in the mainstream to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age.

A good case study is the Guardian, considered the most left wing newspaper in Britain and rapidly acquiring cult status in the United States, where many readers tend to assume they are getting access through its pages to unvarnished truth and the full range of critical thinking on the left.

Certainly, the Guardian includes some fine reporting and occasionally insightful commentary. Possibly because it is farther from the heart of empire, it is able to provide a partial antidote to the craven coverage of the corporate-owned media in the US.

Nonetheless, it would be unwise to believe that the Guardian is therefore a free market in progressive or dissident ideas on the left. In fact, quite the contrary: the paper strictly polices what can be said and who can say it in its pages, for cynical reasons we shall come to.

Until recently, it was quite possible for readers to be blissfully unaware that there were interesting or provocative writers and thinkers who were never mentioned in the Guardian. And, before papers had online versions, the Guardian could always blame space constraints as grounds for not including a wider range of voices. That, of course, changed with the rise of the internet.

Early on, the Guardian saw the potential, as well as the threat, posed by this revolution. It responded by creating a seemingly free-for-all blog called Comment is Free to harness much of the raw energy unleashed by the internet. It recruited an army of mostly unpaid writers, activists and propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic to help brand itself as the epitome of democratic and pluralistic media.

From the start, however, Comment is Free was never quite as free – except in terms of the financial cost to the Guardian – as it appeared. Significant writers on the left, particularly those who were considered “beyond the pale” in the old media landscape, were denied access to this new “democratic” platform. Others, myself included, quickly found there were severe and seemingly inexplicable limits on what could be said on CiF (unrelated to issues of taste or libel).

None of this should matter. After all, there are many more places than CiF to publish and gain an audience. All over the web dissident writers are offering alternative analyses of current events, and drawing attention to the significance of information often ignored or sidelined by the corporate media.

Rather than relish this competition, or resign itself to the emergence of real media pluralism, however, the Guardian reverted to type. It again became the left’s thought police.

This time, however, it could not ensure that the “challenging left” would simply go unheard. The internet rules out the option of silencing by exclusion. So instead, it appears, it is using its pages to smear those writers who, through their own provocative ideas and analyses, suggest the Guardian’s tameness.

The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns.

But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable.

A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left.

Jonathan Freedland, the paper’s star columnist and resident obsessive on anti-semitism, tweeted to his followers that the article was “important” because it was “urging the left to confront antisemitism in its ranks”.

I have no idea whether Atzmon has expressed anti-semitic views – and I am none the wiser after reading Newman’s piece.

As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article by her on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking.)

Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, the Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University.

But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents.

Instead Newman began his piece, after praising Atzmon’s musicianship, with an assumptive reference to his “antisemitic writings”. There followed a few old quotes from Atzmon, long enough to be intriguing but too short and out of context to prove his anti-semitism – except presumably to the Guardian’s thought police and its most deferential readers.

The question left in any reasonable person’s mind is why dedicate limited commentary space in the paper to Atzmon? There was no suggestion of a newsworthy angle. And there was no case made to prove that Atzmon is actually anti-semitic. It was simply assumed as a fact.

Atzmon, even by his own reckoning, is a maverick figure who has a tendency to infuriate just about everyone with his provocative, and often ambiguous, pronouncements. But why single him out and then suggest that he represents a discernible and depraved trend among the left?

Nonetheless, the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday.

The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh.

That Leigh could be considered a reasonable choice for a review of the book – which he shamelessly pilloried – demonstrates quite how little the Guardian is prepared to abide by elementary principles of ethical journalism.

Leigh has his own book on the Guardian’s involvement with Wikileaks and Assange currently battling it out for sales in the bookshops. He is hardly a disinterested party.

But also, and more importantly, Leigh is clearly not dispassionate about Assange, any more than the Guardian is. The paper has been waging an all-but-declared war against Wikileaks since the two organizations fell out over their collaboration on publishing Wikileak’s trove of 250,000 classified US embassy cables. The feud, if the paper’s talkbacks are to be believed, has finally begun to test the patience of even some of the paper’s most loyal readers.

The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga was divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian.

This act of – in the most generous interpretation of Leigh’s behaviour – gross stupidity provided the key for every security agency in the world to open the file. Leigh has accused Wikileaks of negligence in allowing a digital copy of the file to be available. Whether true, his own role in the affair is far more inexcusable.

Even given his apparent ignorance of the digital world, Leigh is a veteran investigative reporter who must have known that revealing the password was foolhardy in the extreme. Not least, it clearly demonstrated how

Assange formulates his passwords, and would provide important clues for hackers trying to open other protected Wikileaks documents.

His and the Guardian’s recklessness in disclosing the password was compounded by their negligent decision to contact neither Assange nor Wikileaks before publication of Leigh’s book to check whether the password was still in use.

After this shabby episode, one of many from the Guardian in relation to Assange, it might have been assumed that Leigh was considered an inappropriate person to comment in the Guardian on matters related to Wikileaks. Not so.

Instead the paper has been promulgating Leigh’s self-interested version of the story and regularly impugning Assange’s character. In a recent editorial, the paper lambasted the Wikileaks founder as an “information absolutist” who was “flawed, volatile and erratic”, arguing that he had chosen to endanger informants named in the US cables by releasing the unredacted cache.

However, the paper made no mention either of Leigh’s role in revealing the password or of Wikileaks’ point that, following Leigh’s incompetence, every security agency and hacker in the world had access to the file’s contents. Better, Wikileaks believed, to create a level playing field and allow everyone access to the cables, thereby letting informants know whether they had been named and were in danger.

Leigh’s abuse of his position is just one element in a dirty campaign by the Guardian to discredit Assange and, by extension, the Wikileaks project.

Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control.

At least Assange has the prominent Wikileaks website to make sure his own positions and reasons are hard to overlook. Other targets of the Guardian are less fortunate.

George Monbiot, widely considered to be the Guardian’s most progressive columnist, has used his slot to attack a disparate group on the “left” who also happen to be harsh critics of the Guardian.

In a column in June he accused Ed Herman, a leading US professor of finance and a collaborator on media criticism with Noam Chomsky, and writer David Peterson, of being “genocide deniers” over their research into events in Rwanda and Bosnia. The evidence was supposedly to be found in their joint book The Politics of Genocide, published last year, and in an online volume, The Srebrenica Massacre, edited by Herman.

Implying that genocide denial was now a serious problem on the left, Monbiot also laid into journalist John Pilger for endorsing the book and a small website called Media Lens that dedicates itself to exposing the failings of the corporate media, including the work of the Guardian and Monbiot.

Media Lens’ crime was to have argued that Herman and Peterson should be allowed to make their case about Rwanda and Bosnia, rather than be silenced as Monbiot appeared to prefer.

Monbiot also ensnared Chomsky in his criticism, castigating him for writing a foreword to one of the books.

Chomsky, it should be remembered, is co-author (with Herman) of Manufacturing Consent, a seminal book arguing that it is the role of the corporate media, including liberal media like the Guardian, to distort their readers’ understanding of world events to advance the interests of Western elites. In Chomsky’s view, even journalists like Monbiot are selected by the media for their ability to manufacture public consent for the maintenance of a system of Western political and economic dominance.

Possibly as a result of these ideas, Chomsky is a bete noire of the Guardian and its Sunday sister publication, the Observer.

He was famously vilified in 2005 by an up and coming Guardian feature writer, Emma Brockes – again on the issue of Srebrenica. Brockes’ report so wilfully mischaracterised Chomsky’s views (with quotes she could not substantiate after she apparently taped over her recording of the interview) that the Guardian was forced into a very reluctant “partial apology” under pressure from its readers’ editor. Over Chomsky’s opposition, the article was also erased from its archives.

Such scurrilous journalism should have ended a young journalist’s career at the Guardian. But ridiculing Chomsky is standard fare at the paper, and Brockes’ career as celebrity interviewer flourished, both at the Guardian and the New York Times.

Nick Cohen, another star columnist, this time at the Observer, found time to mention Chomsky recently, dismissing him and other prominent critical thinkers such as Tariq Ali, the late Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Diana Johnstone as “west-hating”. He blamed liberals and the left for their “Chomskyan self-delusion”, and suggested many were “apologists for atrocities”.

Monbiot’s article followed in the same vein. He appeared to have a minimal grasp of the details of Herman and Peterson’s books. Much of his argument that Herman is a “genocide belittler” depends on doubts raised by a variety of experts in the Srebrenica book over the figure of 8,000 reported executions of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces at Srebrenica. The authors suggest the number is not supported by evidence and might, in fact, be as low as 800.

Whether or not the case made by Herman and his collaborators is convincing was beside the point in Monbiot’s article. He was not interested in exploring their arguments but in creating an intellectual no-go zone from which critical thinkers and researchers were barred – a sacred genocide.

And to achieve this end, it was necessary to smear the two writers as genocide deniers and suggest that anyone else on the left who ventured on to the same territory would be similarly stigmatised.

Monbiot’s treatment of Herman and Peterson’s work was so slipshod and cavalier it is hard to believe that he was the one analysing their books.

To take just one example, Monbiot somehow appears to be unable to appreciate the careful distinction Herman’s book makes between an “execution” and a “death”, a vital differentiation in evaluating the Srebrenica massacre.

In the book, experts question whether all or most of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims disinterred from graves at Srebrenica were victims of a genocidal plan by the Serbs, or casualties of bitter fighting between the two sides, or even some of them victims of a false-flag operation. As the book points out, a post-mortem can do many things but it cannot discern the identities or intentions of those who did the killing in Srebrenica.

The authors do not doubt that a massacre, or massacres, took place at Srebrenica. However, they believe we should not accept on trust that this was a genocide (a term defined very specifically in international law), or refuse to consider that the numbers may have been inflated to fit a political agenda.

This is not an idle or contrarian argument. As they make clear in their books, piecing together what really happened in Rwanda and Bosnia is vital if we are not to be duped by Western leaders into yet more humanitarian interventions whose goals are far from those claimed.

The fact that Monbiot discredited Herman and Peterson at a time when the Guardian’s reporting was largely cheering on the latest humanitarian intervention, in Libya, was all the more richly ironic.

So why do the Guardian and its writers publish these propaganda articles parading as moral concern about the supposedly degenerate values of the “left”? And why, if the left is in such a debased state, can the Guardian’s stable of talented writers not take on their opponents’ ideas without resorting to strawman arguments, misdirection and smears.

The writers, thinkers and activists targeted by the Guardian, though all of the left, represent starkly different trends and approaches – and some of them would doubtless vehemently oppose the opinions of others on the list.

But they all share a talent for testing the bounds of permissible thought in creative ways that challenge and undermine established truths and what I have termed elsewhere the “climate of assumptions” the Guardian has helped to create and sustain.

It hardly matters whether all or some of these critical thinkers are right. The danger they pose to the Guardian is in arguing convincingly that the way the world is presented to us is not the way it really is. Their very defiance, faced with the weight of a manufactured consensus, threatens to empower us, the reader, to look outside the restrictive confines of media orthodoxy.

The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.

The paper’s role, like that of its right wing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough left wing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed.

Reading the Guardian, it is possible to believe that one of the biggest problems facing our societies – comparable to our compromised political elites, corrupt police authorities, and depraved financial system – is an array of mainly isolated dissidents and intellectuals on the left.

Is Atzmon and his presumed anti-semitism more significant than AIPAC? Is Herman more of a danger than the military-industrial corporations killing millions of people around the globe? And is Assange more of a menace to the planet’s future than US President Barack Obama?

Reading the Guardian, you might well think so.

Republican politicians clearly plan to make the Obama administration’s strained relations with Israel an important campaign issue in the Presidential race. By doing so, they hope to portray the President as insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. These Republicans will take their cue from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which utilizes a network of wealthy donors who generously contribute to both parties’ campaign coffers, provides free educational guided tours of the Holy Land and arranges audiences with Israeli officials for many members of Congress and their families. Led by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his democratic counterpart, Steny Hoyer, more than 80 House members are traveling to Israel as guests of AIPAC’s educational arm during the August recess, a time when you would expect most lawmakers to be back home consulting with constituents anxious about their economic future.

Republicans are not alone in their opposition to President Obama’s Middle East policies. Most Democratic politicians, who are equally beholden to AIPAC, have expressed discomfort with the administration’s handling of relations with the Netanyahu government.

Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told Politico, “… there are a lot of questions unanswered as to where this president stands on Israel.”¹ Many Democrats concur with the Republicans, although most are presently reluctant to publicly criticize Mr. Obama. The Politico web post also quotes an unnamed Democratic source admitting, “There’s a lot of anger about that [Obama’s Israel policy] both in the Obama administration and campaign and DNC [Democratic National Committee].”

Although Obama raised expectations that he could broker a just and enduring peace between Israelis and Palestinians, his record to this point has been abysmal. Neither side is talking to the other, and there are no prospects for negotiations in the near future. George Mitchell, who was Obama’s envoy and adviser to the region, resigned months ago, apparently out of frustration with the President’s unwillingness to press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu harder on negotiating permanent settlement with the Palestinian Authority. No new envoy has been appointed. Obama’s chief advisor now appears to be Dennis Ross. Placing Ross in charge of Israel policy indicates that Obama has lost any desire to tangle with the Israelis and their U.S. loyalists.

Despite the President’s recent retreat from confrontation with the Israelis or maybe because of it, the some Republicans sense they can reap political rewards by questioning Obama’s loyalty to our “important ally.” These politicians can rely on the U.S. media to assist them in this endeavor by continuing to depict the conflict from the Israeli standpoint.

The issues that will probably be raised in the election are: Obama’s initial demand that Israel freeze settlement activity in the occupied territories (which has been withdrawn), his call last May to use the pre-1967 borders as a basis for negotiations, and his administration’s supposed softness toward the alleged Iranian nuclear threat to Israel. Republicans may also demand that Obama cut off U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority (PA) if it persists in seeking statehood at the United Nations in September. Discontinuing financial assistance to the PA was part of a recent resolution which was passed by both the House and the Senate.

In the context of the sound bites that comprise much of political campaigning, these arguments could damage Obama even though all are easily refuted. If evacuating some settlements is to be an integral component of the peace talks, it is reasonable to stop their expansion before the negotiation. Obama’s statement concerning the 1967 lines in no way implied that Israel should return to the pre-1967 borders, as many of his detractors claim. The President’s position on Iran and his willingness to support an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities are not all that clear. Finally, even Israel does not want the U.S. to withdraw its financial support from the PA because that money pays the Palestinian police, who suppress armed resistance against the Jewish state.

Obama thought he could resuscitate the Oslo peace process and build on previous agreements made during the Clinton administration. His incentive for bringing the parties together is that it would improve U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim world. However, he found that Israeli political reality had shifted markedly since the Clinton years. Both the government and the population are presently quite comfortable with continuing the occupation. The West Bank provides Israelis with a captive market for exporting consumer goods, it is a good source of cheap labor (although fewer Palestinians are allowed to work inside the Green Line than were in the past), and is a source of water and other natural resources. It is difficult to assess the net economic effect of the occupation since Israel does not publish statistics on its costs and benefits.

In addition, a growing number of Israelis and most politicians in the ruling Likud party now believe that they are the rightful sovereign in the territories. This all means that even if the Netanyahu government enters into negotiations, its demands will be more unreasonable than the Israeli demands were during the failed Camp David negotiation in 2000 or the terms worked out between former Prime Minister Olmert and PA President Abbas just before Netanyahu took power.

The pro-Israel lobby is more powerful today than it was ten years ago. It exercises a tighter control on the U.S media. In 2003 the pro-Israel media watchdog CAMERA organized protests in 33 cities claiming that the programming of National Public Radio (NPR) was overly critical of Israel. The Boston station reportedly lost 1 million dollars as a result of the campaign. NPR coverage of the conflict has shifted markedly toward the Israeli viewpoint since those demonstrations. The Congress, ever beholden to AIPAC, has become more insistent that the executive branch not challenge the Israelis. The time is approaching when the political consensus may not even pay lip service to “the two-state solution.”

The Middle East policy and peace negotiations Obama initially championed were designed to improve U.S. foreign relations with Arab nations and the vast majority of the world that supports ending the Israeli occupation. The peace treaty that Obama desires is based on what President Clinton proposed in 2000. It is a treaty that severely restricts the sovereignty of a future Palestinian state by limiting its control of borders, foreign policy and defense capabilities. These are just a few of the unresolved problems. Thus it is not at all clear that any Palestinian government could sign such an agreement, or whether it would be accepted by the Palestinian people.

The Republican attack upon Obama’s Israel policy will place him in an uncomfortable position. Many members of his own party are urging him to defuse the GOP criticism by backing away from brokering a Middle East peace. They will tell him to refrain from even sparse and weak public criticism of Israel. The Democrats are afraid that any friction between Obama and Israel will cost them and the President dearly in campaign contributions and at the ballot box in 2012.

The President may stand behind his policies and explain that what he is attempting to do is in the best interest of the U.S. and Israel. If he does so, he can count on the support of the Jewish pro-peace lobby JStreet. Its assistance will, however, be small consolation in the face of the combined strength of AIPAC, Congress and the media.

President Obama has demonstrated that he is extremely reluctant to challenge powerful political forces. He has consistently demonstrated an ability to adopt positions he has previously opposed in order to appease powerful interests. Under these circumstances, it is easy to envision the President embracing the extreme pro-Israel stance of Congress and AIPAC. It is more difficult imagining him continuing to defend his policies and chasing a U.S.-brokered two-state solution that after almost two decades appears increasingly out of reach.

If the President concedes in the upcoming debate on Israel, and becomes more Bush-than-Bush on this issue, as he has become on many others, it will reposition the public discourse on Israel and Palestine toward a truly delusional and hopeless place. Will the U.S Presidency become as beholden to Israel as the US Congress? Will this set a precedent for a future total and unequivocal surrender to the pro-Israel lobby by the U.S. executive? The day soon may be upon us when the weak admonition, “it is not helpful,” in regard to massive illegal Israeli settlement construction will be interpreted as a bold and out-of-bounds attack on our strong ally and friend, Israel.

It has been a dream of the pro-Israel lobby to transform the U.S. presidency into an institution that is as subservient to its dictates as the United States Congress has become. Unfortunately, there may never be a better time than between now and the 2012 election to realize this terrifying vision. If the election debate weakens the Presidency, it will solidify Israel’s hegemony over the territories it occupied in 1967 and make U.S. relations with the Arab world much more difficult.

1. Marin Cogan and Jake Sherman, “Hill Fight Simmers Over Palestinian Statehood Vote,” Politico, August 8, 2011.

Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and TV channels have supported all the US-UK wars over the past 30 years, from Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands war in 1982, through George Bush Senior and the first Gulf War in 1990-91, Bill Clinton’s war in Yugoslavia in 1999 and his undeclared war on Iraq in 1998, George W Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Tony Blair on his coat tails, and up to the present, with Barack Obama continuing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now adding Libya to his tally of seven wars.

The consequences in Iraq include a million dead people, four million refugees, a devastated country and the West’s corporate capture of huge oil resources.

David Swanson observes correctly that ‘Murdoch has blood on his hands’ and reminds readers of Article 20 of the UN International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights: ‘Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law.’

Murdoch admitted his complicity during a televised debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he said that his media empire had tried to shape public opinion in support of the Iraq war. That he largely failed in his aim, thanks to the scepticism of the public towards the incessant war-mongering, does not detract from the scale of his wrongdoing.

The Hall Of Shame: Samples From The Archives

Consider some of the evidence of the Murdoch empire’s attempts to manipulate the public. The Sun screamed ‘BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM’ on its front page following Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ of September 2002. When UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix found no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Sun’s hysterical headline was ‘HE’S GOT ‘EM. LET’S GET HIM’. Once the war was underway, the Sun and News of the World were full of propaganda about the need to get behind ‘our boys’ (and girls). In the United States, Fox News was perhaps even worse: a primitive mix of ‘patriotism’ and vitriol directed against even mild dissenters.

The Times could be relied upon to put a more genteel sheen on the propaganda. Michael Gove, then a Times journalist, now Secretary of State for Education, wrote:

We have no alternative but to launch a pre-emptive war against Iraq to prevent Saddam completing his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Massive military force must be deployed to remove Saddam’s regime. (Gove, ‘We need Bush and not Saddam calling the shots,’ The Times, August 28, 2002)

Gove remains in close contact with his former colleagues. George Eaton reports in the New Statesman this week:

The Education Secretary listed 11 meetings at which executives from the company [News Corp] were present, including seven with Rupert Murdoch. Gove met the News Corp head more times than any other minister and had dinner with him twice last month.

Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, works for News International.

In 2004, after Fallujah had been subjected to a brutal US onslaught leaving at least 800 civilians dead, a Times editorial declared: ‘the US military had to act decisively or fail those entitled to its protection.’ (Leading article, ‘Taking Fallujah,’ The Times, November 10, 2004)

In 2006, the prestigious Lancet journal published a paper estimating the Iraq war death toll at around 650,000. The study was led by researchers from the world-renowned Johns Hopkins University and followed standard epidemiological practice for estimating mortality in war. John Tirman, who commissioned the Lancet study, notes in a recent article that ‘the Murdoch media machine did its part in attempting to discredit the household surveys’ which formed the basis of the paper:

The reaction to the Johns Hopkins estimate of 650,000 “excess deaths” came in for savage treatment, trashed as a “political hit” in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. This campaign against the scientists had a chilling effect.

The ‘chilling effect’ meant the corporate media failed to give the study the prominence it deserved. But awkward silences and embarrassed shoe-gazing is standard behaviour when we, the good guys, are doing the killing.

Like most newspapers, The Times and Sunday Times have published good journalism: Michael Smith’s excellent investigative reporting on the Downing Street Memos springs to mind. So too does Jerome Starkey’s work to expose the horrific killing of Afghan schoolchildren in night-time raids led by US forces. The Times editors were, however, on hand to portray the atrocity in the required context of a ‘just war’: ‘The legitimacy of the cause in Afghanistan is called into question by civilian deaths. The conflict needs to be conducted with regard for the native population.’

Not content to justify war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Murdoch press has lined up Iran in its crosshairs. In 2006, Times columnist Gerard Baker donned his fatigues and boots to declare: ‘The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran.’

In 2008, The Times once again came under the Media Lens spotlight for its unbalanced coverage on Iran. Our analysis of the output of the paper’s then chief foreign commentator, Bronwen Maddox, did not go down well. In fact, we received threats of legal and police action from Alastair Brett, then legal director of Times Newspapers Limited. This was the first time we had been subjected to such outrageous threats. Peter Wilby, former News Statesman editor, suggested it was ‘an extraordinary reaction’ from the giant newspaper group, while Noam Chomsky said pithily that the Times reaction was ‘pretty sick’.

In 2010, Times propaganda over the Iranian nuclear ‘threat’ was ramped up yet again when the paper published documents which, it confidently asserted, showed Iran’s intention to develop a trigger for a nuclear weapon. In fact, the authenticity of the documents was highly questionable, with some intelligence experts claiming they were forgeries most likely created as part of an attempt to further boost war fervour against Iran.

Meanwhile, The Times continued to shore up Western foreign policy in its attack on WikiLeaks in an editorial last October:

Nowhere in WikiLeaks’s self-serving self publicity is there a judgment of what the organisation is achieving for the Iraqi nation, and what it hopes to achieve… Its personnel are partisans intervening in the security affairs of Western democracies and their allies, with a culpable heedlessness of human life. (Leader, ‘Exercise in Sanctimony; The release of military files by WikiLeaks is partisan and irresponsible,’ The Times, October 25, 2010)

The Times managed to miss the target by a full 360 degrees. It is the corporate media, not WikiLeaks, which demonstrates a ‘culpable heedlessness of human life’ in its endorsement of the West’s fixed foreign policy: to attack, bomb, invade, torture and steal based on any pretext that can be fed to the public.

The above is but a tiny sample of the abysmal historical record of News International. Journalist Neil Clark correctly noted of Murdoch’s papers that ‘no other newspaper group has as much blood on its hands when it comes to propagandising for illegal and fraudulent military conflicts.’

His Master’s Voice: Cues From The Boss

In 2001, reporter Sam Kiley left The Times following ‘pro-Israeli censorship’ of his reporting. Why the censorship? Kiley believed the explanation lay in Murdoch’s heavy investment in Israel and close friendship with the then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Indeed, Murdoch has travelled to Israel numerous times and met many of its leaders. Kiley said:

In the war of words, no newspaper has been so happy to hand the keys of the armoury over to one side than the Times.

The Times foreign editor and other middle managers flew into hysterical terror every time a pro-Israel lobbying group wrote in with a quibble or complaint and then usually took their side against their own correspondent.

He added: ‘No pro-Israel lobbyist ever dreamed of having such power over a great national newspaper.’

Robert Fisk, now at the Independent, explained that he too left The Times after interference with his reporting on the Middle East:

The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes [a US Navy guided missile cruiser] had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American ‘leaks’ that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.

Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it.

Fisk said that he believed Murdoch did not personally intervene. However: ‘He didn’t need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence.’

In March 2009, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) honoured Murdoch with their ‘National Human Relations Award’. In his speech, Murdoch declared his own version of Middle East reality, including this gem: ‘In Iran, we see a regime that backs Hezbollah and Hamas now on course to acquire a nuclear weapon.’

So Murdoch’s editors and columnists can be in no doubt of where the boss stands on the ‘threat’ of Iran. News Corp employees would also do well to heed the master’s views on Israel, made clear in the same speech: namely, that the state is an integral part of the West as ‘defined by societies committed to freedom and democracy’. Only weeks after the brutal onslaught by Israeli forces in Gaza, with around 1400 Palestinians killed including over 400 women and children, Murdoch had this to say to his audience:

My friends, I do not pretend to have all the answers to Gaza this evening. But I do know this: The free world makes a terrible mistake if we deceive ourselves into thinking this is not our fight.

In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace … who reject freedom … and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb, and the human shield.

Against such an enemy, I will not second-guess the decisions of a free Israel defending her citizens. And I would ask all those who support peace and freedom to do the same.

Murdoch’s pro-Israeli position is reflected in his newspapers. According to Isi Liebler, an Australian Jewish community leader who now lives in Israel, Murdoch’s ‘affection’ for the state ‘arose less out of his conservative sensibility than from his native Australian sympathy for the underdog fending off elites seized by conventional wisdoms’. Liebler added: ‘He’s met Israelis, he’s been to Israel, he’s seen Israel as the plucky underdog when the rest of the world saw Israel as an occupier.’

But the pro-Israel lobby is now ‘warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf’ his media empire. ‘Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune’ has ‘supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.’

One recent article in the Jewish Chronicle was even headed, ‘Is this curtains for pro-Israel Murdoch?’

The Farcical Faustian Pact

Andrew Neil, a former Murdoch editor, once said that although the media mogul would not intervene directly at The Times or the Sunday Times, ‘he does regard himself as someone who should have more influence on these papers than anyone else.’

During his time as Sunday Times editor, Neil ‘was never in any doubt what the News Corp boss thought about issues.’ It obviously helped that Neil and Murdoch ‘share[d] a common worldview’; indeed this is a requirement for all editors and proprietors: ‘An editor has to be on the same planet [as the paper’s owner]. You don’t have to be on the same continent or the same country for all of the time but you need to be on the same planet.’

When it came to Murdoch’s tabloid press, direct intervention by the owner did take place: ‘If you want to know what Rupert Murdoch really thinks read the editorials in the Sun and the New York Post because he is editor-in-chief of these papers.’

Neil continued: ‘There is no major geopolitical position that the Sun will take whether its attitude to the euro or to the current European treaty or to whom the paper will support in the upcoming general election. None of that can be decided without Rupert Murdoch’s major input.’

In 1999, News of the World exposed the former Tory MP Jeffrey Archer as a liar and perjurer, which led to him being imprisoned. But Murdoch had not wanted the Archer scoop to be published and sacked the editor Phil Hall for defying him. It was a clear example of what happens to editors who step out of line.

The threat of proprietorial interference, then, is always present; whether directly (Murdoch’s tabloid press) or by knowing exactly what the owner’s views are and conforming to them (Murdoch’s ‘quality’ press). Denying or downplaying all of this, even in defiance of the clear ‘evidence’, is ‘in everyone’s interests’, said Neil, adding: ‘It suits the editors and proprietors to continue this farce.’

This is not limited to the Murdoch press. Throughout the corporate media, editors and proprietors enter a ‘Faustian pact’ to pretend that interference does not happen; editors do not want to be seen ‘as puppets of proprietors.’ But, in effect, that is what they are.

Thus, it is important to look beyond the Murdoch media empire at the wider context of the scandal engulfing News International, a corrupt police force and a supine political establishment. Seumas Milne made some good observations along these lines in the Guardian recently:

These revelations [of phone hacking] should ram home the reality that Britain has become a far more corrupt country than many realise. Much of that has been driven by the privatisation-fuelled revolving door culture that gives former ministers and civil servants plum jobs in the companies they were previously regulating.

Milne notes that several ‘opportunities’ to clean up this corruption ‘have come and gone’:

First the official deception of the Iraq war, then the collapse of a deregulated banking system, then the exposure of systematic sleaze in parliament revealed a growing crisis in the way the country is run. Now that crisis has been shown to have spread to the media and police. Official Britain isn’t working. Sooner or later, pressure for change will become unstoppable.

It is hard to argue with Milne’s article. But he is silent, for obvious reasons, about the Guardian’s important role as a liberal gatekeeper that helps preserve the established order. As we have repeatedly pointed out in our media alerts and books, this role is a crucial missing ingredient in any serious discussion of the nexus of power, politics and the media. As ever, we have to look to someone commenting from beyond the confines of the self-regarding Guardian for the unvarnished truth. John Pilger is one such voice:

the truth is, Britain’s system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the “news”, defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of “free speech”. This will be strengthened by the illusion that a “bad apple” has been “rooted out”

Even if Murdoch’s empire were to collapse, there would still be no free press, no responsible corporate news agenda and no brave new world of media democracy. For these to take root, the stranglehold of corporate media and corporate politics needs to be broken. That will happen only when enough people demand change.

He who is most noble is he who raises his voice for those silenced by oppression.
– Jonathan Azaziah¹

…the public wants what the public gets
– The Jam²

Twenty years ago when I first arrived in Japan I taught English to a Tokyo University associate professor in engineering. The young and normally reserved man sometimes complained about his boss who was a professor in nuclear engineering and gave him troublesome tasks at the office. I once asked him what he thought about earthquake-prone Japan using nuclear power and he replied, “it’s crazy.” Of course, Tokyo University is the hub of Japan’s nuclear power industry and most executives for TEPCO are graduates (as are many top politicians) from Japan’s most elite university.

Today, “four out of five Japanese want to see Tokyo abandon nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima atomic crisis…”³ But any professional in industry, government or media would have no chance of career advancement if they spoke out against nuclear power. This problem is well documented in an article from Speigel, the German news magazine, which details the insidious and poisonous nuclear tentacles that penetrate the most important aspects of Japanese society.⁴

As a recent Japanese news editorial points out, a small cabal of criminals think they literally own the country and will not allow democracy or the free market to interfere with their aims to control the energy system:

[I]n adopting a scheme for paying damages to the victims of the accidents at Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government has ended up guaranteeing the survival of Tokyo Electric Power Co. the operator of the stricken plant. Radioactive substances from Tepco’s Fukushima No. 1 plant have contaminated surrounding cities, farms, forests and the ocean….

The federation’s staunch opposition to separation of generation and transmission was shown in its rejection of adoption of the “Smart Grid” system that the U.S. is eager to promote — a electricity network that can efficiently and stably deliver electricity supplies by intelligently integrating the behavior of power generation entities and power users. The federation quibbled, saying the Japanese transmission system was “already smart enough.” It fears that the Smart Grid might open the way for outsiders to enter the electricity market, thus breaking the monopoly of the nation’s 10 utilities….

The power industry is also reluctant to build facilities to change the frequency of the alternating currents, so that electricity generated in the western half of the country, where electricity’s frequency is 60 hertz, can be transmitted to the eastern half of Japan where electricity’s frequency is 50 hertz, or vice versa — even though such interchangeability would inevitably reduce regional imbalances of supply….This reluctance is based on a fear that the interchangeability issue may strengthen the argument for separation of power generation and transmission.⁵

About ten years ago I attended a press conference on the dangers of Japan’s nuclear power stations, which was held at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo. It was well attended due to the deadly Tokaimura nuclear accident which had just occurred in 1999. An audience member asked Kenji Higuchi — a journalist and teacher who has written several books about the dangers of nuclear power — why a documentary film about him and the dangers to Japan’s nuke workers, Nuclear Ginza,⁶ was not allowed to be shown on Japan’s government news station, NHK. “It was squashed from the top down.” I have shown the film many times over the years to my university students, but I can’t reach millions of people.

Fast forward to June of 2011 when Higuchi gave a lecture at a small but prestigious college in Tokyo. One conscientious Japanese professor at that college has been alerting his students to the nuke issue and promoting Higuchi’s books. My contact who attended the meeting of only 10 people said that it was Higuchi’s belief that he was not allowed a larger venue because he is too direct in his speaking manner and names the companies that are complicit with the Nuclear Industry. The students’s parents who work for some of those companies might not like hearing such bold criticisms. Higuchi also surmised that the government has implicitly threatened universities not to touch on the nuclear issue in any critical way, such as allowing anti-nuke rallies on their campuses.

I teach part-time at this particular college and have freely published many articles there, but for the first time my submission which was to be on the nuke disaster was turned down because the issue was deemed “too sensitive.” It is noteworthy that one of the more academically open, meaty and progressive-minded schools in Tokyo is now telling people to keep their mouths shut. When I wrote a reply to the editor asking that if I would submit to peer review they would still consider my article, I received no response.

At another school which has an elite science and engineering department, my first year students have responded well to my cynical jokes about nuclear power. When I open the windows in the morning and say, “hey let’s let in the fresh air and radiation, it’s good for you,” everyone nervously chuckles while shaking their heads. The students provide very sensible and conscientious written comments to the articles I give them to read about the nuclear situation.

On the other hand, by second year many students realize that if they are in certain fields of study, it will not do well for their careers to criticize nuclear power. When we had discussions about energy issues, many gave articulate defenses of the various forms alternative energies available and how they should be developed– but in the end some groups said, “but we still think nuclear is the best!”

There is another aspect to this problem, it is simply “air headedness.” When choosing topics for presentations, some groups came up with the uninspiring and disputatious topic of “global warming,” while others choose “beer,” “chocolate,” “television,” and so on. Not real substantive stuff. One teacher suggested to me the reason many students to do not want to think about Fukushima is because Japan previously considered itself superior to its neighbors and has now taken it on the chin. This is sore subject for Japanese pride and Fukushima was a rude awakening reminding Japanese that they are merely human after all. Another explanation may be more postmodern and universal: 3D-HDTV = Triple Dumbing – High Deafening Talmud Vision. Too much “bread and circuses” and “dread and circumcision” has damaged our humanity and empathy for nature and others.

The censorship of critics of the Nuke Industry can be seen at all levels. For example, even “[a] government official who released a book on May 20 criticizing the government’s response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster has been asked to leave his post…. [Mr.]Koga has… pushed for changes to the country’s energy policy, such as a separation of electric power generation and transmission fiercely opposed by power companies…”⁷ Obviously this fellow was looking for an early retirement and was “asked” to leave his prestigious career for telling the truth.

In the meantime, as the Fukushima nuclear reactors which have had “corium” meltdowns continue to irradiate the nearby environment– which ultimately puts all of Japan’s inhabitants in danger– we are being told to “forget about it and go back to sleep.” Yet we can see many hopeful signs of concerned citizens nationwide organizing to address the dangers of spreading radiation and to eventually put an end to nuclear power generation in Japan.

1. Mask of Zion
2. The Jam – Going Underground
3. Most Japanese wish to scrap reactors
4. Japan’s Nuclear Cartel
5. Power industry’s chokehold
6. Nuclear Ginza Japan’s secret at-risk labor force
7. Ministry official who released book criticizing gov’t over nuke crisis asked to resign

The Sicarii played a principal role in provoking the Roman onslaught against the Jewish population in Jerusalem and in the eventual destruction of the city. Their identifying characteristics: victim hood, no compromises, use of daggers to resolve issues, generating hate, and creating victims. Two questions still require responses: Why did the Sicarii pursue a suicide effort and why did the first century Jews tolerate their presence?

History tells us that populations never learn from history and proceed to commit the same mistakes. The Jews have followed this principal; Sicarii have been prevalent throughout Jewish history and have often brought tragedy to Jewish populations.

Roman crushing of the Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem in 67 AD did not stop Jewish rebellions in Roman territories. Thirty eight years later, Jewish tribes in Crete, Cyrenaica (modern day eastern Libya), Cyprus, Mesopotamia and the Aegean took advantage of Roman struggles with attacks from other nations to start the Kitos war. According to Roman history, the war “spiralled out of control resulting in a widespread slaughter of Roman citizens and others by the Jewish rebels. The rebellions were finally crushed by Roman legionary forces, chiefly by the Roman general Luseis Quietus, whose name gave the conflict its title.”

The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the Cyrene massacres:

By this outbreak Libya was depopulated to such an extent that a few years later new colonies had to be established there.

In Cyprus a Jewish band under a leader named Artemion had taken control of the island, killing thousands of civilians. Under the leadership of one Artemion, the Cypriot Jews participated in the great uprising against the Romans under Trajan, and they are reported to have massacred 240,000 Greeks (Dio Cassius, lxviii. 32). A small Roman army was dispatched to the island, soon reconquering the capital. After the revolt had been fully defeated, laws were created forbidding any Jews to live on the island.

Wars undertaken with no possibility of permanent victory; just the opposite, certain destruction of the Jewish populations. And all this done when history considers the Jews relatively accepted and free to practice their religion in the Roman Empire.

In the first century AD, Jews lived across the Roman Empire in relative harmony.

Protected by Rome and allowed to continue their religion, everything was fine until rebellion in Judaea led to a major change in the practice of their faith.

By the beginning of the first century AD, Jews had spread from their homeland in Judaea across the Mediterranean and there were major Jewish communities in Syria, Egypt, and Greece. Practicing a very different religion from that of their neighbors, they were often unpopular. As a result, Jewish communities were often close-knit, to protect themselves and their faith.

Jews had lived in Rome since the second century BC. Julius Caesar and Augustus supported laws that allowed Jews protection to worship as they chose. Synagogues were classified as colleges to get around Roman laws banning secret societies and the temples were allowed to collect the yearly tax paid by all Jewish men for temple maintenance.

There had been upsets: Jews had been banished from Rome in 139 BC, again in 19 AD and during the reign of Claudius. However, they were soon allowed to return and continue their independent existence under Roman law.

If fighting and losing two wars against impossible odds was not sufficiently punishing, Simon Bar Kokhba, a proclaimed Messiah, commandered another revolt against the Roman Empire during the years 132–136 AD. The revolt temporarily succeeded in establishing an independent state of over parts of Judea for two years before the Roman army overcame the rebellion. Result: The Romans barred Jews from Jerusalem, except for Tisah B’av, a fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples

Sicarrii among the Jews continued for centuries with false Messiahs and troubling figures who defied authority in losing causes.

For several reasons, the initial Zionist thrust resembled the Sicarii actions.

Althought their philosophy had little appeal to the Jewish people of the late 19th century, Zionists behaved as if they spoke for the Jews, and their actions threatened them.

The first Zionist Congress (1887) was to have taken place in Munich, Germany. However, due to considerable opposition by the local community leadership, both Orthodox and Reform, it was decided to transfer the proceedings to Basle, Switzerland. Theodore Herzl acted as chairperson of the Congress which was attended by some 200 participants. (Only 69 were delegates)

The Reform Judaism’s (representing most of American Jews at that time) 1885 Pittsburgh Platform called for Jews to adopt a modern approach to the practice of their faith.

Instead of a nation, the Pittsburgh Platform envisions Jews as a religious community within a nation. For this reason, there was an explicit rejection of Zionism, which was viewed as unnecessary because American Jews were at home in America.

The 19th century emancipation movements liberated west and middle European Jews and permitted them to integrate into European society. The Russian Jews, who had major problems, didn’t consider Zionism as a relief for their difficulties.

Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from Russia–2 million to America and only 30,000 to Palestine. Another 500,000 went to the large capitals of Western Europe.

Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism

Rather than benefiting world Jewry, the Zionist message endangered it. Nations were uncertain about their Jewish citizens, who were portrayed by Zionists as having different consciences and mind-sets. Zionism presented Jews as having allegiance to an external ideal, willing to leave their native country if the opportunity became available.

By 1914 the original Zionism had become a stagnant adventure. The Balfour Declaration and the allied victory in World War I revived the Zionist mission. Despite the revival and the establishment of the state of Israel, it’s unproven that the original Zionism succeeded or even has a presence. The Jews who immigrated to Israel immediately after 1948 arrived for mainly economic and political reasons and not to fulfill a Zionist mission. Israel even claims the massive number of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East (Mizrahi) did not arrive voluntarily, but were forced out of their homes. Zionism has not persuaded a great number of Jews to leave their western nations, not deterred them from greatly participating in their nations’ economic and social gains and not prevented them from integrating themselves into their nations’ cultures. The Economist (Jan.11, 2007) mentions that only 17% of American Jews regard themselves as pro-Zionist and only 57% say that “caring about Israel is a very important.” Even if Israel were not primarily a Jewish nation, but politically similar to other western nations and willing to give the immigrants special largesse, the odds favored the willingness of the North African and Middle East Jews to leave their homes and move to any democratic nation in the Middle East, Jewish or non-Jewish..

The attempt to recruit the world in an embargo against Nazi Germany in 1933 can be considered a Sicarii effort.

Jewish organizations initiated an international boycott campaign as a response to German discriminatory policies and abuses of German Jews. In March 1933 the American Jewish War Veterans and the American League for the Defense of Jewish Rights launched the first US Jewish boycott campaign.

Although, undoubtedly originated with proper intentions, the boycott was doomed and counterproductive. Nations struggling with economic depressions did not want to disturb world trade, had enough of their own problems and weren’t prepared to encounter Germany. The Nazis, who would never have been moved by any embargo, took advantage of the intended boycott to try to prove their argument that Jews engaged in international conspiracies. The boycott campaign further enraged the Nazis against the Jews and tightened the discrimination against them.

The underground war fought by Jewish militias against the British Mandate exposed more Sicarii.

The Altalena, carrying members of the right-wing Irgun militia, was sunk in 1948 after arriving in Tel Aviv against the Israeli government’s orders. The encounter left 16 Irgun members and three IDF soldiers dead.

The King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 killed 91 people, including17 Jews.

The Jewish underground organization Lehi assassinated British Minister Resident in the Middle East Lord Moyne, and United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte. Although banned by the Israeli government and called “a criminal group of terrorists” by the UN, Israel granted a general amnesty to Lehi members on 14 February 1949.

Eventual Israeli Prime Ministers committed each of these atrocious actions. David ben Gurion ordered the sinking of the Atalena; Menachem Begin carried out the King David hotel bombing and Isaac Shamir was known as a leading member of the Lehi.

The modern Sicarii, those who claim to speak for the Jewish people but are bringing them to eventual decline, have replaced metal daggers with character assassination, defamation, attacking words, wounding innuendos and bludgeoning malice towards their fellow Jews. They have a unique focus of utmost loyalty to the state of Israel. Jews who don’t share their views and refuse to profess similar loyalty receive their daggers of condemnation.

Neither historical, scientific, or archaeological findings and knowledge, supports a great Hebrew civilization. Jewish legal claims to the Levant, and singular heritage to Jerusalem, contradict the Iscarii focus. Nevertheless, the Iscarii consider fellow Jews who are educated with this knowledge as stupid and deceived traitors and unleash their wrath to intimidate and silence them. Preposterous expressions, such as ‘self-hating’ Jews, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and all those who are antagonistic to Israel are anti-Semites, exhibit a lexicon of hate that guides their actions. The over-used epithets expose the Sicarii’s lack of facts, reality and logic to support their arguments. The rights of others – no consideration at all.

These insulting and ugly epithets solicit examples of “Jewish baseness,” Jewish lack of regard for others, and Jewish feelings of superiority and fuel anti-Jewish feeling. The Iscarii promote the objects they rally against, and which they actually need to validate their existence.

Iscarii websites unashamedly list fellow ‘self-hating’ Jews.

http://www.heebz.com/categories/Self-Hating-Jews
http://masada2000.org/list-K.html

These lists pit Jew against Jew, upset innocent persons and defame Jews. Some persons noting the social quality of individuals in the list have asked to be placed on it. However, the lists are not jokes, but an insult to the Jewish people.

Words beget violence and the more radical Iscarii are driven to violence. The most well known appearance of their violence is the attacks on Tikkun’s Rabbi Lerner.

Only one day after Rabbi Lerner presented the Tikkun Award to South African Justice Richard Goldstone, at a celebration of Tikkun‘s twenty-fifth anniversary attended by over 600 people at the University of California, Berkeley, Lerner’s home was again assaulted by extremist Zionists who once again plastered posters over his home. This is the third assault on Lerner’s home since he announced he would be presenting the award to Justice Goldstone, whose report on Israel’s human rights violations during the Israeli assault on Gaza in Dec. 2008 and Jan.2009 was denounced by the State of Israel and by the AIPAC-dominated House of Representatives last year.¹

An array of well known and consistent dagger throwers in universities, radio, television and print media target those who criticize Israel by trying to curtail professorial tenure, halt publication of books, prevent production of plays, and sidetrack printing of articles. These attackers don’t dialogue or debate issues. They are not interested in truth or reality. Sparked by, “We are always right,” they engage in character assassination, slander and defamation to subdue their rivals. Most disconcerting is their use of the World War II Holocaust to advance their agenda. In addition to appointing themselves as the voice of live Jews, the Iscarii assume themselves to be the voice of dead Jews.

A true story of a typical Iscarious

Seated at breakfast in a Jerusalem hostel, a forty year old English woman explains why she is a new arrival in the West Bank settlement Ma’ale Adumim. She never felt at home in an England filled with anti-Semites. Here, in Israel she feels she has come home. Turn to an American who is asked if he feels the same. He explains he never faced anti-Semitism in his life and never felt anything else but being an American. His words enrage the British expatriate who leaps up and utters: No, first you are a Jew. Then, you are an American.

It is natural that many Jews, regard their birth nation as their primary faith and remain separated from Israel. Many regard Israeli laws to be intolerant, not protective of minorities and somewhat comparable to the Nazi Nuremburg laws. Some relations:

• Since Jews can only be married in Israel by orthodox rites, Jews cannot receive an intermarriage ceremony within the state.
• Although the term right of return refers to a principle of international law and gives any person the right to return or re-enter his country of origin, the Israeli Right of Return only permits foreign Jews to immediately gain citizenship and does not permit immigration of non-Jews, such as Palestinian refugees.
• An Israeli, according to the so-called Nakba law, must wholeheartedly and unreservedly celebrate the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. Any groups or institutions that mourn the event, which was accompanied by the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab residents from their homes – the Nakba, or Catastrophe – or that deny the state’s “Jewish and democratic nature” can now be denied state funds.
• The Citizenship Law allows the state to revoke citizenship and imprison anyone convicted of acting against “the sovereignty of the state”.
• Fifty rabbis signed a declaration calling for Jews not to let Arabs rent apartments in their communities. The state owns almost all the land and, except for special situations, refuses land sales to non-Jews.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt noted similarity between the racist foundation of the state of Israel and the 1935 Nuremburg laws. Both laws were based on an idea of Judaism as a race, not as a religious practice, regardless of whether individuals identified themselves as a Jew or belonged to the Jewish religious community.

Many Jews refuse to accept the rationalization that the oppression of the Palestinian people is a temporary measure brought about by Israel’s security considerations. They see no reason to be drawn into the conflict in which they have no part. Not so with the new Iscarii.

Three huge granite stones rest comfortably on the top of Midbar Sinai Street, in Givat Havatzim, Jerusalem’s northernmost district. Cut to specification, the imposing stones represent one of several preparations by the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement’s to erect a Third Temple on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Since the Islamic Wafq owns and controls all the property on the Haram al-Sharif, by what means can these stones be transferred to the Temple Mount and how can a Temple be constructed there? Not by any legal means. The stones are a provocation, which the Israel government refuses to halt. Since the Iscarii now have the occupation forces on their side, it becomes obvious they will be more threatening. In ancient times, their efforts contributed to the destruction of Jerusalem. Now it could be the entire Middle East.

1. Zionist Extremist Hate Crime Against Rabbi Lerner: Third Attack on His Home and the Limits of “Freedom of the Press,” 3/17/2011, Berkeley, California

Their letter and with a copy of the op-ed I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times are attached.

Allow me to refute the lies and innuendos that these “colleagues” have levied against me, behind my back. Since each of you received the detractors’ letter, I am sending you this rebuttal.

1. The purpose of my op-ed was to define Holocaust denial. That should be clear from the byline “What do deniers really mean?” It was submitted in response to the media frenzy and demonization of President Ahmadinejad who addressed the UN General Assembly and whose picture was shown above my guest appearance piece. Instead of acknowledging this, my faculty detractors feigned outrage that it appeared on the eve of Yom Kippur. I had nothing to do with the timing of the article and make no apology for when it appeared vis-à-vis a Jewish holiday.

2. More egregiously these faculty detractors claimed to know my “personal beliefs” and claimed that I mis-used my title of professor emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges to lend them credence. That is simply a lie. Nowhere are my personal beliefs stated. Moreover my op-ed included an exceptionally long disclaimer showing The Colleges neither condone nor condemn what I had written.

3. The faculty detractors claim that “Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever.” That is simply not true. There are a number of scholars who write about the typical Holocaust narrative and are willing to fight the slime hurled at them by ardent Zionists and by others who feel it their duty to protect the narrative which serves as the sword and shield of apartheid Israel. (BTW, our former provost and former William Smith Dean both demanded that I not use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel; granted the term was used in the Israeli press and later by President Carter, but it was not “suitable discourse” on our campus where we routinely claim to support free speech and diversity of opinion.)

4. The faculty detractors write that “denying undisputed facts of the holocaust (sic) is not a way to show support for the Palestinians.” First, the three tenets of Holocaust revisionism are clearly not “undisputed. To the contrary, they are hotly and passionately disputed; people’s lives are ruined when they even question these “facts.” In fourteen countries you can get jail time for disputing “facts” surrounding the Holocaust.

Second, disputing “facts” is what science and historical analysis is all about. We academics have no problem discussing and disputing whether or not Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, or if President Obama’s birth certificate is real, or if President Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack on Hawaii was imminent, but we are not allowed to discuss or dispute the six-million figure.

Third, what gives these detractors the credentials to pontificate on what supports or hurts Palestinians? Some of them have been responsible for feting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges anti-Palestinian demagogues including Wiesel and even Netanyahu. They helped give Madeleine Albright our highest humanitarian award, which is a disgrace in light of her statement that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it.” Was I the only one to protest that award?

I have team-taught a senior course on the Palestinians. I have published books and articles on the Palestinian Naqba and the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. I have built the only United States memorial to their dispossession and ethnic cleansing. I don’t need, nor accept, biased comments on how to support Palestinians.

5. Calling Holocaust historical revisionism “Holocaust denial” is unnecessarily pejorative. It might be fine for Fox News, but it is not conducive to academic discourse. To call Holocaust revisionism “thinly veiled anti-Semitism” is simply untrue and it demeans scholars and others, including Jews, who question the Holocaust doctrine as we are fed it in hundreds of films, books, articles, and commentaries. Terms like Holocaust Industry, Holocaust Fatigue, Holocaust professional, Holocaust wannabes, and Holocaust High Priest were not coined by “deniers” or anti-Semites; they were coined by Jews. (The High Priest quip is an obvious reference to Wiesel; it was made by Tova Reich in her book My Holocaust. Tova’s husband, Walter Reich, was the former director of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.)

In 1946 the US government told us that over 20 million people were murdered by Hitler. Now that figure is said to be 11 million; it is literally carved in stone at the US Holocaust Memorial. For years we were told that over 4 million were killed at Auschwitz, but by the early 1990s that figure was reduced to 1.5 million. Wiesel tells us that people were thrown alive onto pyres; he claims to have seen it with his own eyes; today Yad Vashem trained guides at Auschwitz say that is not true. These are examples of historical revisionism and they are not inherently anti-Semitic.

6. It is most interesting to see academic colleagues say, “(a)s we all know … the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.” That means they either deny that Palestinians have been (and continue to be) ethnically cleansed or they agree that Israel is performing genocide of the Palestinian people.

7. While the faculty detractors found my speech to be “abhorrent,” they seemed unable to find fault with a single fact I presented. So they resorted to name-calling and labeled the piece “hate speech” and “unsupported vitriol” and smeared my name to hundreds of people. I am surprised that Abe Foxman or the Mossad did not come calling.

8. The detractors genuinely were concerned about the op-ed’s impact on our Jewish students, staff, and faculty. But maybe it is time for all members of the community to see the Holocaust for what it really was and not the unquestionable, unimpeachable, doctrine that makes Jewish suffering superior to that of other people. Maybe it is time to recognize that Zionism as a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine began long before the Holocaust and that Zionist discrimination, dehumanization, and dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be excused by it. Maybe it is time to see that since over half the population (within the borders controlled by Israel) is not Jewish, the dream of creating a Jewish state has failed. Walling in the non-Jews or putting them in Bantustans or driving them into Jordan will not make it a purely Jewish state. The nationalist allegiance to “blood and soil” has been a failure and that should be the real lesson of the Holocaust.

9. To say that my op-ed “does not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse’ is nonsense. The piece is well written, well substantiated, and quite humane.

10. But the faculty detractors are quite right about one thing; they were deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. Diversity and perspectives outside the mainstream are to be encouraged, but not if they question Jewish power, Israel, or Holocaust doctrine. Apparently that is beyond the pale.

11. The demand to President Gearan to remove my title of Professor Emeritus is both classic and stupid. Consider how little it would accomplish. I would be supposedly ashamed and I would have to buy a walking pass at the gym that would cost me $40 a year. Would it save HWS from being associated with my writings? Of course not; I would simply use the title of “Former Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges” with no disclaimer.

But what it would really do is to cast me into the briar bush with Norm Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Paul Eisen, Henry Herskovitz, Gilad Atzmon, Rich Siegel, and Hedy Epstein (a Holocaust survivor), all friends of mine and all anti-Zionists. Professors Ost, Linton, and Mertens apparently saw this and I credit (or blame) them for my still having the emeritus title.

Lest I seem irreverent or unscathed by this widely-circulated smear letter from my detractors, allow me to admit that I have been hurt by it. Many faculty and other HWS folks now shun me as a persona non grata largely because they only read the slime and never a rebuttal. Of course until now there could be no rebuttal because the smear letter was withheld from me. (Even the Provost’s request to send me a copy was refused.)

My former student and long-time friend, David Deming, who is now the Chair of the HWS Board does not answer my letters. President Gearan does not answer them either. Board member, Roy Dexheimer, disparages me and wonders if I fell “off my meds.” Another Board member, Stuart Pilch, took it a step further and made a threatening phone call to my home and a promise “to hunt me down.”

But the biggest disappointment is with those faculty detractors who never came to discuss or complain about what I had written, but instead chose to spin their own interpretation, which was full of lies and half truths, and then disseminate their smear as widely as possible. Should any of you be one of the signatories, my door is open for further discussion. And if you know the names of the other signatories, I would appreciate your sharing that information with me.

Pro-Israel lobbying. An Israeli Cabinet minister, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and a massive American-Zionist campaign have succeeded in pressuring Facebook into removing the third Intifada page, which clearly calls for an all-Arab uprising against Israel.

According to the Facebook “cause” page, the plan for the intifada would go as follows:

Friday, May 13th
In Egypt, the epicenter of the Arab world, the biggest Arab country and from Tahrir square at the heart of Cairo where the whole Arab spring has sprung and gained fervent momentum, this massive Arab intifada will be launched.

Millions will gather once again in Tahrir square at the heart of Cairo but this time to call for all Arab-march toward Israel.

This mass protest will come two days prior to the actual march, as a clear message to Israel and the rest of the world that liberating Palestine is the core cause for every Arab in the Middle East. And that restoring Jerusalem is all Arab’s sacred mission

Sunday, May 15th
To commemorate the Palestinian exodus day 1948 (Nakba) when well over 750000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled out of their home land by Israel, similar number of Thousands angry Arab protesters from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon along with their Palestinian brothers from Gaza and the occupied west bank will advance toward Israel in what they call, the third intifada.

In their march, they will be denouncing the ongoing Zionist occupation of the Arabic land of Palestine and calling for internationally recognized independent Palestinian state over its legitimate pre-1967 borders with Eastern Jerusalem as its capital.

Those fair Palestinian demands have been begged for by all ways known to diplomacy over the last 60 years. But since diplomacy has utterly failed the Arabs of Palestine and since politicians have granted them nothing except despair and Diaspora, they thought it was time they put their life into their own hands.

And what could be more timely than this Arab spring, which a lot of Arabs could not see or rather imagine approaching its full bloom without Palestine being included.

This revolutionary plan that has been publicly posted on a Facebook “cause” page and given the daring title “the third Palestinian Intifada” following two previous Palestinian Intifada uprisings. The first was sparked in 1987 and the second or what is known as the Aq’sa intifada in 2000; during both uprisings, Israel had to live through years of domestic unrest and worldwide condemnation of its apartheid and oppressive policy toward the Palestinians.

But as this “cause” page managed to attract almost 300,000 fans and an incredibly growing number of visitors in just a few days, Israel grew restlessly nervous about it. And nervously restless Israel acted in response.

What was worrying Tel Aviv is the fact that, so far, all Arab uprisings have been kicked off on Facebook pages. So, under the boiling situation in the Arab world this Facebook call couldn’t be underrated nor neglected.

Bullying Facebook

With the growing traffic to the Facebook page and the spread of the call for a third intifada Israel couldn’t just stand watching underneath its big sign that reads: “The only democracy in the Middle East.”

Quickly switching signs, Israel grabbed the “Israel-hating and anti-Semitism” sign and put on its despotic mask, and before the administrators of the third intifada knew it, Yuli Edelstein, Israel’s Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, wrote Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder and told him,

the social network site has great potential to rally the masses around good causes, and we are all thankful for that. However, such potential comes hand in hand with the ability to cause great harm, such as in the case of the wild incitement displayed on the Third Palestinian Intifada page.

A Facebook statement said on Monday of the first week of April that while the “third Intifada” page “may be upsetting for someone, criticism of a certain culture, country, religion, lifestyle, or political ideology, for example — that alone is not a reason to remove the discussion.”

At that point it was clear to Israel that this Zuckerberg is not getting the message, Israel didn’t not seek his eloquent definition of the site’s terms for freedom of speech, removing the page that what Israel wanted. So Israel, with its Zionist lobbies and pro-Israel campaigns began to pull some strings and show some muscles and it did not take long before Mr. Mark Zuckerberg came to his senses and reevaluated the page as inciting violence against Israel.

And to make sure this will always be a lesson, learned the hard way, less than a week after facebook removed the intifada page; Zuckerberg was hit by a law suit seeking more than $1 billion in damages, for doing too little too late. The law suit has been filed by one of the American Zionist puppets by the name of Larry Klayman.

After the page was no longer available on Tuesday, ADL director Abraham Foxman commented,

By taking this action, Facebook has now recognized an important standard to be applied when evaluating issues of non-compliance with its terms of service involving distinctions between incitement to violence and legitimate calls for collective expressions of opinion and action. We hope that they will continue to vigilantly monitor their pages for other groups that call for violence or terrorism against Jews and Israel.

But that will be mission impossible, for how could Facebook go after thousands of Arab users who replaced their profile photos with the poster photo of the third intifada. Will Facebook be able to pull down the other pages that began to play the same intifada tune?

Why can’t Israel face the truth? It is crystal clear; it needs no terrorizing of Zuckerberg or Goldstone. Arabs will never accept Israel as a neighbor state as long as Palestine is being systematically wiped off the map by the Zionist military dictatorship.

Israel could intimidate Facebook but not the millions of awakening Arabs.

If Facebook is to block any page or any account that speaks unfavorably of Israel that will mean that Mr. Zuckerberg is going to sacrifice the hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims who are already using Facebook worldwide.

Could Facebook, contrary to its previous role in boosting the Arab uprisings, save the Israeli domino piece from falling?

“How low will they (the Guardian) go?” asks the Zionist watchdog.

The Judeo-centric site defines Latuff as “one of the most prolific anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.” It is also outraged  with Latuff depicting “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as a sinister looking (gun wielding) Orthodox Jew.”

The Jewish site claims that much of Latuff’s work “expresses anti-Semitic themes. Some of his caricatures seem to suggest that Israel is a unique and immutable evil in the world.” I am afraid to disappoint the Zionist watchdog; the Jewish State is uniquely evil, and this fact has been exposed numerous times in the last years by UN fact finding missions.

The Zionist blog claims that Latuff’s work “includes imagery frequently suggesting a moral equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany – and he has explicitly acknowledged that this is indeed his political view.” Again this is far from being a revelation. We all see equivalence between the ‘Jews only State’ and Nazi Germany.

The Latuff cartoon above depicts Sharon kissing Hitler. Indeed this is an appropriate representation of  the Sabra and Shatilla mass murderer

The above Latuff cartoon was published by Indymedia on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Indeed the most appropriate way to criticise the transformation of Palestine into a set of isolated concentration camps.

The image above makes sure there is no doubt that the Jewish state has morphed into the new Nazi Germany by showing the tracks of the Israeli tank shaped like swastikas. Not many people realise that Zionism actually predates Nazism.

The cartoon above conveys  the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert cradling a dead Palestinian baby. It suggests that, not only do Israeli leaders intentionally kill Palestinian children, but also that such child murder is popular among the Israeli public and helps Israeli politicians get elected. Bearing in mind that 94% of the Israeli Jewish population supported IDF murderous tactics along Operation Cast Lead, Latuff seems to be overwhelmingly realistic.

This cartoon, comparing Zionism to the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed a necessary comparison considering the fact that the Jewish state is driven politically and spiritually by racist supremacist ideology.

And, finally, an Israeli so evil as to douse gas on a burning Lebanese child. This cartoon is in fact prophetic. It isn’t just Lebanon, it is the entire region.

Let’s hope that the Guardian will soon also liberate itself of its Zionist and war advocates. We need much  more Latuff and less Nick Cohen.

I should mention here that the open letter was only the latest in a series of numerous letters to the editor, blog comments, and long and short articles submitted for publication in internet and print outlets going back three years or more, all of which attempt to raise awareness about the essentially reactionary nature of the Democratic Party generally and the Obama campaign and presidency specifically.

In the course of these efforts, certain websites moved to eliminate my participation either as a front page poster or in their comment sections where I had previously been a frequent contributor.

Before I describe some of these instances I will make two introductory qualifications.  First, I am by no means the only one who has been subjected to similar treatment, and I hope this piece will encourage others to document their experiences; our coming forward could, I believe, address some of the underlying causes of what is now a rather dysfunctional climate for discourse on the left.  Second, as I have pointed out elsewhere, there is a need for editorial gatekeeping.  Indeed, I have argued that there should be more, not less, than there is.  Rather, the following should be seen as an argument for this gatekeeping function to be exercised responsibly to promote, rather than undermine, the left’s agenda.

With those qualifications out of the way, here is the thumbnail history.

As of this writing, I have been banned from the comment sections of two websites, OpenLeft.org and Commondreams.org.  In the first of these cases,  there was at least a superficial justification for their having done so.  In a posting I made a description (of Open Left founder and Obama’s transition team member Mike Lux) which could be characterized as ad hominem — understood to be a “capital” offense on blogs.

In retrospect the posting in question seems more likely to have served an excuse for management’s enacting a broader agenda which was to rid their site of a group of skeptics of the Democratic Party centric organizing model taken as a given by management. The trajectory of Open Left manager, Chris Bowers, to Daily Kos where purges of so-called “Naderites” are routine would seem to lend credence to this explanation, though I should say that, in fairness, I could possibly have escaped banning by couching my objections more diplomatically, and probably should have done so in any case.

My other banning was from commondreams, both from the comment section and, it would seem now likely, also from their front page which had run some of my articles in the past. While the cause was unstated, as is typical of the internet at its most Kafkaesque, it seems that it was provoked by my attempting to use the site for lining up signatories for the open letter.  Both I (and, I suspect, they) knew that commondreams was a natural place to do so.  This was because the comment section routinely demonstrates that the readership, as opposed to the management,  is sympathetic with the basic goal of the open letter — to protest left establishment apologetics for the Obama administration and the imposed silence about it on outlets like Commondreams.

All this came to a head in the following postings which appeared on the site in reaction to one of my comments mentioning www.protestobama.org. I’m copying one thread in its entirety as it provides an indication of the kind of virtual paranoia the imposition of arbitrary censorship results in.

Aquifer December 20th, 2010 11:44 am.

GW, have you noticed how my response to your comment and your response to it, in which i commented on the removal of another poster’s, John Halle’s, response, have been removed. Since then, John Halle’s original comment, the first posted on this thread, and my responses to him, including one pointing out how his response had been removed, have, in turn, also been removed. When i tried to respond again to your response, I got a message “you are responding to a comment which doesn’t exist.

i guess my days on CD are numbered – that’s OK, cause this whole area of censorship is really getting to me …..

RV December 20th, 2010 11:46 am

You and I may disagree on some things, but you are absolutely correct about that!

Aquifer December 20th, 2010 11:59 am<

So, RV, I am correct about my days being numbered, or about censorship, or both?

In any case, here’s a simple suggestion for the first step in solidarity – how about all of us here protesting the censorship of posters? Good grief, if we can’t do that, what’s the point of even posting? i stand in support of “teddy” who was banned, for god knows what, and in protest of all these posts that have been removed for CONTENT reasons only – no cuss words, no insults, just pointing out either censorship, or, in the case of john Halle, a “protestobama” petition, apparently …..

One wonders how many other posts have been removed for similar reasons, either our “fellows” here don’t know or don’t care. I think this needs to be a theme mentioned and pursued on every thread here ……

L:et’s (sic) see how long this comment lasts …..

The answer to “Aquifer’s” question was quickly provided.  Commondreams’ reaction to the above (and similar reader uprisings which have periodically taken place) was to disappear these and other postings and ban those participating in the discussion, myself included.  The postings can no longer be found on the site and were copied by me in anticipation that the commondreams staff would do exactly as they did.

****

Counterpoised to these brute force tactics, a more traditional and effective means of information management is to prevent positions judged unacceptable from finding their way into print in the first place.  In its internet variant, this takes the form of editorial decisions with respect to the content of front page postings at the major left websites.  Central among these was the topic of the open letter; namely, the maintenance of “critical support” with respect to the Obama campaign and subsequent administration.  Those who viewed the Obama phenomenon with grave suspicion both for its stated  policies and for its likely effect in undermining opposition movements, almost never found their positions represented on the front pages of any but the most marginal internet outlets, and, for that matter, in left print publications.

It is true that the far left spectrum of the internet represented by Counterpunch allowed challenges to this conventional wisdom.   But even here, leftists such as Norman Solomon, David Michael Green and others could be found making the case for “critical support” and in some cases expressing unbridled enthusiasm at the prospect of the nation’s first African American president.  In the months after the election, as predictions of even Obama’s most unenthusiastic supporters collided with the hard right reality of the Obama administration, pieces stating the obvious fact of the matter — that virtually the entirety of the mainstream left and much of the so called “radical left” — got it wrong remained hard to place.   Again, speaking from my own experience, what I regard as one of my better pieces “Who Got it Right” was consigned to the far fringes of the web, having been rejected for publication from the all of the major left sites I sent it to.

It is obvious that no single rejection by itself, or, for that matter, a boxful of them, constitutes censorship.  As stated earlier, articles can, and should, be rejected based the quality of the expression, factual accuracy, logical consistency and relevance among other factors. Proving censorship requires demonstrating that a piece meeting normal standards for publication was rejected purely on the grounds of its content having been considered as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, which meant in this specific case challenging what had become a widespread left conventional wisdom with respect to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign.

Circulating the open letter was a useful exercise in that it demonstrated conclusively through some of the responses it received that the leading left wing sites engaged in censorship in the service of this agenda.  That there is a paper trail attesting to this was due to a unique circumstance.   Had the letter been merely an over the transom submission by a relative unknown such as myself it would have been summarily rejected without any acknowledgment of its existence.  As it was, however, the letter was signed by a rather large cross section of leading left intellectuals and activists forcing some of those sites which ignored it to to reveal their grounds for doing so.  Or, insofar as they lacked such grounds, they were required to invent them.

The latter was the case for Znet which found its proprietor Michael Albert accusing the authors of “deliberately misleading” himself and other potential signatories, “fooling” them into believing that those receiving the letter (and criticized by it) were, in fact, endorsing it.  Albert would evidently use this canard as a justification for removing the open letter from the site after having ran it on the site for a less than a day, replacing it with a rebuttal by Bill Fletcher which was front paged for a full three days.  The original piece was subsequently purged from the Znet website — a google search bringing up a link to a blank document.

While Counterpunch ran the open letter, that it did so grudgingly was revealed in a note rejecting a follow up piece from editor Alexander Cockburn who described the “bleats out to progressive leaders” as “uninteresting.”

They sent me to the doctor that morning, a health maintenance organization: skilled, meticulous care, responsive to the patient as a human being and a trivial expense for the people who sent the car. In darkest Africa you have a right to health. Uganda has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights – the right to health is Article 12. Ugandans wrote the covenant directly into their constitution. Under constitutional Article XIV(b), the state “shall endeavour to ensure rights, opportunities and access to health care.” In Uganda’s constitution, medical services are a national objective and directive principle of state policy, Objective XX. Uganda’s no exceptional case – human rights are the state of the nation-building art.

The project I was there for went ahead without a hitch. It was volunteer food security work, the best work I’ve ever done for free. As soon as I finished – it’s always that way – my hip, or back, went out, revealing tissue where I thought there was only bone and reducing me to howling fetal helplessness, just in time for the return flight. Back home in the states I did not seek medical attention. It wasn’t worth the risk.

Here in America you have to avoid the health care system as you avoid the correctional system. They’ll treat you with abandon and demand exorbitant surprise payments based on secret rules, and maybe find some agonizing malady that costs too much and cut you off for crossing some “i” or dotting some “t” on a form, and then to survive you’ve got to beggar yourself and your loved ones with snowballing debt. Or they’ll dose you with some lethal snake oil that’s corruptly deemed safe. That’s with the best plan money can buy. The industry’s a viper’s nest. Fifty-nine million of us have no health care coverage at all. People in 48 countries live longer than we do. It’s not because we’re fat or prone to vice. We’ve been taking better care of ourselves but we’re still being killed by the perfidy and waste that plagues our health care.

With education, food, and housing it’s the same, you have to watch your step. The state has weaned us off security at home. You used to hear about freedom from want or fear but those are quaint old Norman Rockwell virtues, long revoked. It so happens that those freedoms are among your human rights. In our patriotic murk here in America we’ll occasionally hear about human rights, when some enemy breaches them, or when we ostentatiously uphold them, always vaguely. We never go into the detail of chapter and verse. Just eight percent of Americans can tell you where our human rights are written down (in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) Half of us do not believe that any such document exists.  You can get perfectly respectable schooling here and never know your rights. The state prefers that human rights be a warm glow in our hearts, and not specific binding obligations. That’s why we never, ever hear about the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR).

The CESCR is one of a pair of treaties that define the state’s duties to the people. The International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights (CCPR) protects people from arbitrary state coercion.  The CESCR makes states responsible for the living conditions they permit. Together the two covenants bind states to keep the promises of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

When a state becomes a party to the CESCR it acknowledges peoples’ self-determination, free disposition of natural wealth, and specific listed rights:

• The right to work (Article 6)
• The right to minimal standards for working conditions (Article 7)
• The right to form and join trade unions (Article 8)
• The right to social security, including social insurance (Article 9)
• The right to protection of the family (Article 10)
• The right to an adequate standard of living (Article 11)
• The right to physical and mental health (Article 12)
• The right to education (Articles 13 and 14)
• The right to cultural life and benefits of science (Article 15).

It sounds like so much motherhood and apple pie, perhaps, but the state’s decree is not enough. In acceding to the treaty, states commit to progress. If the strongest share nothing else with the weak, they can share this commitment to advancement. It’s the least that a country can do.

The United States is one of 28 countries that have not ratified the CESCR. We’ve fallen in with a motley group, by no means all laggards: some Micronesian specks on the map, much of the Mideast, Singapore, Hong Kong, Andorra, Botswana, Bhutan, Myanmar, they’ve all demurred so far, for diverse reasons. But none of them pretend to be a shining example for the world, as we do.

In American lore, there are two kinds of rights, ours and theirs: the dual covenants came of tensions between individualist American rights and the collectivist ones asserted by Soviets. The UN split the draft treaty in two, so the story goes, consigning the suspect, Bolshy rights to the CESCR. It wasn’t quite that simple. There was plenty of cold-war gamesmanship, of course. As the treaties took shape, a tag team of Soviet gadflies reveled in America’s embarrassments: A.P. Pavlov needled us about housing predation and ruinous health-care cost, plus ça change…, and Alexander Bogomolov had a ball when the NAACP petitioned the UN for redress.

But the primary split wasn’t red versus blue. The battle lines united the superpowers against the rest of the world. Neither superpower wanted the CESCR. Pavlov called it “weak and completely unacceptable.” The Russians tried to negate each article with countervailing duties to the state, or provisos that the state would see to it that rights are granted. Soviet Delegate, Alexander Borisov, played dumb or worried every jot and tittle. The US resisted more passively. To head off preparation of the covenants, America tried to put their reporting provisions into the UDHR: that way the declaration would gauge compliance instead, but toothlessly, with no basis in binding treaty law. Our government then tried to strip the covenant of legal, “self-executing” force. When the majority decided on a binding treaty, the US largely sat out the work of drafting it.

Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the UN Human Rights Commission at the time. Her minder, James Hendrick, described what the State Department wanted: a “carbon copy” of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. The CCPR gave America’s citizens far too many rights. The CESCR was even worse. Either convention would subject the state to international scrutiny, and judge the state’s treatment of the people. Our statists would never accept that without a fight. The American Bar Association said it best, in 1967: “The regulation by a state of relations between it and its own citizens… constitutes the very essence of domestic jurisdiction.” In America’s naive youth it was thought that citizens should regulate the state and not the other way around. The state did not own citizens then, citizens chose to constitute their state. But now the state doles out your rights like food stamps, only so much and no more.

Charles Malik of Lebanon summed up the debate and the global majority view: “I’m not arbitrarily setting the state against the individual. But which, I ask, is for which? I say the state is for the individual.” The issue pitted the statist superpowers against humanists from older civilizations. The majority ruled. The humans prevailed. Mrs. Roosevelt slipped America’s leash and sided with the world. The treaties took shape over tea at her house. The world’s other founders are all but unknown here at home: Malik, John Humphrey, René Cassin, Chang Peng-Chung. They weren’t working for America, they were working for its people, against the express wishes of the state.

Conservatives fought the threat of foreign rights with the Bricker Amendment, a well-funded popular movement to keep treaty law from granting rights at home. In 1954 President Eisenhower preserved constitutional treaty powers by defeating the amendment in Congress, at the price of the Dulles Doctrine. With the Dulles Doctrine, the State Department promised to keep the government free from human rights obligations. ¹

Despite the superpowers dragging their feet, the UN General Assembly approved both covenants in 1966. The wider world took our resistance in stride and went ahead without us. Europe and Latin America built human rights into their regional institutions and began to lay down precedents and case law. In the 1980s the UN set out the state’s obligations in the Siracusa Principles and the Limburg Principles, so that each covenant entailed a set of detailed, concrete standards states must meet. Our UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick dug in her heels for her government, but the rights that she derided as “a letter to Santa Claus” came to seem more like an entrance exam for some posh school that we can’t get into. The new standards made it clear that our country wasn’t up to snuff. Meanwhile new countries used human rights as a nation-building template. America was obliged to approve, but fledgling nations increasingly went elsewhere seeking practical human-rights advice. Our pretension to a crucial leading role in human rights was wearing thin.

The nearest we came to freedom from want was 1976. The time seemed right. We had imposed civil rights on our white supremacists, so their fight against human-rights treaty law became a lost cause. President Kennedy had skirted the Dulles Doctrine, letting the Senate dip a toe in the water with an easy one, a treaty abolishing slavery. We had already swallowed some economic and social rights to join the Organization of American States. Yet we weren’t feeling wholly secure in our rights: hints of COINTELPRO’s secret police state had come out. The sacrifice of Richard Nixon, and his pardon, didn’t lift the people’s mood. Seizing the moment, Jimmy Carter campaigned as a champion of human rights and won.

The following year Carter’s fervent lip service led to some awkward moments at the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). At the CSCE conference in Belgrade, allies joined our enemies in pointing out that America loves to talk about human rights but they won’t put anything in writing. Chastened, Carter signed both covenants as soon as he got home, but to convince the free world he had to get them ratified in time for the next conference, in Madrid.

To grease the skids and avoid controversy, Carter’s State Department festooned the conventions with caveats, a shyster’s recital of ifs, ands, or buts. They made reservations meant to bend the rules for states; understandings meant for Congress; and “declarations” and “statements” with no meaning whatever in law. The State Department marked up the treaty like third-graders signing a plaster cast:

• What we couldn’t slip into the treaty itself, we put in a declaration: the treaty has no legal force, we said, it’s not self-executing.
• We backed away from any hint of obligations on the state. Goals, that’s what they are, we said.
• With another declaration that was pointless in law, we reminded everyone that we have property rights. For good measure we declared that twice.
• Article 5 set us off. That article tries to make it clear that the treaty cannot be used to limit rights. In response, we affirmed our American freedom of speech. It wasn’t the non sequitur it seemed, if you knew what we were thinking: we were anxious to make sure that the cultures we hate could not inhibit hate speech with their rights.
• Article 28 guarantees rights even in federal states, so that progress won’t be balked by petty local autocrats or fiefdoms. Perhaps we felt singled out, because we hashed the article with some gibberish about jurisdiction and subject matter and competent authorities and jurisdiction and constituent units and subject matter. Between the lines we promised all deliberate speed.

The import was clear: no change. The state had no intention of permitting the rights it proclaimed. Government provisos would subvert the Constitution’s supremacy clause to negate the covenant. The state was clinging to the Dulles Doctrine: how our state treats its people is none of the wider world’s business.

Carter finally submitted the treaties to the Senate in November 1979. The Foreign Relations Committee considered ratification in four days of hearings. By the time the committee took it up, Iranians were parading US hostages for the cameras, inflation had driven the Fed’s lending rate past 13 per cent, and the opposition scented blood. The doomed hearings went unnoticed but the proceedings show how the state puts the kibosh on our rights.²

The CESCR took more punishment from the outset. There was something fishy about it. Testimony variously described the problem: a non-Western bias; Soviet Marxist ideology; an infatuation with democratic socialism; ideological appeasement of the third world. The American Bar Association blamed the UN’s majority rule: with all that democracy, nobody gets what they want.

In the hearings Senator Jesse Helms set out to amend the treaty itself, proposing to tear up and renegotiate decades of multilateral diplomacy. He wanted explicit property ownership rights enshrined worldwide. He didn’t trust Article 5(2), which leaves all existing rights intact.

At the time we were busy toppling Central American reformers, and Helms grilled the State Department about Nicaragua. They had nationalized some private enterprises, compensating the owners in accordance with international law. They tinkered with their banking system. We cut off their aid but Cubans helped them meet their basic human needs. These were brazen acts of self-determination, and signing the convention would only make it worse.

The committee put Phyllis Schlafly up to speak and she delivered a remarkable stemwinder. She told us what would happen if we put America’s head in the noose. The covenant would bankrupt us for world equality, she said. Equality would wreak further havoc in our very homes. Non-discrimination would undercut the husband’s duty to support his wife. The covenant promised maternity leave, which is for societies “in which all mothers have a continuing obligation to remain in the labor force, as in Communist countries.” We had no say in writing these grotesque rules, as many lesser nations had joined the UN and shouted us down with promiscuous majority rule. Knowing this, we tried to sign up “fingers crossed,” as Schlafly – accurately – put it. We’d be a laughing stock, caught out in double dealing. The world would hold us to our pledge, and we would see: we gave our sacred rights away to gloating Commies.

Other experts amplified the warning. Sore losers here at home were turning to a malign UN to negate and destroy the lawmaking authority of Congress. The promise of human dignity and well-being will erode our liberties: as restive groups clamor for more and more rights, an emboldened government will frogmarch us to progress in defiance of constitutional restraint. No fear was too fanciful to voice. Under Article 1, self-determination would lead to secession. Under Article 2, nondiscrimination rules would outlaw nepotism. (How would prosperous men provide for their dimwitted sons?) The best efforts demanded in Article 2 would subvert the essence of public life in America: the vicious conniving through which our politics expresses the national spirit. The covenant would hobble us abroad as well. Social and economic obligations would turn our foreign aid into demeaning conditional grants unworthy of America’s benevolent, no-strings largess.

The State Department half-heartedly backed the treaty. The treaty is for states where citizens have few domestic remedies, so State said. We sign it only to help the huddled masses overseas. Joining up would be a feather in our cap abroad but inconsequential here at home. The treaty’s goals dovetail with our policies. We comply fully right now. So when we ratify the treaty, no further effort will be needed. Accordingly, the Justice Department undertook to keep extraneous rights out of reach of the people and the courts. It wouldn’t do to upset our intricate body of law, they explained. The state has seen to all these rights, as Commissar Pavlov would say.

The Senate did not ratify the treaties for President Carter. We eventually ratified the CCPR, in 1992, but not the CESCR. Civil and political rights were permissible, but not economic, social, or cultural rights, or even goals. America opted out of these unwelcome rights and the wider world moved on, but in the eyes of the world, our state is shirking its duties. In 1993 UN members expressed their consensus in the Vienna Declaration:

All human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated. The international community must treat human rights globally in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing, and with the same emphasis. While the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind, it is the duty of States, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems, to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

All of them, all human rights. As even our handpicked Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon would later say, states can’t pick and choose the peoples’ rights. But in America the state picked a few of our rights, American ones, and withheld the rest.

Our unnatural “collectivist” rights sank without a ripple here at home. We’ve even managed to forget where those rights came from. In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his Four Freedoms message to Congress. One of those freedoms was freedom from want. He was serious. In 1944, before Congress, FDR proposed a full-fledged economic Bill of Rights. He said, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” The rights he proposed were the following:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home and abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

He boiled it all down to security. “For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.” So these rights may be alien to us, but they’re hardly un-American. They surfaced, briefly, when Bill Bradley tried to run for president. Bradley made security an overarching theme. Al Gore fought Bradley harder than he fought George Bush, and then security was guns and bombs again.

What if the Communists won? What if the covenant came to be adopted as supreme law of the land? The treaty, itself, involves only the mildest suasion. Our state’s compliance with the treaty would be reviewed and judged by the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Committee, 18 members chosen to represent the world. The UN Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC) elects them by secret ballot. Selected for their expertise in human rights, members serve in their personal capacity for renewable four-year terms. They don’t get pulled up short by diplomatic cables. On a five-year cycle paced by required state reports, the committee measures each state by the covenant’s standards and suggests ways to improve. The committee works with non-governmental advocacy groups to balance the position of the state with voices of the people.

Even though we’ve kept out of ECOSOC’s reach, America got a taste of global scrutiny at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Starting in 2010, under a procedure called Universal Periodic Review (UPR), UN members examined reports from the US government and independent advocacy groups. Then the members questioned US government representatives about the state’s compliance with its obligations and its duties.  Domestic press accounts of the Human Rights Council define it as a feces-flinging mob of tyrannical rogue states, typically in a subordinate clause in the topic sentence, but awkwardly, our ordeal included dressings-down from Japan, Switzerland, Commonwealth countries, and NATO allies. Much of the spectacle centered on our putative civil and political rights, adopted as supreme law of the land and shredded in perfect bipartisan concord after 9/11. Yet much criticism focused on derelictions of an economic, social, or cultural sort.

The council picked at scabs we never touch: re-segregation in housing and education; the hopeless underclass from which we muster troops; forced eviction, by demolition, or by our trick of letting mother nature flush them out with storms.

Bolivians embarrassed us about our treatment of indigenes, tactlessly adverting to our inveterate chiseling and treachery. It would have been easy to dismiss it as a grasping red-Indian gambit, but Germany and Norway horned in, too. Norway pried into the misery of our sickly brown helot caste, and Japan seconded Bolivians in pointing out the disparate racial treatment that our equal opportunity leaves untouched. Class came up as well as race. Russia cited indelicate facts about our spreading third-world poverty. The council turned over all sorts of rocks. With no Article 8 protections and labor laws a dead letter, our H2A and H2B visas permit a handy modern form of slavery. Bolivia and Mexico brought that up in the least private forum in the world. In the good old days we could have had some death squads chop them up but now we have to be polite.

Many countries pointed out that we have failed even to sign most core human rights conventions. The international community seemed bemused to see us opt out of the rudiments of modern civilization. They asked when, exactly, America is going to go beyond lip service and lectures and let us humans exercise our rights.

The panel noted that America has no national human rights institution. What that body must do is set out in the Paris Principles. President Clinton signed Executive Order 13107 but no one’s fooled, except soup-hoarding New World Order bumpkins – there’s no fearsome world tribunal there at all. To diffuse human-rights responsibilities throughout the government, the order created a low-priority interagency working group, a tempting dumping ground for misfits, and gutted it, in Section 6:

Nothing in this order shall create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any party against the United States, its agencies or instrumentalities, its officers or employees, or any other person… This order does not supersede Federal statutes and does not impose any justiciable obligations on the executive branch.

That is our sole guarantor of human rights. The world is pointedly waiting for a real one.

Our human rights sanctimony makes us a cruel joke worldwide but Americans’ appalling ignorance shields our government from ridicule at home. Europeans old and new pulled that thread, asking when we will teach human rights in the schools, as our state has pledged to do.

Obama’s State Department took it with aplomb. The old Bush-era style was to proclaim human rights compliance with a trancelike fixity that Kim Il-sung’s top echelon would envy. Obama’s envoys were different. No superstitious jingoes, these were clearly the best and the brightest. Our urbane delegation candidly acknowledged great struggle — though they could hardly do otherwise with our galloping misery, collapsing services, and hair-raising atrocities and torture. Yet State cooked up a remarkable twist on American exceptionalism: America handles human rights uniquely, they said. Unlike other countries that pledge to improve, America complies with the treaties first, then ratifies in glory. Under this ingenious dodge, failure itself relieves the state of the duties and scrutiny of treaty law. In the grand tradition of outclassed Ivy-League overachievers, State ducked responsibility and salved the national ego with a sort of paralyzing perfectionism. In detailing executive priorities, State made no mention of the CESCR. Forget about freedom from want, we’re not ready for that. “Too bad, Mr. and Mrs. America!” — as Phyllis Schlafly said to Congress back in 1979.

Our institutional human rights void did not faze US diplomats a bit. State had a clever answer for that too. Here, again, America does it differently. Rather than impose a monolithic human rights bureaucracy, we let a thousand flowers bloom. Official neglect spawns multiple protections of stupendous complementarity, much greater than the sum of the many little parts. In this way, presumably, sadistic Maricopa County gulags and Texan “plenty guilty” legal doctrines interact synergistically with the wistful resolutions of the one-horse college town of Carrboro, North Carolina, providing unmatched protection for our peoples.

No one so much as cracked a smile throughout.

Such mild reproof can be ignored at home but under the CESCR, America’s standing in the world would rise or fall with a new and more rigorous test: whether the state meets the minimal needs of the people. If too many are deprived of essential food, health care, education or shelter, the state is held to be breaching obligations. With state duties set out in such stark relief, the courts might elect to view domestic law quite differently.

BP’s rupture of the earth’s crust at Macondo well makes a helpful test case. When BP cut the last corner and poisoned the Gulf, the coastal peoples who live by tourism or fishing were deprived of their means of subsistence. This violates Article 1(2). Rubber-stamp regulation permitted a spill and response that tainted and decimated fisheries. As the CESCR has been applied, the minimum core of the right to food requires that the government not destroy or contaminate food sources.

BP offered scanty settlements that forced fishermen to work in its toxic waste, forbidding respiratory protection as a condition of employment and suppressing diagnosis or treatment of chemical exposure. This breaches Article 7(b), which guarantees safe and healthy working conditions. BP spread toxic dispersants in an unprecedented experiment in public health and environmental intervention. It remains to be seen how that arbitrary action comports with our right to health under Article 12, or with the state’s obligation to improve environmental hygiene. BP had imprisoned workers trucked to the spill zone in containers, like livestock, and penned in the sweltering miasma until needed. With the slave states’ tradition of reliance on convict labor, prisoners know better than to refuse a work detail but Article 6 requires that work be freely chosen or accepted under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms.

The state ceded police powers to BP, and BP used them to coercively suppress public investigation of the disaster. Federal officials in state jurisdictions helped intimidate observers while making false claims about the danger and extent of the spill. The Coast Guard denied watercraft access for sampling or independent observation. Residents were forbidden to take samples on their damaged property. As BP hired local scientists and gagged them with nondisclosure agreements, out-of-state scientists resorted to covert sampling with the help of local people. Under Article 15(2), states undertake to respect the freedom indispensable for scientific research.

BP even hired local law enforcement to choke off free inquiry. When even the police are private property, the “sacred right” of property gets murky. But BP’s proprietary clampdown makes it clear that the region as a whole belongs to them.

In practice our sacred property rights are marvelously flexible things. Panicked by collapsing housing markets, the state of Florida created a special-purpose foreclosure court that authorizes fraudulent documentation from firms with no legal standing to foreclose. In most other states, fraudulent evictions proceed with no court review at all. The resulting mass illegal forced evictions breach Article 11(1) by failing to respect legal security of tenure. Though UN special procedures have focused on forced evictions as ‘gross violations of human rights,’ we Americans are to have no redress. The sale of a residence gained by eviction cannot be reversed.

The covenant is silent on property rights. Here that’s thought to be a sop to the third world, to accommodate more primitive societies. Could be. The third world knows a lot about disgraces like the Gulf Coast spill. Foreign capital suborns the colonial government, suspends the state’s protective role, and secures a free hand in land and resource exploitation. The pervasive corruption of the Minerals Management Service fits a classic third-world pattern. Corruption entrenches a class of “indigenous colonizers,” in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s mordant term: “Accidents Happen,” as Senator Lieberman said; the Hon. Joe Barton apologized to BP; government bank overseers posed for photos taking a chainsaw to prudential rules. Booms and busts wrench the economy and hollow it out. Your people’s home becomes a blighted wasteland brutally repressed. It’s called the resource curse.

Resource-exploitation tensions show in the covenant’s drafting. Article 1(2) qualified peoples’ free disposition of their wealth and resources with the provisions of international law. Article 1(2) encourages mutual benefit too, but as third-world peoples know, law trumps mutual benefit every time. So the majority of the world imposed Article 25: “Nothing in the present Covenant shall be interpreted as impairing the inherent right of all peoples to enjoy and utilize fully and freely their natural wealth and resources.” Colonized by stateless enterprises and held helpless by America’s comprador state, the Gulf Coast’s northern shore is now part of the third world. Article 25 means something now. Northern Gulf Coast people might come to see why the global majority took its defiant stand.

In modern America, the resource curse is not restricted to the downtrodden natives of the Gulf Coast states. Mountaintop removal razes Appalachian peoples’ lands. Uranium mining kills Indian miners and contaminates tribal lands. Elsewhere, the extractive technique of fracking is used to force gas out of deep shales. Natural-gas concessionaires press individual landowners to cede all control over land use with no right of refusal. They will drill anyway if you don’t consent. Sometimes flammable water comes from the tap, showers become gas chambers and the right to decent housing is held in contempt. The practice is poisoning groundwater in several states, having been exempted from oversight under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The covenant might complicate the frackers’ sacrosanct American property rights: in Comment No. 15, the ECOSOC rights committee declared a universal right to water for personal and domestic use.

The measure of our rights is development. To assess it the UN compiles the Human Development Index (HDI), a composite of income, health, and education data. Based on 2009 data, the US ranked 13th. We slipped from our best showing, a tie for second in 1980, as more and more countries overtook us. A reformulated index bumped us up to fourth in 2010 (we look better when you set literacy aside and look at all the years we spend in school instead.) However, the new index shows the same slow slide.

As the composite nature of the HDI shows, development’s a matter of choices. Our state has always opted to keep us richer but sicker, as Hans Rosling points out. Still, even at the peak of our recent boom, 30 per cent of us could not meet the expenses of a basic family budget, and corruption and collapse in the financial sector haven’t helped. The full effect of our slump and financial crisis is not yet clear. The poverty rate had passed 14 per cent as of 2009, according to the Census Bureau. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports its most inclusive measure of joblessness as 17 per cent. By the old depression-era measures, depression days are here again.

For many countries development, itself, is a right, though not in the US. Development is something of a privilege here. We safeguard our traditional extremes of poverty and wealth. As measured by the Gini index, inequality here is greater than in developed countries, and clusters with middle-income banana republics and the kinder, gentler kleptocracies. For all our vaunted wealth, we’re a rich-world leader in child poverty — only Mexico’s is worse. Uniquely among the rich countries of the OECD, our youth are less educated than their elders, as the lucky fraction of our people that gets a secondary education slowly shrinks. Who decided we would be like this? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t anyone I know. People want their wealth shared out like Sweden’s, if you ask them. Nine in ten like the Swedish model better. We think it’s fair if the top fifth owns about a third of all the wealth. We think the top fifth actually owns 59 per cent of it all, but the joke’s on us: they own 84 per cent.

Here in America, basic human needs are used as bait by predatory enterprises. Your rights are a reward for good behavior – education, housing, even health – and they’re bound up with debt, your promise of future service. Rights are conditional, contractual, contingent. Commercial schools tap state coffers to fund worthless degrees with debt that cannot be expunged. Banks ramp the price of housing to draw buyers, and encumber them with ruinous debt. Health insurers cut off coverage whenever your misfortunes displease them.

Some of these abuses have broken down and the state is attempting to amend them. The state says that the only cure is markets. By markets the state means power relations rigged by industry-dictated laws that isolate buyers and subject them to colluding sellers. Commercial charters in these industries are functionally equivalent to strip-mining concessions, extractive industries for people’s future livelihood. The covenant’s guarantees would wreck this arrangement. The right to an adequate standard of living and to continuous improvement of living conditions; full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity? It would be as if the rebels seized the mines that work the rich veins of want and fear on the slippery slope.

“Necessitous men are not free men.” FDR said so to Congress. To two thirds of the UN’s members, economic rights are the most basic ones, because people will submit for survival. Civil and political rights don’t last when desperate people struggle to subsist. Our survival’s now contingent on obedience to many tacit rules and petty private rulers. That’s why your bank cuts you off from redress in the courts, imposing captive arbitrators from its handpicked list. That’s how, if you go broke, your creditors can put you on a food budget of 300 dollars a month. That’s why they’ll fire you if you try to form a union, and you’ll starve before the Wagner Act protects you. The threat of destitution persists because it serves a purpose — it keeps your desperation quiet. So it seems that your rights are collective after all. But the collective to which you must subordinate yourself is the firm. The firm took the rights that were meant for you. It’s not accountable to you as it delimits your options and your life. Producer sovereignty, some call it — Edward Herman, Wharton’s apostate professor, coined the term.

Sovereign producers with the blessing of their state push more and more people to the edge, where you’re trapped in rapacious legal usury, your dicey wages mostly gone at once for fixed expenses and your solvency a matter of sheer luck. Lose a job or get sick, and you’re lost on a remorseless slide to peonage, stripped bare by courts that impose sumptuary penance, or just jail you, and attach your future wages for life. You’re made to bid frantically, all against all, for the few homes with adequate schools, fighting for the sort of vocational and obedience training that’s thought to give your child some edge in a glut of faceless labor. For those who don’t comply, it’s the abyss.

It’s different in the civilized world. Our periwigged, grudging clutch of rights is obsolete. No country has copied our constitution for a hundred years. Human rights law has been called the true revolutionary movement of the 20th century. Economic and social rights in particular would weaken many of the indirect controls on which our state relies. Controls would instead be imposed on the state — the covenant focuses global scrutiny and shame like a burning glass on peoples’ want and fear. In testimony to Congress, John L. Hargrove described how human rights threaten an oppressive state:

What they rightly fear is being caught in a web of living law from which they cannot extricate themselves without large cost, but in which they cannot remain without occasionally yielding to pressure for change.

He was talking about the Soviet state. Our own state also fears that pressure, rightly so. In 1991 America’s UN ambassador called these rights “a dangerous incitement.” People secure in their dignity, with recourse to the wider world, won’t stand for quite so much.

1. Lash, Joseph P., “Eleanor, the Years Alone”, New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1972, Ch. III passim
2. U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. International Human Rights Treaties. Hearings, 96th Congress, 1st session. November 14-16, 19, 1979. Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 197

The latest target of the Canadian Jewish Congress is Adbusters magazine, a counter-culture alternative to the pro-business, pro-Israel mainstream media. Publisher Kalle Lasn ran an article and a single pair of photos comparing the Nazi persecution of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to the Zionist persecution of native Palestinian Arabs in Gaza. The parallel is not perfect, but it’s very close and politically relevant.

In response, the CJC mobilized against Shoppers Drug Mart to have it pull Adbusters from its 515 stores nationwide. A spokeswoman for Shoppers denied any connection, but such a pro forma denial cannot be taken seriously, especially when it is demonstrably false:

“Two weeks ago Shoppers told us they were pulling Adbusters off their shelves because of customer complaints about our Gaza/Warsaw comparison,” wrote Kalle Lasn in the comments to the article. “But after stories appeared about this in the National Post and Globe & Mail it seems they have had a change of heart. We should all be calling out Shoppers’ CEO Jürgen Schreiber, not just for pulling Adbusters, but for then blatantly lying about why he did it…”

Nobody expected the CJC to like the article. Nobody should care because a constitutionally guaranteed right to free expression does not depend on the political machinations of a pressure group. Sounds highly undemocratic. Sounds, well, fascist, doesn’t it?

If Adbusters can be persecuted and smeared for dissenting from official Zionist dogma, what does that say about the state of Canada?

The CJC, like all the Zionist organizations in Canada, needs to sabotage any and all rational, open discussion of Israel, and to do that it must undermine the rule of law and constitutional freedoms. Yet, as is often the case, the CJC has done more to enhance Adbusters reputation than harm it.

Speaking of reputations, Canadian organizers of the Boycott Divest Sanction movement are now considering adding Shoppers Drug Mart to its list of businesses to be boycotted. That, and being caught lying about its role in the CJC’s censorship, can’t be good for business.

Ironically, the article that caused all the fuss was relatively innocuous, and given Adbusters relatively small circulation and readership demographic, it’s doubtful that anyone in the general public would have paid much attention.

To give an idea how inane the attack on Adbusters is, Dr. Norman Finkelstein has for the last 23 months featured on his website 84 pairs of photos that depict the horrific parallel between Nazi and zionist fascism. Thanks to the CJC, The Canadian Charger has the perfect reason to share it with its readers.

The Adbusters episode should be kept alive as long as possible to make the Israeli lobby as uncomfortable as possible and to remind us to ask ourselves: “Why do companies and governments so readily capitulate to the Israel lobby’s dictates?”

In Ottawa recently, pressure from B’nai Brith compelled the RCMP, our national police force to reconsider its decision to join the Canadian Islamic Congress at an Ottawa conference. Zionists routinely defame the CIC as extremist, but that doesn’t mean the RCMP should take its orders from them.

A bully only has as much power as his victim is willing to give him. When a victim stands and fights, the bully will often back down because all bullies are cowards.

You, reader, can help stop the zionist bullying of Canada by subscribing to Adbusters and writing to Jürgen Schreiber [requires javascript] and the Canadian Jewish Congress [requires javascript] to remind them that censorship belongs to a fascist state, not Canada.

•  This article first appeared here.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Call to Freedom” (1819)

My film deceptions and the works of others document the many lies and the hypocrisy that our politicians and government have foisted upon us. However, the public has begun to wake up. They are beginning to realize that 9/11 revelations will be the first of many cascading dominoes as conspiracy theory will morph into cover-up, over and over again.

When it comes to a fresh investigation of 9/11 Democrats have joined Republicans to “keep a lid on it.” They know they will also be flattened once this snowball begins to roll; their duplicity, their culpability cannot be blamed entirely on the Republicans. A great unraveling is just beginning.  When the final spin, the final unraveling occurs, the Fed, the IMF, the World Bank and Media will all be left standing and the public will then know who has been in control all along.

Much of this unraveling and the public’s awareness have come from the Internet which is the last bastion of free speech left on the planet. If Leahy’s Law becomes law, freedom of expression on the Internet could well become an endangered species. It is called Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act (COICA) S.3804.  He introduced it on Sept 20 and promptly referred it to the Judiciary Committee which he also chairs. This law is being fast tracked, flying under the radar and almost in total darkness. When money is involved it is amazing how fast bipartisan support can be found. This legislation could be out of committee and headed for a full vote in Congress, with almost no input from the public, in just a few weeks. Amazing.

As proposed, COICA can blacklist, control or close down thousands of watchdog websites, sites like mine, bloggers, even You Tube for engaging in “infringing activities.” With no due process or legal oversight this law would empower the Attorney General (not the aggrieved party) to initiate blacklisting activities and prevent access to infringing sites. It is a dangerous and ill defined piece of legislation that at the very least should be publicized and thoroughly discussed in the open.

Counsel from Senator Leahy’s office was recently in contact with me. He assured me at great length that this bill was targeting the bad guys, counterfeiters and criminals that were re-selling American products or services often from abroad, a fact I do not doubt. I said to him “great,  I agree – go get em.” I then asked for an example of an infringing organization that was not also a counterfeit company. The example cited played movies and TV shows that were not authorized by the copyright holders. This example illustrated to me how You Tube and other sites could be inadvertently snared by this legislation.

Our quest to get the counterfeiters and criminals should not also give government the power to blacklist thousands of innocent sites for expressing the infringing words of others as determined -  not by the original copyright holder – but by government. The rights of the public should not get trampled by big money’s quest to stop the bootleggers from redistributing their music, film, drugs and designer jeans.

In spite of these facts and a letter sent to Mr. Leahy expressing serious concerns about this legislation from the American Civil Liberties Organization, The Center for Democracy and Technology, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch and others, Leahy was honored as Vermont’s civil libertarian of the year by the Vermont’s ACLU, that’s right,  the ACLU. It is kind of like giving Obama the Noble Peace Prize while he commits 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan.

“Doublespeak, doublethink, thought control and the Ministry of Truth”  are no longer Orwellian book terms, as Nineteen Eighty-Four is becoming a living reality in 2010.

Wake up Mr. John Q Public.

Money not public opinion drives party politics and the legislative process. Did I mention that the multibillion dollar media conglomerates of Time Warner, Disney Co and the Vivendi (a French corporation) have been three of Leahy’s largest financial contributors for the last five years?

“Terrorists Watch – No Fly Lists” does it sound familiar? And we all know how well that one has gone.

Contact Leahy.

Petition the Senate.

Early reviews revealed just how provocative the book was going to be.  The Boston Globe reported,  “… With dismal clarity, Smith lays out the step-by-step history of how a national pension plan was transformed into an outright shakedown of working people” and ALA Booklist said, “Smith has written a scathing account of massive fraud on the part of our nation’s leaders, who have plundered every cent of the Social Security Trust Fund surplus that was specifically earmarked for the retirement of the baby boomers.”

On February 26, 2004, I appeared on CNBC, to respond to Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, who had called for Social Security benefit cuts the previous day.  I held my book in front of the camera and said, as forcefully as I could, “Alan Greenspan should be ashamed of himself for what he is not telling the American people.” I now believe that this public criticism of the Fed chairman may have been the final nail in the coffin of The Looting of Social Security, which was very critical of Greenspan’s role in making the looting of the trust fund possible.

A few weeks after my controversial appearance on CNBC, the book mysteriously disappeared from bookstores, nationwide, and was listed as “unavailable” by Amazon.com.  I tried to get the rights to the book reverted back to me so I could publish my message elsewhere, but my publisher refused to surrender the rights.  Thus the book was effectively killed off, and there was nothing I could do about it.  I was unable to pinpoint exactly who was responsible for rendering the book “unavailable,” but a lot of people did not want the contents of the book to become public.  Certainly, people in government, such as Alan Greenspan and Karl Rove, as well as many others in the Bush administration, would have wanted to prevent the book from becoming public knowledge, if they could find a way to do so.

Although the public knew nothing about it at the time, Greenspan’s February 25, 2004 call for Social Security benefit cuts was the opening salvo in an organized campaign to dismantle Social Security, as we now know it, once George W. Bush was safely elected to a second term. On August 27, 2004, Greenspan again spoke of cutting Social Security benefits during remarks at a symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“As a nation, we owe it to our retirees to promise only the benefits that can be delivered,” Greenspan said.  “If we have promised more than our economy has the power to deliver to retirees without unduly diminishing real income gains of workers, as I fear we may have, we must recalibrate our public programs so that pending retirees have time to adjust through other channels.”

Almost immediately upon his re-election, President George W. Bush made public his plan to partially privatize Social Security.  On November 4, 2004, Bush said, “Let me put it this way: I earned capital, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.  It is my style…I’ve earned capital in this election— and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on, which is — you’ve heard the agenda:  Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.”

Like other Americans, there is no way I could have known about the standby plan to privatize Social Security, which was already formulated at the time I appeared on CNBC and publicly challenged Alan Greenspan on Social Security.  Therefore, I didn’t realize just how big the potential impact of widespread readership of my book could be on the future plans of the Bush administration.  From the administration’s point of view, I’m sure that they were not going to allow my book, or a book by any other author, to sabotage their plan to privatize Social Security.  The book was a threat, and the threat had to be dealt with.

What is far more puzzling to me, than the opposition to my book in 2004, is the current effort to discredit me, and the book.  I was almost flabbergasted when I learned, just a few weeks ago, that a website that goes by the name of “Medicare and Medicare Programs” launched a smear campaign on September 22, 2010 against me and the book that has been off the market since 2004.  You don’t believe me?  Click on the following link and it will take you to that website.  I tried to find out who owns this website and who is behind this effort, but I was unable to do so.  Who is sponsoring this website, and what is their agenda?  These things don’t just happen by chance. The five negative reviews, alleged by the website to have been submitted on September 22, 2010, are exact duplicates of “customer reviews” from Amazon.com that were posted in 2004 and 2005.

If the intent of this internet campaign was to stomp out the message of my book, now and forever, their actions have backfired on them.  It was in reaction to this campaign that I decided not to allow them to kick a dead book without bringing the book back to life.  When I finally regained the rights to “The Looting of Social Security” in 2008, I vowed to re-publish the book, when the time was right, under an arrangement that would guarantee that the book remained in print for as long as anyone wanted to read it.

The smear campaign on the internet has convinced me that the time is now right for the book to be resurrected.  Therefore, I am pleased to announce that the book has just been published by Ironwood Publications, under the title, The Looting of Social Security, New release of the book they didn’t want you to read.  The new book includes all of the content of the original book, along with a new forward written by Dr. Victor Stoltzfus, President Emeritus, Goshen College, and an afterword written by me that brings the book up to date.  The book was officially released yesterday, November 1, 2010.

“I feel very strongly that the world needs to see, to consider, to be aware that there are some very dark and sinister forces at play shaping what we think is an independent opinion,” he told me via email.

Pratt shows how BP’s control of the US government over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe supports his theme that a shadow government of the world’s wealthiest are bent on further concentration of wealth, regardless of cost to the environment or human lives.

The swine flu hoax, ObamaCare and fraudulent elections get a mention, but the focus is predominantly on mind control via mass media. Netrooters understand better than most that the free flow of ideas in today’s electronic world only occurs when people can access any website they want, any time they want. Obama seeks to shut down this access via the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act.” Talk about a 21st century police state.

Deceptions emphasizes the vital need for all people to have access to ideas and information from around the world — just like goverments do.

The film takes a deliberate pace exploring the structures of the shadow government, in a format adapted for classroom use. Each segment was designed as a stand alone video clip that can be viewed independently. His website, DeceptionsUSA, provides information about acquiring the film for screenings in theatres and schools, how to become a citizen journalist, Net Neutrality, a variety of resource links, and a six-page booklet for teachers.

Though a novice filmmaker, Pratt’s virgin launch is tightly developed, with spot-on music and imagery. While he won’t win any awards for enunciation, the use of subtitles overcomes this small weakness while underscoring his points. Instead of fear-mongering, Pratt presents the facts in a straightforward and logical manner.

Remarkably, Deceptions was made for less than a thousand dollars in 16 months. A former systems analyst living in Brattleboro, Vermont, Pratt shows how, for a bargain price, a concerned citizen can be informative, compelling and inspirational to anyone seeking the truth.

“I have no ax to grind, no money to make – just awareness – that is my goal,” he said.

1. Released September 2010, 78 minutes.