ABC’s Peter Jennings called him “a journalist’s journalist.” The New York Times featured his death on its front page (usually reserved for the rich and powerful) in a Peter Flint obituary titled, “IF Stone, Iconoclast of Journalism, Is Dead at 81.” A quintessential muckraker, he described him as “the independent, radical pamphleteer of American journalism hailed by his admirers for his scholarship, wit and lucidity” over a career spanning 67 years.

He quoted Stone saying:

“I tried to bring the instincts of a scholar to the service of journalism; to take nothing for granted; to turn journalism into literature; to provide radical analysis with a conscientious concern for accuracy, and in studying the current scene to do my very best to preserve human values and free institutions.” In the spirit of author Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), he “comfort(ed) the afflicted and afflict(ed) the comfortable,” in a way few others matched or kept doing for so long.

In a 1987 interview, he deplored what he called the ascendancy of “right-wing kooks (and) the ugly spirit (of Reagan’s not so subtle message that) you should go get yours and run.” Late in life he learned classical Greek to be able to read untranslated works and write The Trials of Socrates after more than a decade of study. He criticized the accepted Plato view that he died for exhorting his fellow Athenians to be virtuous. According to Stone, he was seen as a security threat at a time Athenian democracy was imperiled.

In Izzy on Izzy, he called himself an “anachronism… an independent capitalist, the owner of my own enterprise, subject to neither mortgage or broker, factor or patron… standing alone, without organizational or party backing, beholden to no one but my good readers.”

They were many, loyal, and included Ralph Nader who called him “the modern Tom Paine — as independent and incorruptible as they come (as) journalism’s Gibraltar and its unwavering conscience.”

Stone called himself “a newspaperman all my life,” publishing a paper (the Progress) at age 14, working for a country weekly, and then as correspondent for two city dailies (the Haddonfield Press and Camden Courier-Post). Beginning as a high school sophomore, he did this into his third year of college (at the University of Pennsylvania), then quit because “the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me.” At the same time, he worked afternoons and evenings at the Philadelphia Inquirer “doing combination rewrite and copy desk (work), so I was already an experienced newspaperman making $40 a week — big pay in 1928.” He did everything “except run a linotype machine.”

In the 1920s as a teenager, he became radicalized, mostly from reading Jack London, Herbert Spencer, Peter Kropotkin (a noted Russian anarchist and early communism advocate), and Karl Marx. He joined the Socialist Party and was elected to its New Jersey State Committee “before I was old enough to vote.” He did publicity for Norman Thomas (1894-1968) in the 1928 presidential campaign, but then “drifted away from left-wing politics because of the sectarianism of the left.”

He also believed that party affiliation was incompatible with independent journalism, and he wanted to be “free to help the unjustly treated, to defend everyone’s civil liberty, and to work for social reform without concern for leftist infighting.”

Remembering them “with affection,” he praised his employers for never forcing him to compromise his conscience, even as an anonymous editorial writer. From 1932-1939, that was his job for the Philadelphia Record and New York Post, both strongly pro-New Deal papers at the time. In 1940, he came to Washington as The Nation’s editor and remained until his death, working as reporter and columnist for PM, the New York Star, New York Post and New York Compass.

In the 1950s, during the Cold War and McCarthy era, no daily paper (or The Nation) ran his byline, so when the Compass closed in 1952, he launched his own four-page IF Stone’s Weekly in 1953 and wrote:

“Early Soviet novels used a vivid phrase, ‘former people,’ about the remnants of the dispossessed ruling class. On the inhospitable streets of Washington these days, your editor often feels like one of the ‘former people.’ ”

Earlier from its 1946 inception until 1949, he was a regular on Meet the Press, first on radio, then TV. No longer, nor was he seen again on national television for another 18 years because his muckraking threatened the powerful.

It’s never easy starting out on your own, but Stone succeeded by what he called “a piggy-back launching” from the PM, Star, and Compass mailing lists as well as people who had bought his books. From them, he got 5,000 subscribers at $5 each. During McCarthy’s heyday, he got a second-class mailing permit, and was on his way after “working in Washington for 12 years as correspondent for a succession of liberal and radical papers.”

Biographer Myra MacPherson (from All Governments Lie!) said he “went from a young iconoclast in the 1930s to an icon during the Vietnam War. In the fifties, he spoke to mere handfuls who dared surface to protest Cold War loyalty oaths and witch-hunts. A decade later, he spoke to half a million who massed for anti-Vietnam War rallies. (Deservedly) He became world famous.”

Earlier, he supported Progressive Party nominee Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential election campaign, civil liberties for everyone, including communists, and advocated for peace and co-existence with the Soviets. He fought the loyalty purge, FBI, House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Pat McCarran’s virulent anti-communism as Senate Judiciary Committee and Internal Security Subcommittee chairmen, and Joe McCarthy.

He wrote the first article against the Smith Act for its 1940 use against Trotskyites and other leftists with suspected subversive leanings.

His idea was to make the Weekly radical by providing information readers could check out on their own. He “tried to dig the truth out of hearings, official transcripts and government documents, and to be as accurate as possible.” He wanted every issue to provide facts and opinions unavailable elsewhere in the press. He felt like “a guerilla warrior, swooping down in a surprise attack on a stuffy bureaucracy where it least expected independent inquiry.”

Unlike beat reporters for major dailies or wire services, he was immune to the pressures they faced. He said Washington has lots of news. If information on some are blocked, go get others because “The bureaucracies put out so much that they cannot help letting the truth slip from the time to time.” And by asking tough questions, a whole lot can be learned that as an independent can be published freely without fear of employer retribution.

It’s why no bureaucracy likes independent journalism, especially radical muckrakers digging out the most sensitive material it wants suppressed. The fault Stone found with most newspapers wasn’t the absence of dissent. It was the absence of real news, the timidity of journalists to write it, and the power owners held over them.

“Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling.” Most newspaper owners are businessmen, not journalists. “The news is something which fills spaces left over by advertisers.”

Most publishers aren’t just hostile to dissent, they suspect any opinions likely to antagonize readers, consumers, and mainly advertisers. As a result, most newspapers “stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons.” Even the best papers are timid. They don’t question the Cold War, arms race, or stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law. Only a few “maverick” dailies are around making it “easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express.”

Journalism was a “crusade” for Stone. What Jefferson symbolized for him was being “rediscovered in a socialist society as a necessity for good government.” During the height of the McCarthy era, he felt like a pariah but believed he stood for and was preserving the best of America’s traditions. It inspired what he did to the end.

DD Guttenplan’s American Radical: The Life and Times of IF Stone

Guttenplan described him as a journalistic “irritant to power for his uncanny ability to seize on the most inconvenient truths and for his vociferous opposition to the existing order.” After becoming radicalized, he was brash, forthright, anti-fascist, pro-labor, a supporter of New Deal politics, and a passionate activist for the oppressed, disadvantaged, and social justice.

In his preface, Guttenplan described the fateful December 12, 1949 moment when Stone went from prominence to a non-person in American politics and his profession. It was during an interchange with the AMA’s Dr. Morris Fishbein on Meet the Press, an ardent foe of universal single-payer health insurance he denounced as “socialistic.” Quoting Stone, Guttenplan wrote:

“Dr. Fishbein, let’s get nice and rough. In view of his advocacy of compulsory health insurance, do you regard Mr. Harry Truman as a card-carrying communist, or just a deluded fellow-traveler?”

After that, he slowly vanished, was never again on Meet the Press, couldn’t get his passport renewed after a year in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Compass, and when it closed in 1952 was blacklisted as a reporter. As he put it at age 40: “I feel for the moment like a ghost.” And as Guttenplan wrote:

“For some time he live(d) in a kind of internal exile (sitting) in (a) Washington, DC… rented office waiting for the phone to ring (and) after three years (getting no) visitor apart from building maintenance workers and the mailman… (so he gave) up the office… work(ed) from home,” and launched the IF Stone Weekly as a platform to produce radical commentaries for his readers… “slowly, almost imperceptibly, his audience return(ed)” to its final year 1971 peak 70,000 circulation level.

According to Guttenplan, Stone “rode into battle not as a paladin of the powerless or a gadfly, but as an insider, a confidential agent of the (left-wing) ‘party within a party’ that served” progressive politics in the 1930s. He later broke with Harry Truman and supported Wallace. The FBI followed him everywhere, investigated him for five years, and accumulated 6,000 pages in his file, threefold its size for Al Capone. His phone was tapped and his mail intercepted on suspicion he was a Soviet spy, that was, of course, untrue.

By 1970, he was invited in from the cold and given a special George Polk Award in journalism. He got honorary degrees from American University, Brown, Colby, and others, including a baccalaureate and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania where he dropped out before graduating.

His numerous awards included:

• Newspaper Guild of New York Honors Page One Must for his book, Underground to Palestine — written before his views about Israel changed after the 1967 war;
• The Eleanor Roosevelt Award;
• the National Press Club Journalists’ Journalist Award
• ACLU Award;
• the Professional Freedom and Responsibility Award of the Association for Education In Journalism & Mass Communications;
• Columbia University Journalism Award; and
• on March 5, 2008, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University announced an annual IF Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence award and an IF Stone Workshop on Strengthening Journalistic Independence.

In his name, the annual Izzy Award is presented to “an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures.”

Three of Stone’s great quotes were:

One of several versions of his saying, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”

“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins….”

“You’ve really got to wear a chastity belt in Washington to preserve your journalistic virginity. Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.” Not Stone. His honor and integrity weren’t for sale.

In a June 19-25, 2009 Counterspin interview, Guttenplan said Stone was never ideologically rigid, and would always change his views in light of new information. He:

never pretended to be a liberal. He was an unashamed radical, and in a way, the most important way in which he matters is he shows us, he reminds us what’s possible. He reminds us what the left can do. He reminds us what our country can do. He reminds us what our government can do if we keep on its back and we make sure it delivers on its promises.

And he showed how good journalism can make a difference, the kind so lacking then and now with no IF Stone around to write it.

He “challenged power by using power’s own record against itself.” And after his hearing failed, he relied increasingly on documents to prove what he famously said:

“All governments lie, but the truth still slips out from time to time,” and it’s up to good journalists to find and report it. Stone did, what the powerful wanted suppressed in his Weekly and numerous books, including (a treasured signed used copy this writer owns of) his Hidden History of the Korean War.

Published in 1952, Monthly Review co-founders Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy wrote in the preface:

“This book….paints a very different picture of the Korean War — one, in fact, which is at variance with the official version at almost every point.” Stone’s investigations into official discrepancies led him “to a full-scale reassessment of the whole” war.

First published, in part, in the Compass and two articles in France’s L’Observateur, its publisher, Claude Bourdet explained in his article titled, “The Korean Mystery: Fight Against a Phantom?”

If Stone’s thesis corresponds to reality (and it did), we are in the presence of the greatest swindle in the whole of military history… not a question of a harmless fraud but of a terrible maneuver in which deception is being consciously utilized to block peace at a time when it is possible.

Stone called it international aggression. So did Huberman and Sweezy writing in August 1951 (14 months into the war):

“….we have come to the conclusion that (South Korean president) Syngman Rhee deliberately provoked the North Koreans in the hope that they would retaliate by crossing the parallel in force. The northerners (who wanted a unified Korea, not war) fell neatly into the trap.” Truman was the instigator who took full advantage when they did, as Stone believed in writing:

we said we were going to Korea to go back to the status quo before the war but when the American armies reached the 38th parallel they didn’t stop, they kept going, so there must be something else. We must have another agenda here and what might that agenda be?

The same one, he later learned, we had in Vietnam that made him outspoken against it. He was the only journalist asked to speak at the first nationwide November 15, 1969 “Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam War,” that half a million to Washington one month after a global event was held.

He matched his anti-war spirit with his support for the disadvantaged, the oppressed, social equity, and above all accuracy and truth, and used his journalism as a “crusade” to produce it. He wrote:

“I was heartened by the thought that I was preserving and carrying forward the best in America’s traditions, that in my humble way I stood in a line that reached back to Jefferson. These are the origins and the preconceptions, the hopes and the aspirations” behind all his writings and the legacy that’s now ours.

On June 17, 1989, he died of heart failure in Cambridge, MA and is buried there at Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaving behind his wife, Esther, of 60 years, and three children, Celia, Jeremy and Christopher. He once told his wife that “if (he) lived long enough (he’d) graduate from a pariah to a character, and then if (he) lasted long enough, from a character to public institution.” He omitted a legend, a committed radical, consummate independent, and ideological hero symbolizing what Public Affairs’ Peter Osnos called his “stubborn tenacity, ferocious independence, and extraordinary will” in pursuing truth.

Or as Guttenplan ended his book:

“IF Stone wrote not to create a sensation, or to promote himself (or his ‘brand’), but to change the world. We read and work – and wait.”

Gates is more upset about the image of a dying Marine gaining currency than he is about the multiple wars in which the U.S. is currently engaged. The Bush regime especially has been adept at controlling and sanitizing the images of war, prohibiting photos of flag-draped caskets or military burial services. As if war were a distant abstraction, without bloody, fatal consequences.

What is “appalling” of course, and beyond any rational “judgment and common decency” are the wars themselves, in Iraq – built on lies – and in Afghanistan – purportedly in revenge against a Saudi guerrilla there. Neither conflict can be justified or withstand scrutiny – moral or political – but that does not bother Robert Gates. His brief is to run the wars, test the weapons, keep the military in fighting trim and try to minimize the psychic damage to the American soul. That was why he protested the photo. Psychic damage.

What we need is many more photos, of dead and wounded U.S. fighting men and women. But also of Iraqi and Afghani civilians. Why does AP not show us the torn and bloody children of our “muscular foreign policy”? The American people are not nearly appalled enough by the wanton destruction committed in our name. There is no strategy worth this carnage. Control of petro resources cannot justify this ongoing murder.

AP needs to fill the pages of its clients’ publications with the wages of our sins of aggression. Some Americans will not be affected, but the majority might be angry enough to speak up at last against these obscene “appalling” exercises in futility. The consequences are real, to bodies and minds, of soldiers and civilians. So we deserve to see those consequences for ourselves, to understand the policies rational planners like Gates and now his cohorts in the Obama regime have accomplished, flying in the face of “law… or constitutional right.” Not to mention common decency.

There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.¹

All of this can be confusing to those following the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know that the United States has been assassinating non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced from amongst those who happened to be in the same house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the non-believer.) These murders apparently don’t qualify as “assassinations”, for somehow killing “terrorists” from 2000 feet is morally and legally superior to doing so from two feet away.

But whatever the real story is behind the current rash of speculation, we should not fall into the media’s practice of at times intimating that multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts would be something shocking or at least very unusual.

I’ve compiled a list of CIA assassination attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against prominent foreign political figures, from 1949 through 2003, which, depending on how you count it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban intelligence);²) the list can be updated by adding the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone attack victims of recent years. Assassination and torture are the two things governments are most loath to admit to and try their best to cover up. It’s thus rare to find a government document or recorded statement mentioning a particular plan to assassinate someone. There is, however, an abundance of compelling circumstantial evidence to work with. The list can be found here.

For those of you who collect lists about splendid US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a few more that, lacking anything better to do, I’ve put together: Attempts to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which had been democratically-elected.

After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966,³ referring to him only as a “giant” among African leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not easily get away without mentioning it in a talk in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known; indeed, not a single print or broadcast news report in the American mainstream media saw fit to mention it at the time of the president’s talk. Like it never happened.

And the next time you hear that Africa can’t produce good leaders, people who are committed to the welfare of the masses of their people, think of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the 1970s, making it impossible for him to institute progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique against whom the CIA supported a counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to Machel’s widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.⁴

• Gross interference in democratic elections in at least 30 countries⁵
• Waging war/military action, either directly or in conjunction with a proxy army, in some 30 countries
• Dropping bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
• Attempts to suppress dozens of populist/nationalist movements in every corner of the world⁶

The Myths of Afghanistan, past and present

On the Fourth of July, Senator Patrick Leahy declared he was optimistic that, unlike the Soviet forces that were driven from Afghanistan 20 years ago, US forces could succeed there. The Democrat from Vermont stated:

The Russians were sent running as they should have been. We helped send them running. But they were there to conquer the country. We’ve made it very clear, and everybody I talk to within Afghanistan feels the same way: they know we’re there to help and we’re going to leave. We’ve made it very clear we are going to leave. And it’s going to be turned back to them. The ones that made the mistakes in the past are those that tried to conquer them.⁷

Leahy is a long-time liberal on foreign-policy issues, a champion of withholding US counter-narcotics assistance to foreign military units guilty of serious human-rights violations, and an outspoken critic of robbing terrorist suspects of their human and legal rights. Yet he is willing to send countless young Americans to a living hell, or horrible death, or maimed survival.

And for what? Every point he made in his statement is simply wrong.

The Russians were not in Afghanistan to conquer it. The Soviet Union had existed next door to the country for more than 60 years without any kind of invasion. It was only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists; precisely what the United States would have done to prevent a communist government in Canada or Mexico.

It’s also rather difficult for the United States to claim that it’s in Afghanistan to help the people there when it’s killed tens of thousands of simply for resisting the American invasion and occupation or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; not a single one of the victims has been identified as having had any kind of connection to the terrorist attack in the US of September 11, 2001, the event usually cited by Washington as justification for the military intervention. Moreover, Afghanistan is now permeated with depleted uranium, cluster bombs-cum-landmines, white phosphorous, a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals, and a population, after 30 years of almost non-stop warfare, of physically and mentally mutilated human beings, exceedingly susceptible to the promise of paradise, or at least relief, sold by the Taliban.

As to the US leaving … utterly meaningless propaganda until it happens. Ask the people of South Korea — 56 years of American occupation and still counting; ask the people of Japan — 64 years. And Iraq? Would you want to wager your life’s savings on which decade it will be that the last American soldier and military contractor leaves?

It’s not even precise to say that the Russians were sent running. That was essentially Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision, and it was more of a political decision than a military one. Gorbachev’s fondest ambition was to turn the Soviet Union into a West-European style social democracy, and he fervently wished for the approval of those European leaders, virtually all of whom were cold-war anti-communists and opposed the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan.

There has been as much of the same “causes” for wars that did not happen as for wars that did.

Henry Allingham died in Britain on July 18 at age 113, believed to have been the world’s oldest man. A veteran of World War I, he spent his final years reminding the British people about their service members killed during the war, which came to about a million: “I want everyone to know,” he said during an interview in November. “They died for us.”⁸

The whole million? Each one died for Britain? In the most useless imperialist war of the 20th century? No, let me correct that — the most useless imperialist war of any century. The British Empire, the French Empire, the Russian Empire, and the wannabe American Empire joined in battle against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire as youthful bodies and spirits sank endlessly into the wretched mud of Belgium and Germany, the pools of blood of Russia and France. The wondrous nobility of it all is enough to make you swallow hard, fight back the tears, light a few candles, and throw up. Imagine, by the middle of this century Vietnam veterans in their 90s and 100s will be speaking of how each of their 58,000 war buddies died for America. By 2075 we’ll be hearing the same stirring message from ancient vets of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many will remember that there was a large protest movement against their glorious, holy crusades, particularly Vietnam and Iraq?

Supreme nonsense

Senate hearings to question a nominee for the Supreme Court are a supreme bore. The sine qua non for President Obama choosing Sonia Sotomayor appears to be that she’s a woman with a Hispanic background. A LATINA! How often that word was used by her supporters. She would be the first LATINA on the Supreme Court! Dios mio!

Who gives a damn? All anyone should care about are her social and political opinions. Justice Clarence Thomas is a black man. A BLACK MAN! And he’s as conservative as they come.

Supreme Court nominees, of all political stripes, typically feel obliged to pretend that their social and political leanings don’t enter into their judicial opinions. But everyone knows this is rubbish. During her Senate hearing, Sotomayor declared: “It’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

The former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, would not agree with her. “At the constitutional level where we work,” he said, “ninety percent of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections.”⁹

By Sotomayor’s own account, which echos news reports, she was not asked about her position on abortion by either President Obama or his staff. But what if she is actually anti-abortion? What if she turns out to be the swing vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade?

What if she’s a proud admirer of the American Empire and its perpetual wars? American dissidents, civilian and military, may depend on her vote for their freedom from imprisonment.

What does she think about the “war on terror”? The civil liberties and freedom from torture of various Americans and foreigners may depend on her attitude. In his 2007 trial, Jose Padilla, an American citizen, was found guilty of aiding terrorists. “The jury did seem to be an oddly cohesive group,” the Washington Post reported. “On the last day of trial before the Fourth of July holiday, jurors arranged to dress in outfits so that each row in the jury box was its own patriotic color — red, white or blue.”¹⁰ No one dared to question this blatant display of patriotism in the courtroom; neither the defense attorney, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. How can we continue to pretend that people’s legal positions exist independently of their political sentiments?

In the 2000 Supreme Court decision stopping the presidential electoral count in Florida, giving the election to George W. Bush, did the politics of the five most conservative justices play a role in the 5 to 4 decision? Of course. Judges are essentially politicians in black robes. But should we care? Don’t ask, don’t tell. Sonia Sotomayor is a LATINA!

Given the large Democratic majority in the Senate, Sotomayor was in very little danger of being rejected. She could have openly and proudly expressed her social and political positions — whatever they may be — and the Democratic senators could have done the same. How refreshing, maybe even educational if a discussion ensued. Instead it was just another political appointment by a president determined to not offend anyone if he can help it, and another tiresome ritual hearing. The Republican senators were much less shy about revealing how they actually felt about important issues.

It didn’t have to be that way. As Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org pointed out during the hearings: “Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.”

NATO and Eastern Europe resource

No one chronicles the rise of the supra-government called NATO like Rick Rozoff in his “Stop NATO” mailings. NATO has become an ever-expanding behemoth, making war and interfering in political controversies all over Europe and beyond. The United States is not the world’s only superpower; NATO is another, as it surrounds Russia and the Caspian Sea oil reserves; although the distinction between the two superpowers is little more than a facade. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the NATO/US 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. On April 23, 1999 missiles slammed into Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in downtown Belgrade, killing 16 employees. The station, NATO claimed, was a legitimate military target because it broadcast propaganda. (Certainly a novel form of censorship; not to mention the fact that NATO could simply have taken out the station’s transmitter.) What apparently bothered the Western powers was that RTS was reporting the horrendous effects of NATO’s bombing as well as passing footage of the destruction to Western media.

To mark the anniversary, Amnesty International recently issued a demand that NATO be held accountable for the 16 deaths. Amnesty asserts that the bombing was a deliberate attack on a civilian object (one of many during the 78 days) and as such constitutes a war crime, and called upon NATO to launch a war crimes probe into the attack to ensure full accountability and redress for victims and their families.

Readers might consider signing up for the “Stop NATO” mailing list. Just write to: rwrozoff [at] yahoo.com. Rozoff scours the East European press each day and comes up with numerous gems ignored by the mainstream media. But a warning: The amount of material you’ll receive is often considerable. You’ll have to learn to pick and choose. You can get an idea of this by reading previous reports here.

1. The Guardian (London) July 13, 2009
2. Fabian Escalante, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro, (Ocean Press, 2006
3. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 32.
4. William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 23.
5. Ibid., chapter 18
6. Rogue State, chapter 17, intermixed with other types of US interventions
7. Vermont TV station WCAX, July 4, 2009, WCAX.com
8. Washington Post, July 19, 2009
9. William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (1980), p.8
10. Washington Post, August 17, 2007

It has begun by targeting one of the world’s leading rights organisations, the US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), as well as a local group of dissident army veterans, Breaking the Silence, which last month published the testimonies of 26 combat soldiers who served in Gaza.

Additionally, according to the Israeli media, the government is planning a “much more aggressive stance” towards human rights groups working to help the Palestinians.

Officials have questioned the sources of funding received by the organisations and threatened legislation to ban support from foreign governments, particularly in Europe.

Breaking the Silence and other Israeli activists have responded by accusing the government of a “witch hunt” designed to intimidate them and starve them of the funds needed to pursue their investigations.

“This is a very dangerous step,” said Mikhael Mannekin, one of the directors of Breaking the Silence. “Israel is moving in a very anti-democratic direction.”

The campaign is reported to be the brainchild of the far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, currently facing corruption charges, but has the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Early last month, Mr Lieberman used a press conference to accuse non-government organisations, or NGOs, of replacing diplomats in setting the international community’s agenda in relation to Israel. He also threatened reforms to curb the groups’ influence.

A week later, Mr Netanyahu’s office weighed in against Human Rights Watch, heavily criticising the organisation for its recent fund-raising activities in Saudi Arabia.

HRW has pointed out that it only accepts private donations, and has not accepted Saudi government funds, but Israeli officials say all Saudi money is tainted and will compromise HRW’s impartiality as a human rights watchdog in its treatment of Israel.

“A human rights organisation raising money in Saudi Arabia is like a women’s rights group asking the Taliban for a donation,” Mark Regev, a government spokesman, told the right-wing Israeli daily newspaper the Jerusalem Post.

HRW recently published reports arguing that the Israeli army had committed war crimes in Gaza, including the use of white phosphorus and attacking civilian targets.

HRW is now facing concerted pressure from Jewish lobby groups and from leading Jewish journalists in the US to sever its ties with Saudi donors. According to the Israeli media, some Jewish donors in the US have also specified that their money be used for human rights investigations that do not include Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel’s foreign ministry is putting pressure on European governments to stop funding many of Israel’s human rights groups. As a prelude to a clampdown, it has issued instructions to all its embassies abroad to question their host governments about whether they fund such activities.

Last week the foreign ministry complained to British, Dutch and Spanish diplomats about their support for Breaking the Silence.

The testimonies collected from soldiers suggested the Israeli army had committed many war crimes in Gaza, including using Palestinians as human shields and firing white phosphorus shells over civilian areas. One soldier called the army’s use of firepower “insane”.

The Dutch government paid nearly 20,000 euros to the group to compile its Gaza report, while Britain funded its work last year to the tune of £40,000.

Israeli officials are reported to be discussing ways either to make it illegal for foreign governments to fund “political” organisations in Israel or to force such groups to declare themselves as “agents of a foreign government”.

“Just as it would be unacceptable for European governments to support anti-war NGOs in the US, it is unacceptable for the Europeans to support local NGOs opposed to the policies of Israel’s democratically elected government,” said Ron Dermer, a senior official in Mr Netanyahu’s office.

He added that many of the groups were “working to delegitimise the Jewish state”.

Jeff Halper, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, said the government’s position was opposed to decades-old developments in human rights monitoring.

“Every dictator, from Hitler to Milosevic, has said that there must be no interference in their sovereign affairs, and that everyone else should butt out. But international law says human rights are universal and cannot be left to individual governments to interpret. The idea behind the Geneva Conventions is that the international community has a duty to be the watchdog on human rights abuses wherever they occur.”

Mr Halper, whose organisation last year received 80,000 euros from Spain to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes, was arrested last year for sailing to Gaza with peace activists to break the siege of Gaza.

Other groups reported to be in the foreign ministry’s sights are: B’Tselem, whose activities include providing Palestinians with cameras to record abuses by settlers and the army; Peace Now, which monitors settlement building; Machsom Watch, whose activists observe soldiers at the checkpoints; and Physicians for Human Rights, which has recently examined doctors’ complicity in torture.

The government’s new approach mirrors a long-running campaign against leftwing and Arab human rights groups inside Israel conducted by NGO Monitor, a rightwing lobby group led by Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv.

NGO Monitor has also targeted international organisations such as Oxfam and Amnesty, but has shown a particular obsession with HRW. Mr Steinberg recently boasted that HRW’s trip to Saudi Arabia in May reflected the loss of major Jewish sponsors in the US following the publication of its Gaza reports.

In an article in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Mr Steinberg claimed that European governments treated their funding of Israeli human rights organisations “as ‘top secret’, reflecting the realization that such activities lack legitimacy”.

Mr Mannekin said the Breaking the Silence report listed donors on the first page. “We are far more transparent than NGO Monitor. We don’t know who funds them.”

NGO Monitor, which according to its website is chiefly funded by the shadowy Wechsler Family Foundation in the US, is closely linked to Dore Gold, a hawkish former adviser to Ariel Sharon.

Mr Mannekin added: “The government cannot suppress information about what happened in Gaza by shutting us down. You can’t send 10,000 soldiers into battle and not expect that some of the details will come out. If it’s not us doing it, it’ll be someone else.”

The government’s current campaign follows a police raid on the homes of six Israeli women peace activists in April.

The women, all members of New Profile, a feminist organisation that opposes the militarisation of Israeli society, were arrested and accused of helping Israeli youngsters to evade the draft. The women are still waiting to learn whether they will be prosecuted.

If we examine these lists closely, we find internal contradiction, limits of application and other exceptions to strict adherence, but we don’t really understand these devices as absolute anyway, but rather as guides. Even those that have the force of law, like the Bill of Rights, must be adjudicated in specific situations since a few words can do no more than offer direction for a journey, not prescribe its every turn.

It is in this spirit that I offer this list of the Real Seven Deadly Sins. The limits and contradictions may seem especially glaring, but this is only because we are not use to them – and I will deal with some of the exceptions.

The “original” Seven Deadly Sins have a long history, quite a variety of inclusions and have been 5, 7, 10 and more sins at different turns. A society picks its sins; they are adaptive.

We have come to a time when we desperately need a new list. This is not to say that the list that evolved from Dante (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) has become acceptable, although fashion has certainly changed for several; in fact, if we had been more serious about these, we might not be in such a present pickle. But we need to refocus on those activities and, especially, the principles that have morphed from sin to saw.¹

These are the New Sins:

1) Progress
2) Economic growth
3) Property
4) Excess
5) Censorship
6) Repression
7) Religion

One of the first things that you might note from the new list is that it is easily adaptable to collective action, where as the Dante list is more easily seen as the unfortunate qualities of individuals. For this and other reasons, we might best keep those seven available for personal use. The new list is, in some cases, the “originals” writ large.

It is, today, our institutions that are dominating human action, and human institutions are not just the summing up of individual human behavior, but are, under the Consciousness System of Order, developing into new entities with new properties for which new guidance is needed.

1) Progress

This is the most insidious sin and one from which some others receive their motive force. We have come to see this greatest source of devastation as the essential positive value – and we rarely question it; taking the assertion, “It is progress,” as a substantive and often final argument.

Progress is change that arises from some previous condition, change that is judged by some humans as an improvement. But it has come to pass that the only guiding principle for the design of change is a previous condition that formed from some even earlier progress. That this seems perfectly normal to you is a measure of just how insidious this sin is.

Living things “progress” by adapting to the biophysical realities of the living space. Of course, they begin with what they have, but the changes occur in a universal context of long scale forces and processes. In humans, progress has come to mean changes that modify some existing condition arising in the human context, a condition that came to exist with the last round of progress. The speed of adaptation and the power to discover and use specific bits of information about how the biophysical world functions has allowed humans to ‘defeat’ certain biophysical rules. By bringing enough energy to bear and using mechanical physics, heavier than air machines can fly. By concentrating specific chemical species a concentrated consequence can be made to happen: poison, acid, lighter than air balloons, metals, etc. There are millions of examples. These things we call progress.

An evolutionary system would have to integrate every consequence that occurs within evolution’s time frame. Consciousness Order system time frames are so much more rapid than biophysical time frames that we have avoided the consequences of our behaviors. This we call progress.

Progress is building dikes to keep the waters out – both literally and figuratively; and then building buildings behind and on the dikes, and then building more and better pumps to remove the water that seeps through, and then, and then… The reality is that the water level is higher that the land level. Think for a moment on this from a position of sanity.

The sin of progress is to act outside of the context of the biophysical time frame, to make changes in response to existing conditions in such a way that the biophysical costs are deferred to other humans, other species and the future. Our societies today are dependent on billions of jobs that are the products of progress and all but a handful are made from the overcoming of the overcoming. We now have to keep trying to overcome the very fabric of universal reality to continue to ‘make progress.’ Such is the depth of our depravity.

And so Progress is a sin. Rather than seek it, we must make appeal to attempt it; must be able to demonstrate that the proposed changes enhance integration into biophysical reality, not attempt to defeat reality with some slight of hand. We would continue to change, to learn and to use the living and physical worlds, but at a pace to which all living and physical process on earth could adapt; a pace that will not create the dramatic synergies of a convulsive rejection of living things as the consequence of our progress.

2) Economic Growth

The sinfulness of growth is more obvious than the sin of progress. One need only think for a moment of the concept of the exponent. And it needs to be clear that human capacity has created a new model for growth; it is not the same process as growth of biological systems – just the same word. Biological growth is replenishment with the capacity to exceed its bounds, but fully inhibited by homeostatic feedback so that ecosystems are no-growth, sustaining systems.

Economic growth means an increase in the volume and speed of transactions of exchange. Transactions of exchange are the trading of one thing for another. Since there are basically three kinds of things (material/energy, behaviors and abstract tokens of exchange) there are a variety of forms that exchange can take, but ultimately increasing amounts of real stuff must be extracted, moved, modified and consumed as an economy grows. To some extent the need to actually raise crops, dig in mines and cut forests brings perspective to our economic growth, but…

economic growth can occur, so long as participants believe that tokens of exchange represent real things, as a result of trading those tokens – really betting on how many of a particular token will be required to trade for a particular real thing at a particular moment. This allows ‘not real things’ to increase in amount without limit. If the tokens are in a demand relationship with real things, then it is possible for there to be more ‘real stuff’ represented by tokens than there is or ever can be. The result is that demands are made of the earth’s capacities that cannot be met; the reality of the effort and limits of extraction is overcome in the perception. This is a sin.

A component of economic growth is investment: I loan you a hatchet to cut firewood and you return the hatchet plus a bit of cut wood, or I could loan you tokens to trade for a hatchet and you give me back the tokens plus a few extra. Either way you have to cut more wood than you require. The amount of material or behavior traded becomes more and more dependent on the obligation and less and less on the actual state of need. Economic growth mutates into increasing states of obligation.

If there is not a constantly increasing need or obligation, then there can be no more than momentary or situational occasions for investment. And so – placing the cart squarely in front of the horse – our economic system sustains the investment model without regard to the relationship of human economics to the natural biophysical economy. This is a sin.

3) Property

Property once seemed so simple; I learned it at my father’s knee: It is mine, you may not use it or touch it without my permission. I hold it by a force as close to a divine right as such things get. And yet, my ball (hat, toy or _____ ) could be taken and tossed around and eventually tossed onto a roof in the age old game of ‘humble the property owner’, AKA ‘keep away.’

I have discovered that humans come with a great variety of respect for property. Some have arm’s length rules and others will take even useless things. Different groups of people define property in different ways – what can be property, degrees of holding property, what must be done to identify property.

“Keep away” offered this instruction: property and force are intimately related. Property is mine so long as I am willing and capable to use sufficient force to keep it. A powerful man in my town lived at the end of a long road; the sign at his gate, “If you trespass, you will be shot.” This was not at his front door – his house could not be seen – but was at the most easily approached edge of the 30 or 40 acre mountain valley to which he lay claim. Records show that his family drove out the previous inhabitants with legal trickery and one punctuating dynamite explosion.

There are 3 ways that we can view property: 1) that which is, 2) that which is ours (or theirs) and 3) that which is mine (or his or hers).

“That which is” belongs to all and to no one. You may use it only as long as you don’t change it or deny its use to any other organism or process. “That which is ours” belongs to the commons, the community decides potential uses and what compensations and ablutions are required. “That which is mine” belongs to me; again, however, the community decides what can be personal property and often the limits of control and use – this should tell us something. The attempt to turn ‘that which is mine’ into absolute domination without regard to the rest of existence is a sin.

It is circumstance and excess that moves the sustaining to the sinful. Human progress and economic growth have driven property from balanced patterns of use, compensation and replenishment to the assumption of more and more private ownership; so that today we claim we can not only own the contents of our pockets and immediate living space, but we can own the land, the water, the air, living things, DNA, chemical processes and ideas. And we have even added a specialized instrument of private ownership called the corporate collective to own in even greater amounts and with greater force. This is sin.

4) Excess and Wealth

Excess has almost always been a sin in almost every culture. Yet, in our present condition the application of Sins 5 and 6 (censorship and repression) have led the way in justifying excess, usually claiming envy as the reason of objecting to wealth. This is quite simply sin supporting sin.

Excess is a sin because it perpetuates the sins of property, is the product of growth and can only be justified by dishonest and coercive means. But, primarily it is a sin because it damages the human relationship to the planet and to each other.

Ultimately the excess of wealth (both private and societal) can only be extracted from the universal commons and it can only be extracted by the coercion of one human entity by another. It is difficult to say who is harmed more in the existential sense, the miner who must dig or starve, yet retains some vestige of specieshood or the owner who believes in the madness of his right of power to steal the life and labor of the miner and the product of the land. It is, of course, not difficult to see who lives in the greatest distress of the moment.

5) Censorship

It is obvious to many that we must not speak of dangerous, harmful and distressing things. To do so would bring upset and disruption to our settled lives: speak the Devil’s words and call the Devil.

There is, as there always is, a major difficulty: How are we, or who is, to decide? We are ultimately faced with this simple choice: freedom of speech with only the most limited restrictions or speech controlled by whoever can wrest power over its methods and topics.

Control of speech is control of idea, is control of possibility. And yet we cannot live in a world without design, a world that limits and organizes possibility. The probability of glucose moving through a cell membrane in controlled by insulin, which is controlled by a dozen other conditions of the organism. We can expect nothing less for a super-organism collective like human societies. But there the analogy fails; the process by which biological evolution designs physiological function leaves out nothing. Every force and movement of the natural world gets its say without inhibition because it is exists in the total reality. Again, we can have nothing less for our collective social order.

Lying is a special form of censorship that denies access to a factual basis for action, but lying should be no more reviled than demanding that the truth of another’s understanding not be spoken.

This is an especially dangerous sin as new and powerful forms of human super-organism are demanding and receiving the power to censor speech that challenges their domination by controlling the means of speech and using that means to control the topics of speech.

6) Repression

The rejection of one identifiable racial, ethnic, language, cultural or behavioral group by another is one of the oldest human actions. When there was space and available niches, this was less sin and more signal to spread the species around. It even served certain other useful functions by reducing the spread of disease and supplying gene pools from which vigorous crosses could test the genetic waters.²

But today and for some many hundreds of years the repression of one group by another as been in the service of quite other forces: economic and political power. Billions of human lives have been lived out in the greatest of distress – truly painful, brutal and short because of the sin of repression.

Life has never had a guarantee – or so is my belief – but to assign beforehand that billions of lives will be lived in horror and pain is a sin. And this is a sin that is likely to continue to increase dramatically as it has over the last few thousand years. Never have so many lived such deprived and devastated lives as in today’s moment.

Two hundred years ago there were one billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in deep poverty at the advancing edge of European expansion and industrialization and in islands of industrial servitude. One hundred years ago there where two billion people on the earth, nearly half of whom lived in the deepest poverty as the first world nations were converting the rest of the world into their larder. Today there are almost 7 billion, nearly half of whom live at the edge of survival. Local sustaining practices have been so damaged and demonized that even those who are not in immediate peril today are but one global economic decision away from dust.

7) Religious Piety

Religion is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Its supporting structures and designs are deep in our origins, but it has become a chimera, a crossing with politics, economics and the institutional super-organism. Religion is a developmentally dysfunctional entity demanding the privilege of an infant while having the strength of a powerful adult.

In its origin religion was the combined effect of the Stories that integrated human action within the environment and the instinctual emotional connections to environment and community. It gave strength to the adaptations that formed the basis of human success. It did not create the behaviors, but responded to them as the collected Stories that organized the behavior of a group, carrying them through space and time.

Devotion to religious story has become the central madness of our time and one of the greatest inhibitions to our survival. There were in the past many thousands of religions because there were thousands of situations in which people lived. Since religion’s function is to define a way of life, then it must be completely connected to immediate and sustaining reality – it used to be! Now religions are devoted to the remains of Stories that once had some relational meaning, but are no longer connected to reality. This makes the Stories of religion easy prey for any entity to use as devices of censorship and repression.

Summary

These are the sins that we need to “hold in our hearts” as unacceptable. These are the sins that are devastating our world. 30 years ago drunk driving was a laughing matter (even as people were killed), but became a matter of scorn and rejection as people incorporated into their habits of thought, into their lists of sins, driving drunk. We need to see these seven sins in the same way. Just as with the original seven deadly sins a small number of people are empowered by them if allowed, but if enough people reject those behaviors, actively reject them, they will be weakened and more of us may begin to see them for what they are.

1. It is an irony of our time that those who claim to champion individual freedom are really speaking for the institutional collective and the individual’s subservience to it, while those who are accused of socialist “collectivism” see the collective in service of the individual.
2. Cultural habits combining with instinctual behaviors associated with incest created complex rules that often involved either males or females moving from one group to another.

They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it truth.
– Isaiah

The unexamined life is not worth living.
–Socrates

War is always finally about betrayal.
– Chris Hedges

A static universe isn’t physically self-consistent. The sun can’t shine forever.
– James Peebles, Physics Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

Do I dare
disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
– T.S. Eliot

On July 11th, author William Blum e-mailed me a Washington Post article about Ken Meyercord. Fredrick Kunkle, a Post staff writer, described Meyercord as a 65-year old with a “high tech job at Freddie Mac, a local public-access cable television show … and a long history of writing about what he says are ‘myths’ of the Holocaust.” Meyercord, the article continued, hoped to win “an at-large seat on the board of the Reston Citizens Association, a quasi-government body … for the community of 60,000, which is not officially a municipality.” Reston is basically a D.C. suburb in Virginia.

I’d met Meyercord a few months before at a political celebration in downtown D.C. The party’s sponsors were elated over Obama’s inauguration. More cynical than most of those there, I’d latched onto Blum’s coat-tails for the invite—providing chauffeur services in my old van. I met Medea Benjamin, Meyercord and his Palestinian wife, Samira, and a few other interesting people. Nobody I met or overheard struck me as radical or dangerous. Some—not those I’ve mentioned here—struck me as naïve for believing that one election would change the direction of our latter-day Empire.

A few months later, friend Blum and I were at Eduardo Galeano’s reading at Politics and Prose, also in D.C.. We ran into Meyercord there and we decided to get some Chinese food nearby. Meyercord told me about his TV show then, but most of the conversation had more to do with Peking duck than with the sweet and sour business of contemporary, imperial politics.

Meyercord probably mentioned that he was running in the Reston election. A Maryland resident, unable to vote in Virginia, absorbed in my personal problems then, all of that sailed over my head. Conversation was mostly convivial; no one was trying to proselytize; and, in fact, nobody could have. Blum is 75 and he’s seen it all; I’m 63 and I’ve seen enough.

Four days after reading the first article on Meyercord, I was e-mailed another, also by Fredrick Kunkle at the Post. Under the headline, “Write-in Effort Blocks ‘Revisionist,” I learned: “A last-minute campaign to prevent a self-described Holocaust revisionist from serving on a civic body in Reston has succeeded with a landslide. … Ken Meyercord, who had been running unopposed for an at-large seat on the Reston Citizens Association’s 13-member volunteer board, received only 23 votes after his provocative views on Jews created a backlash.” Debra Steppel, who organized the write-in campaign, called it a “fabulous result.”

Mr. Kunkle wrote that Meyercord was “gracious in conceding,” and that he had congratulated Ms. Steppel for her efforts, although he thought her “misinformed.” Further, the article noted that Meyercord and his wife had lived in Reston since 1977, and that, in “writings and interviews,” he had expressed doubt that Nazi Germany had a “mission to annihilate European Jews, a plan known as the Final Solution.” Meyercord had also denied that Nazis used gas chambers to murder Jews, and he had “expressed skepticism that the number of Holocaust victims reached 6 million.”

By now, my interest was more than piqued, and I asked Meyercord to send me some of his writing. As a half-Jew with Zionists, anti-Zionists and the indifferent, ignorant and uniformed within my own extended family; as a fan of Paine and Thoreau, Martin Buber, Rilke and Hesse; as a man vitally interested in my world and human psychology, I wanted to know more about this tempest in a teapot in Reston and how it might relate to our confused, violent and pernicious modern macro world.

Perusing Meyercord’s work, I found him to be more apologetic than inflammatory. In “In Search of a Holocaust Denier,” he writes, “What I would like to offer here is a rationale—a plea, really—for investigating all aspects of the holocaust story in an atmosphere free of rancor, intolerance, and intimidation. I believe we can learn from history and that it will be a better world if we do. Of course, to learn from history, we have to have an accurate understanding of what happened. …”

Meyercord describes how the “goose-stepping … siegheiling” Nazis endlessly portrayed by Hollywood and the other media provided little insight into “how a man like Hitler could have risen to power in one of the most sophisticated countries on earth.” He deplores the fact that we have learned so little from the Nazi era, noting that the Foreign Minister of Israel [Avigdor Lieberman] has advocated the deportation of all Palestinians from Eretz [Greater] Israel. Those who have challenged holocaust orthodoxy have found themselves exiled to an academic wilderness—a la Norman Finkelstein in the U.S.—or imprisoned—like David Irving in Austria! And, in that same reasonable, almost apologetic mode, he asks, “Wouldn’t it be better to dispel the myths surrounding the holocaust now, while anti-Semitism is a neglibible factor in American society, than at some future date when hard times lead desperate, angry Americans to look around for a scapegoat?”

So much for the overview of Meyercord’s approach. He’s not some glib-tongued salesman for neo-Nazism. His argumentation is tightly reasoned and far less fiery and provocative than, say, Limbaugh’s, O’Reilly’s, Hannity’s or Coulter’s. He directs his readers (and directed me in a short phone interview of him) to two websites for further exploration of the issues.

Meyercord describes himself as a “revisionist,” not a holocaust denier. He notes: “What causes revisionists to be misrepresented and slandered by the believers is their denial of three constituent parts of the holocaust story:

   1. That there was a plan to exterminate the Jews, aka, “The Final Solution.”
   2. That gas chambers were used in the execution of that plan; and
   3. That no less than six million Jews died as a result.

He offers his own refutations of the predominant “holocaust story” and directs us to others for more detail.

The question I have to ask now is: How is this relevant to our post-9/11 world?

It is relevant because past is prelude, and those who don’t learn the lessons of the past, as Santayana said … well, you know the rest.

It’s relevant because we would rather kill each other to defend the sanctity of our myths—religious, ideological, nationalistic/patriotic—than smash the idols of our perceptions—and misperceptions.

It’s relevant because a thoughtful man’s views of history or religious dogma is irrelevant to the performance of his duties and responsibilities as a citizen in a local civic organization.

It is relevant because every tin-pot dictator who appears on the scene—a Noriega, a Saddam Hussein—who loses the favor of the U.S. imperial regime; and every populist leader—an Ahmadinejead, a Hugo Chavez, a Fidel Castro—is inevitably compared to Hitler and threatened with regime change, or having his country “wiped off the map,” or has, in fact, been invaded. Hitler has become the gold standard of evil—and that incubus colors every other form of evil. We have personalized and incarnated evil, ignorance and brutality, and exonerated the institutions, the social forms and mechanisms of control, the psychologies and hysterias still very much with us today.

It is relevant because most Americans don’t know squat about Zionism or the role that Jewish nationalism played in the run-up to World War I, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the disastrous Versailles treaty, the Balfour Declaration, etc. (Meyercord, in fact, does not touch on any of this in his writing or in his interviews with me or with Fred Kunkle at the Post.)

It is relevant because whether 6 million Jews died or 1 million died—there still is no justification for the expropriation of another people’s land, resources, country. (My mother taught me as a child, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”)

Meyercord’s little dust-up in a D.C. suburb leaves us with three big ponderables:

   1. A question of censorship
   2. A moral question
   3. The historical record

Ms. Steppel’s write-in campaign, and the voters of Reston, attempted to censor Meyercord’s words and beliefs. They did not vote on the man’s competence, his willingness and ability to serve his local community. They voted against his convictions, at which he had arrived after carefully examining the evidence, his life and the promptings of his conscience. He lived for six months in Beirut, traveled in Israel, has had a long, fulfilling marriage to a Palestinian woman. They raised two children who attended Reston’s public schools. No doubt his unique experiences have enriched his perspective. How does censorship and expurgation serve the public interest? In our intertwined world, are we not all safer reaching out, trying to understand “the other”?

The moral question has too often reduced itself to “my suffering is better than your suffering.” Suffering employed this way has little or nothing to do with morality, much to do with religious dogma. It is suffering as justification—for outrageous reparations (against Germans, for example, no more guilty for World War I than Brits, the French, the Americans, the Russians). It is suffering employed as the ultimate rationale for “man’s inhumanity to man,” “nature red in tooth and claw,” etc. It is suffering memorialized as stasis (James Peebles here: “a static universe isn’t physically self-consistent”). It is suffering as rationalization for continuing the empires of destruction, wreaking havoc and revenge on more innocents, continuing the whole ghastly process (“They will take evil and call it good. They will take the lie and call it the truth.”)

As for the historical record, it has always been a rather murky affair. In my entire lifetime, God has never spoken to me once out of the Whirlwind, and I have been waiting for 46 years to find out what really happened on November 22, 1963. Einstein said God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, and Bohr told Einstein to stop telling God what to do! God may not play dice, but He/She/It certainly keeps His/Her/Its cards close to His/Her/Its chest/bosom/ineffable mystery.

Which means I’ve got to keep digging. I have to keep disturbing the universe, checking my notes and revising my memes because in an expanding universe I don’t participate in cosmological events, but I can play my ant-like role in the evolution of awareness and consciousness. “War is finally about betrayal,” as Hedges succinctly and profoundly writes, and I need to know why and how a species that has evolved so magnificently in its technology has, when it comes to interacting with other sentient beings, stymied itself in the Age of Iron and Sky Gods. What gives? What mystery here?

Six million victims or one innocent victim—what compels us to slaughter the innocents under Herod, to crucify Christ for our sins, to burn John Hus for impiety? How shall we employ numbers to justify brutality? Did the death of 20 million Russians in the Great Patriotic War justify the rape of 2 million German women by Russian troops when the Third Reich collapsed? The ghost voices of tens of millions of native peoples of the Americas rise up and cry for justice. What reparations can we pay them? Millions of Africans, lost in the “Middle Passage” of the slave trips, sweated to death among the sugar canes of the Caribbean and the cotton and tobacco plantations of the New (old!) World—what memorials shall we build for them, what is their due?

How do we make equivalences? I suffered, my family suffered, my people suffered … therefore, I have the right to. … What? Wreak vengeance? Upon the innocents?

Probably it is too much to hope for forgiveness—either given or gotten. Humans are not, generally, constituted that way. Except for a few saints we’ve usually managed to crucify upside down, boil in oil, or murder with a thousand cuts.

But we may, possibly, hope for clarity, breaking the cycle of wrong for wrong, by excavating the truths, the hidden causes, penetrating the whirlwind of confusion and setting the record straight–because in this melange of pulsating life called Earth, it’s looking more and more like we’d better all pull on the oars together or we’re all going down together. And it looks more and more like Eugene Debs, who said so much well, said this one perfectly: “While there is one soul in prison, I am not free.”

What else but to know the true history of the human mind and heart—to extricate ourselves, to beam the searchlights in terra incognita, confront our demons, shake our wings loose from the chrysalis of so much ignorance, blood-lust, power-lusting, arrogance, fear, greed and stupidity?

Media reform activists have drawn a line in the sand. Net Neutrality must be defended at all costs. Preserving a viable, independent, free and open Internet (and the media overall) is essential to a functioning democracy, but the forces aligned against it are formidable, daunting, relentless, and reprehensible. Some past challenges suggest future ones ahead.

Censorship Attempts to Curtail Free Expression

The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Nonetheless, Congress and state legislatures have repeatedly tried to censor free speech, allegedly regarded as indecent, obscene, hateful, terrorist-related, or harmful to minors. However, the Supreme Court, in a number of decisions, ruled that the government may not regulate free expression, only its manner such as when it violates the right to privacy “in an essentially intolerable manner” — a huge hurtle to overcome, including online, because viewers are protected by simply “averting (one’s) eyes (Cohen v. California, 1971).”

In 1998, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) passed, but was blocked by federal courts as an infringement of free speech and therefore unconstitutional and unenforceable. In 1999, the law was struck down at the Appellate Court level, but it stayed on the books. In 2002, the Supreme Court reviewed the ruling and returned the case for reconsideration. It remained blocked. Then in March 2003, the Appellate Court again ruled it unconstitutional on the grounds that it would hinder protected adult speech that’s likely what it was about in the first place.

Other litigation followed at the District and Appellate levels until on January 21, 2009, the Supreme Court killed COPA by refusing to hear appeals to affirm it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this way: “After 10 Years, an Infamous Internet-Censorship Act is Finally Dead.” At least that’s the hope, but censorship attempts never die. They just reinvent themselves in new forms made all the easier when powerful corporate interests and their congressional allies support them.

In 2000, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) became law, and the Supreme Court upheld it — to regulate online content deemed “indecent (or) harmful to minors.” The law requires schools, libraries and other public institutions to install blocking software to prevent minors from having access to it.

In 2006, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) passed the House but not the Senate. It also would have mandated schools, libraries and other public institutions to prevent minors from accessing “commercial social networking websites (and) chat rooms.”

Its language was broad enough to apply also to sites like Amazon, Yahoo, Wikipedia and others and would have made the FCC a gatekeeper/censor. As the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, the law was reintroduced in the Senate in January 2007 but never passed.

In February 1996, the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed to regulate alleged indecent and obscene online content in violation of the First Amendment. Under the law, classic fiction would be banned as well as any material deemed offensive. In June, 1996, a three-judge federal panel partially struck it down for restricting adult free speech. In June 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.

The Act was Title V of the 1996 Telecommunications Act titled Broadcast Obscenity and Violence that applied broadcast standards to the Internet. Under Section 230, Internet services operators aren’t considered publishers and thus have no liability for the words of third parties using their services.

In 2003, Congress amended CDA by removing struck down indecency provisions. In 2005, a three-judge Southern District of New York panel rejected Barbara Nitke’s obscenity provisions CDA challenge (in Nitke, et al v. Ashcroft). The Supreme Court upheld the decision.

In 2005, the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act (VAWDOJRA) became law and another blow to online free speech by prohibiting “any device (like a modem) or software that can be used to originate… (anonymous or other) communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the internet” for the alleged purpose of harassment, even if only vigorous constitutional debate was intended or ordinary free speech.

In October 2007, the House passed the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act called “the thought crime prevention bill.” It was introduced in the Senate, referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but never voted on or passed.

If it ever becomes law in its present form, it will establish a commission and Center for Excellence to study and act against “thought criminals” (including online ones) for alleged acts of “violent radicalization (and) homegrown terrorism” defined as follows:

• “violent radicalization (to mean) adopting or promoting an extremist belief system (to facilitate) ideologically based violence to advance political, religious or social change;”
• “homegrown terrorism (to mean) the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any (US) possession to intimidate or coerce the (US) government, the civilian population… or any segment thereof (to further) political or social objectives.”

In other words, this law, if passed, will criminalize whatever the government wishes to include under the above two categories, including constitutionally protected speech online or elsewhere.

Another ongoing censorship issue involves craigslist — a worldwide online community network featuring classified ads for “jobs, housing, for sale, personals, services, local community, and events.”

On May 5, South Carolina Attorney (AG) General Henry McMaster notified its CEO, Jim Buckmaster, that unless an “erotic services” section is removed in 10 days, “craigslist management may be subject to criminal investigation and prosecution.” Other AGs in Rhode Island, Illinois, and Connecticut issued similar threats even though all of them are baseless.

Previous courts have held that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects “interactive computer service” providers like craigslist and lets them be self-regulating and free from liability. The law clearly states that they shouldn’t be responsible for third party content because they didn’t do enough to comply with individual State standards that may violate the First Amendment and federal law.

In craigslist’s case, it’s gone way beyond its legal obligations. In November 2008, it agreed to technical and policy changes to curb the use of its site for illegal purposes by third parties, including requiring telephone and credit card verification for “erotic services” ads to reject ones deemed illegal.

Earlier, craigslist screened out 90% of these ads. Nonetheless, it’s being unfairly targeted by AGs interpreting Section 230 and First Amendment rights as they please. Federal law, however, protects craigslist, but not against ambitious AGs harassment for their own political advantage and self-interest.

On May 20, craigslist announced that it filed suit against South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster seeking “declaratory relief and a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he has repeatedly threatened against craigslist and its executives.” Craigslist is on solid footing. It’s in full compliance with the law, but McMaster’s persistent threats forced it to sue in federal court.

These and numerous other congressional and other attempts aim to censor protected speech, including online. Expect more of this ahead, some legislation to be enacted, at times upheld by the courts, and, as a result, our liberties to be chipped away incrementally and lost — unless a line in the sand is drawn and defended by enough of the committed to do it.

On February 29, 2008, one skirmish turned out successfully when a federal judge let the anonymous whistle-blowing WikiLeaks resume operations after a week earlier ordering its US hosting company and domain registrar (Dynadot) to shut down and lock out its site. In his reconsidered ruling, District Judge Jeffrey White conceded he was having second thoughts regarding “serious questions of prior restraint (and) possible violations of the First Amendment.” He added that “the court does not want to be a part of any order that is not constitutional.” Even so, one triumph doesn’t mean victory. The struggle for unimpeded free speech continues.

Secret Unconstitutional Surveillance, Including Online Data Mining

The right to privacy is sacred even though no constitutional provision specifically mandates it. Nonetheless, the First Amendment guarantees free and open speech and beliefs. The Third Amendment the privacy of our homes against demands to be used to house soldiers. The Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and privacy of our personal information.

Also, the Ninth Amendment states that the “enumeration of certain (of the Bill of) rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the people.” In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects privacy in a case affirming the right to use contraceptives and that banning them violated the “right to marital privacy.”

In Justice Arthur Goldberg’s concurring opinion, he cited the Ninth Amendment in defense of the ruling. Earlier High Courts also affirmed the constitutional right of privacy on matters of marriage, child rearing, procreation, education, termination of medical treatment, possessing and viewing pornography, abortion, and more as well as overall privacy protection.

The 14th Amendment’s “liberty” clause also relates to privacy by stating: “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” Courts have broadened the meaning of “liberty” to include personal, political and social rights and privileges. Thus, invasion of private spaces is unconstitutional.

In Olmstead v. US (1928), Justice Louis Brandeis stated:

The makers of our Constitution understood the need to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness, and the protections guaranteed by this are much broader in scope, and include the right to life and an inviolate personality — the right to be left alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. The principle underlying the Fourth and Fifth Amendments is protection against invasions of the sanctities of a man’s home and privacies of life. This is a recognition of the significance of man’s spiritual nature, his feelings, and his intellect.

George Bush institutionalized lawless spying invasions of privacy on Americans and others. Barack Obama continues the practice under the same federal agencies, including the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and NSA. On April 15, the New York Times headlined: “Officials Say US Wiretaps Exceeded Law.”

It cited the NSA’s practice in recent months of intercepting private emails and phone calls of Americans “on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year…” Briefed intelligence officials and lawyers called it “significant and systematic… overcollection” in violation of the law.

The Justice Department acknowledged the problem but said it was resolved. For its part, the NSA said its “intelligence operations, including programs for collection and analysis, are in strict accordance with US laws and regulations.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in overall charge, downplayed the Times story, referred to “inadvertent mistakes,” and claimed efforts were immediately implemented to correct them.

Nonetheless, the issue remains unsettled, and new details reveal earlier domestic surveillance, including wiretapping a congressional member without court approval, and systematically doing it against many American citizens.

Tom Burghardt writes often on these issues at his Antifascist Calling blog… “Exploring the shadowlands of the corporate police state.” In calling “Spying on Americans: ‘Business as Usual’ under Obama,” he reported that working cooperatively with private corporations, the NSA collects vast amounts of “transactional data such as credit card purchases, bank transactions and travel itineraries… sold to (the agency) by corporate freebooters.” It’s then data-mined for “suspicious patterns,” a practice begun pre-9/11 but expanded greatly since then.

More than just financial transactions are monitored. According to investigative journalist Christopher Ketchum, “as many as ‘8 million Americans are now listed (as) secret enemies… who could face detention under martial law (and subjected) to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning” and possible internment.

Nothing under Obama has changed in spite of serious privacy, civil liberties, and other constitutional issues. Director Rod Beckstrom of DHS’ Cyber Security Center resigned in March because of NSA’s “greater role in guarding the government’s computer systems” and its concentrated power without checks and balances.

According to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston: Obama’s “Justice Department (is continuing) the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a ’secret’ that cannot be reviewed by the courts…” because doing so would harm national security.

Worse still is the DOJ’s assertion that the US government is immune from illegal spying litigation even when in violation of federal privacy statutes, an unprecedented claim exceeding the Bush administration citing “sovereign immunity.” Obama is going Bush one better by saying the Patriot Act immunizes the government from being sued under surveillance provisions of the Wiretap Act, Stored Communications Act, and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) enhanced warrantless wiretapping powers in cooperation with complicit telecom providers. In other words, Obama’s DOJ absolves itself and its corporate allies of accountability under existing federal statutes that prohibit illegal spying on Americans.

On April 26, Burghhardt reported that “The Pentagon’s Cyber Command Formidable Infrastructure arrayed against the American People” will be headed by the NSA’s director, Lt. General Keith Alexander, to protect the military’s networks from hacker attacks, especially from countries like China and Russia. How this will “affect civilian computer networks is unclear. However, situating” it alongside NSA at Fort Meade, MD “should set alarm bells ringing (because of NSA’s) potential for (greater) abuse… given (its) role in illegal domestic surveillance… (and its) tremendous technical capabilities.”

“As a Pentagon agency, NSA has positioned itself to seize near total control over the country’s electronic infrastructure, thereby exerting an intolerable influence — and chilling effect — over the nation’s political life.” Recent history shows that “NSA and their partners at CIA, FBI, et. al. have targeted political dissidents,” including anti-war protesters, environmentalists, and others for their activism and beliefs. Greater NSA powers will “transform ‘cybersecurity’ into a euphemism for keeping the rabble in line (and) achieving ‘full spectrum dominance’ via ‘Cyberspace Offensive Counter-Operations.’ ”

Directed against ordinary Americans, democratic freedoms will be severely compromised. No matter as “the Obama administration (prepares) to hand control of the nation’s electronic infrastructure over to a (rogue) agency” — with General Alexander telling the House Armed Services subcommittee that America needs a digital warfare force for defensive and offensive cyber operations. More resources are required to do it, not for public security, but for imperial conquest and containing dissent at home – in violation of constitutional freedoms and international law.

In a follow-up May 4 article, Burghardt explored the secret, unaccountable world of FBI data mining through its Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW) containing over a billion documents, including many on US citizens. They come from our personal records and history, including what’s obtainable online through illegal spying.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Kurt Opsahl, “The IDW includes more than four times as many documents as the Library of Congress, and the FBI has asked for millions of dollars to data-mine this warehouse, using unproven science in an attempt to predict future crimes from past behavior.” This illegal spying violates our constitutional right to privacy and endangers our freedom by generating unsubstantiated threats based on pure supposition.

Besides the FBI, it’s virtually certain that other, perhaps all 16, government intelligence agencies conduct similar spying illegally, and as such, endanger everyone’s freedom.

Earlier on July 14, 2008, an ACLU press release headlined: “Terrorist Watch List Hits One Million Names” based on government reported figures. They include: “Members of Congress, nuns, war heros and other ’suspicious characters’ (like anti-war and environmental activists)… trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape.”

According to the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program director, Barry Steinhardt, this data base represents “what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security: it’s unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of (people) in this country. Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee (it) will do more harm than good” besides being ineffective to catch real criminals.

Given the current scope and intent of FBI data mining, with millions under surveillance, its potential for abuse far exceeds where it stood less than a year ago – because the Obama administration supports it. No longer is anything about us private, including:

• all our financial transactions and records;
• every check written;
• every credit card or other electronic purchase;
• our complete medical history;
• every plane, train, bus or ship itinerary;
• our phone records and conversations; and
• every computer key stroke.

Our entire private world is now public if spy snoops decide to invade it.

Key Internet-based companies, like Google, do it routinely; the company UK-based Privacy International ranked worst in its September 2007 “Race to the Bottom” report. It stated:

“… throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google’s approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations.” It tops them all “as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google’s product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part due to Google’s market dominance and the sheer size of its user base.”

It’s also unmatched in “its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.” It’s able to “deep-drill into the minutiae of a user’s life and lifestyle choices” irresponsibly. Its attitude toward privacy is blatantly hostile at worst and benignly ambivalent at best. Specifically:

– Google retains a large amount of user information with no limitation on its subsequent use or disclosure and with no chance for users to delete or withdraw it;

– it retains all “search strings and associated IP-addresses and time stamps for at least 18 to 24 months (retention) and does not provide users with an expungement option;”

– it has other personal information, including hobbies, employment, addresses, phone numbers, and more, and retains it even after users delete their profiles;

– it “collects all search results entered through Google Toolbar and identifies all Google Toolbar users with a unique cookie that allows Google to track the user’s web movement;” it also retains information indefinitely with no expungement option;

– it doesn’t follow OECD Privacy Guidelines and EU data protection law provisions;

– users have no option to edit or delete obtained records and information about them; and

– they can’t access log information generated through various Google services, such as Google Maps, Video, Talk, Reader, or Blogger.

In 2004, Google also acquired the CIA-linked company Keyhole, Inc., that has a worldwide 3-D spy-in-the-sky images database. Its software provides a virtual fly-over and zoom-in capability to within a one-foot resolution. It’s supported by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital CIA-funded firm that “identif(ies) and invest(s) in companies developing cutting-edge information technologies that serve United States national security interests.”

In 2003, its CEO, John Hanke, said: “Keyhole’s strategic relationship with In-Q-Tel means that the Intelligence Community can now benefit from the massive scalability and high performance of the Keyhole enterprise solution.”

In 2006, former CIA clandestine services case officer, Robert Steele, said:

I am quite positive that Google is taking money and direction from my old colleague Dr. Rick Steinheiser in the Office of Research and Development at CIA, and that Google has done at least one major prototype effort focused on foreign terrorists which produced largely worthless data… I think (Google is) stupid to be playing with CIA, which cannot keep a secret and is more likely to waste time and money than actually produce anything useful.

On April 29, Willem Buiter’s Maverecon site headlined “Gagging on Google” and said:

Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women’s rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property.

This company should be rigorously regulated, “and if necessary, broken up or put out of business.” With about half the global internet search market, it threatens enhanced “corporate or even official Big Brotherism.”

For example, Google Street View, an addition to Google Maps, “provides panoram(ic) images visible from street level in cities around the world. The cameras record details of residents’ lives” on all sorts of personal matters that no one should be able to snoop on, then save, without permission, for whatever purposes.

The company also invades our privacy through tracking cookies or “third-party persistent cookies” to assist interest-based advertising, a practice known as behavioral targeting. In the wrong hands, this information can be used “to put a commercial squeeze on people, but also to extort and blackmail them.” And in government hands, it enhances “a pretty effective and very nasty police state.”

Can Google be trusted to use this information responsibly? “Of course not.” It’s a business run by “amoral capitalists,” out to make as much money as possible by any means necessary. Google and other Internet search engines “should not be trusted because they cannot be trusted.” However, because of its size and dominance, Google is “the new evil empire of the internet,” a “Leviathan” that must be tamed.

Cybersecurity Legislation

On April 1, two bills endangering a free and open Internet were introduced in the Senate:

– S. 773: Cybersecurity Act of 2009 “to ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.”

S. 773 was then referred to the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and thus far not voted on.

– S. 778: A bill to establish, within the Executive Office of the President, the Office of National Cybersecurity Advisor (aka czar). The bill was referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and not yet voted on.

Accompanying information said Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe introduced the legislation to address:

“our country’s unacceptable vulnerability to massive cyber crime, global cyber espionage, and cyber attacks that could cripple our critical infrastructure.”

We presently face cyber espionage threats, they said, as well as “another great vulnerability… to our private sector critical infrastructure — banking, utilities, air/rail/auto traffic control, telecommunications — from disruptive cyber attacks that could literally shut down our way of life.”

“This proposed legislation will bring new high-level governmental attention to develop a fully integrated, thoroughly coordinated, public-private partnership to our cyber security efforts in the 21st century” through what’s unstated — government affecting our private lives by threatening the viability of a free and open Internet.

During a March Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing, Senator Rockefeller said that we’d all be better off if the Internet was never invented. His precise words were: “Would it have been better if we’d never have invented the Internet and had to use paper and pencil or whatever!” Left unsaid was that without a free and open Internet, few alternatives for getting real news and information would exist, at least with the ease and free accessibility that computers can provide.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Granick expressed alarm about the risk of “giving the federal government unprecedented power over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways that matter most. (These bills) should be opposed or radically amended.”

Here’s what they’ll do:

• federalize critical infrastructure security, including banks, telecommunications and energy, shifting power away from providers and users to Washington;
• give “the president unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in (whatever he calls) an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds…;”
• potentially “cripple privacy and security in one fell swoop” through one provision (alone) empowering the Commerce Secretary to “have access to all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access….”

In other words, the Commerce Department will be empowered to access “all relevant data” – without privacy safeguards or judicial review. As a result, constitutionally protected private information statutory protections will be lost — guaranteed under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, and financial privacy regulations.

Another provision mandates a feasibility study for an identity management and authentication program that would sidestep “appropriate civil liberties and privacy protections.”

At issue is what role should the federal government play in cybersecurity? How much power should it have? Can it dismiss constitutional protections, and what, in fact, can enhance cybersecurity without endangering our freedoms? S. 773 and 778, as now written, “make matters worse by weakening existing privacy safeguards (without) address(ing) the real problems of security.”

In late February, Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, told the House Intelligence Committee that the NSA, not DHS, should be in charge of cybersecurity even though it has a “trust handicap” to overcome because of its illegal spying:

“I think there is a great deal of distrust of the National Security Agency and the intelligence community in general playing a role outside of the very narrowly circumscribed role because of some of the history of the FISA issue in years past…” So Blair asked the committee’s leadership to find a way to instill public confidence.

On February 9, Obama appointed Melissa Hathaway to be Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils in charge of a 60-day interagency cybersecurity review, now completed.

On April 21, NSA/Chief Central Security Service director, General Alexander, told RSA Conference security participants that “The NSA does not want to run cybersecurity for the government. We need partnerships with others. The DHS has a big part, you do, and our partners in academia. It’s one network and we all have to work together…. The NSA can offer technology assistance to team members. That’s our role.”

But someone has to be in charge. It may or may not be NSA, but no matter. At issue is our constitutional freedoms. Any infringement on them must be challenged and stopped.

In the case of Palestine/Israel, the Zionist-owned or -controlled media will attempt to control the discourse. The Lobby and Zionist media have controlled discourse most effectively. To assure future control, the message reaching the next generation must also be controlled.

In Toronto, one alternative public school, TheStudentsSchool (TSS), studies the occupation of Palestine and the war crimes committed in perpetuating the occupation. That was too much for the manifestly Zionist National Post newspaper.³ An indignant article was published, and an investigation of TSS teacher John Morton was launched.

Barbara Kay, whose disinformation I have covered before,⁴ is zealously vigilant against education about the Zionist occupation – something she views in a bizarre reversal.

Kay uses George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a metaphor: teachers are “pigs” and high school students are “newborn puppies.”⁵ Kay charges that TSS is indoctrinating the high school students.

Some of Morton’s colleagues within the Toronto District School Board (TSDB) reacted “with dismay” at his possible censure from “a misleading and possibly libelous article which appeared in the National Post.” Morton’s colleagues labeled Kay’s Animal Farm analogy “preposterous” and “the opposite of what is alleged to be happening at TSS and other schools – i.e. repression of open discussion and debate of the Israel-Palestine conflict…”

The TSDB communique argued that making students critically aware was a moral imperative:

For teachers and school administrators to ignore this situation, especially as conflict in the region assumes proportions of a humanitarian crisis, would be pedagogically unsound, morally irresponsible and contrary to principles of inclusive curriculum and the TDSB’s Equity and Foundations Statement. Moreover, as citizens of a state that is a signatory to the Fourth Geneva Conventions, we have the obligation to educate our students about International Law and how to think critically about states which are in violation of it.

Indoctrination?

Kay advocates debating “both sides of the story.” This is reasonable. However, long after facts have been established, the demand for “balanced reporting” becomes disingenuous and is, itself, a bias. For what is meant by “balance”? Does balance mean that when confronted by 100 verifiable facts of war crimes that 100 specious and mendacious factoids from the perspective of the war criminals must be presented? What does the application of critical thought hold for a universal balancing of views?

I took Kay up on her penchant for discussion and emailed her asking for clarification/substantiation of eight points.⁶ First, I questioned whether Kay was implying that high school learners lacked sufficient critical thinking ability, and I asked what evidence she had that the learners were indoctrinated and that their critically thinking was being suppressed?

She went off on another tangent:

*Implying* that high school students have not yet mastered critical thinking? My dear, most adults with university degrees in my opinion have not mastered the art of critical thinking, for critical thinking is not so much a matter of basic IQ as it is exposure to a wide variety of *objective* facts, a wide variety of opinion around those facts and a great deal of practice in analysis and interpretation – not to mention a certain historical referential depth that no high school student can be expected to have.

Critical thinking might well be an underutilized skill. But my query was not about whether high school students had “mastered critical thinking.” I asked whether she denied that students have “critical thinking ability.”⁷

Kay took extreme exception to students being presented the film Occupation 101⁸ in a room without any adults present:

It is the role of a high school to prepare its students to think critically, which involves exposure to thinking, not memorizing. The school in question is shutting down critical thinking and presenting one side of a story as though it were settled fact, which is not the case at all. The story they are being fed is being presented by advocates and activists in a political cause, not by history teachers. That is why I call it indoctrination and it is indoctrination by any definition of the word.

Indoctrination according to Dictionary.com: “to instruct in a doctrine, principle, ideology, etc., esp. to imbue with a specific partisan or biased belief or point of view.” Critical here is “biased belief or point of view.” Facts are not partisan or biased, and hence, the presentation of facts is not indoctrination. Ergo, to label something as indoctrination requires that the critic refute the facts, thereby exposing them as biased beliefs or falsehoods. Kay did not do this, and she ignored my invitation to refute the facts. Kay merely asserts. Abraham Lincoln compellingly argued that “assertion” is an inexcusable falsehood: “I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him.”⁹

Kay states, “Gaza is not occupied – Israel left in 2004 – and you make no mention of the provocations that caused this war.”

As for Gaza not being occupied, that is semantics. When a country’s airspace, borders, and coast are controlled and blockaded by another entity (a UN official called the blockade “devastating” for Palestinians¹⁰), then I submit that it is equally or more sinister than an occupation; it is a siege.

Kay evaded each question that I posed in our “discussion”; instead she resorted to personalized attacks:

If you knew anything of the history of the area, and of the five wars – all started by the Arab states – and of the terrorism that predated the Occupation against Israel, perhaps we could have a discussion. But your ignorance and bias and hostility are set in stone. And that is precisely why it is dangerous for young students to be listening to people like you, and not to be presented with an alternate view.

In Kay’s worldview, it is an “Occupation against Israel”!

Orwell on Democracy and Censorship in Animal Farm

Kay rails against any depiction of Israel as the aggressor without presenting the Zionist viewpoint,¹¹ saying this endangers democracy and must, therefore, be stopped. The absurdity of Kay’s position is easily revealed by an analogy which would require that each time Nazi World War II atrocities are mentioned that a Nazi viewpoint must be presented for balance.¹²

Kay advocates a veiled censorship: young learners can be presented information that is disputed by another group as long as the disputing group can present its information. As I have argued, this is fine when each side substantiates its facts. However, facts must not be balanced with factoids.

While Animal Farm does depict the dangers of indoctrination, Kay has missed much of the point of Orwell’s novel. In the intended preface to Animal Farm — itself subject to censorship — Orwell argued against the suppression of uncomfortable truths: the silencing of unpopular ideas and inconvenient facts by “censorship that can be enforced by pressure groups.”¹³

Orwell wrote,

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Orwell argued for freedom of speech; he did not advocate any fettering of speech with provisos to balance “the truth.”

Orwell held it to be a fact that “intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.”

Kay concluded her article, “George Orwell said it with puppies and pigs, but the message was the same: HAIA, whose reach is extending into other high schools as I write, is dangerous to democracy and must be stopped.”

Is this really Orwell’s message of danger to democracy? He wrote,

[T]here is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

I submit that Kay has twisted the thought of Orwell and the evidence for her claims is either non-existent, mendacious, or wrapped in ad hominem. Readers are invited to critically contemplate and draw their own conclusions.

I further submit that Kay and the National Post feigned a desire for both sides of an “issue” to be presented. The Zionist media is concurrently attempting to silence university professors. Dennis Rancourt, a tenured full professor and highly recognized physics professor at the University of Ottawa, is being hounded — purportedly for his “political views about the Palestine-Israel conflict” — by the CanWest Global Communications Corporation (owner of the National Post) through its Ottawa Citizen newspaper and a recently appointed pro-Zionist university president, Allan Rock.¹⁴

Education and Conscience

We live in a world ravaged by the scourge of war, a world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, where socialism is a taboo word, where corporations have the rights of persons, and when the capitalists run their corporations into the ground, the masses are expected to acquiesce to socialism for the capitalists.

It is in the powerful nations, often built through the dispossession of the land and resources belonging to the Indigenous peoples, that capitalists, their corporations, and their private banks have grow topsy-turvy gargantuan, enriching themselves off war, looting resources, and by immiserating the workers until the workers could no longer buy what the companies made; consequently, the greed of the companies spelled their own downfall.

But what could keep such a system charging along head on until its own predictable doom? Why would the people not solidarize, withdraw their labor, demonstrate in the streets, and refuse to be killers and cannon fodder for the government’s military? I submit that the answer lies largely in the controlled worldview presented to the masses via the corporate media.

Propaganda and disinformation are mighty tools. It is said that information is power, so if one controls information, then one would, according to the aphorism, be powerful. The media are a preponderant source of information. There is an inherent bias in that the corporate media have the money to dominant the presentation and propagation of information in the world.

There is also another adage which holds that power corrupts, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Thus the masses are presented a worldview that conforms to the parameters set by the capitalists and their desire for money, control of information, and power – which, ultimately, will lead to the greater corruption of capitalists and their eventual downfall (unless or until bailed out by socialism).

How to escape the onslaught of propaganda and disinformation? Certainly not by censorship; because who will be entrusted with the responsibility to censor? It is necessary that people be empowered to think for themselves, to be open-minded and sufficiently skeptical to information presented to them, to research, discuss, analyze, and draw conclusions – what is commonly referred to as critical thinking.

Consequently, unfettered critical thinking is not something one would expect to be encouraged within a capitalist society, and certainly it wouldn’t be expected in the corporate media except as a mere buzzword or ethereal concept, something designed not to draw too much serious attention.

The Foremost Task of Education

What should be taught in society’s schools? In a statement to a Brooklyn church minister on 20 November 1950, the renown physicist Albert Einstein put forward his thought:

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Our morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education.¹⁵

The ways of the past have not eliminated inequality, poverty, racism, and warring. It seems obvious that a new direction is called for.

Within the education system, social justice entered the high school curriculum last September in the province of British Columbia. Opening the doors to social justice issues and inviting critical thinking pose powerful challenges to the old power structure.¹⁶ A better way lies in exposing (not indoctrinating) young minds to the ethical paucity of capitalism; the alternatives of anarchism, socialism, and communism; the ravages wrought by imperialism, colonialism, and Zionism – including arguments for and against. Preparing learners for critical thinking is crucial, but critical thinking alone is insufficient. Learners must be exposed to issues of life, morality, and social justice and be encouraged to analyze, draw their own conclusions, and defend them. When the ground is prepared, a potential arises for an increasingly enlightened and sophisticated younger generation. The world needs a generation that can organize, plan, demand, and build a better society where social justice has meaning beyond academic discourse – where social justice might become a reality.

1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Available at The Complete Works of George-Orwell.
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964): 7.
3. The National Post even deigned to publish a story wherein the Simon Wiesenthal Center evoked the WWII Holocaust for the fraudulent news of Iran requiring labeling of its Jewish citizens. See “Iran eyes badges for Jews,” National Post, 19 May 2006. Removed from the Post site, but available online at Free Republic.
4. See Kim Petersen, “Defining Racism,” Dissident Voice, 26 November 2007 and Kim Petersen and BJ Sabri, “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism,” Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12Dissident Voice, December 2007-January 2008.
5. Barbara Kay, “Barbara Kay: Teaching hate at Toronto’s alternative school puppy mill,” National Post, 4 March 2009.
6. Kay, to her credit responded to this writer, neither John Morton nor anyone from with TSDB responded.
7. The entirety of the email correspondence is readable here.
8. Occupation 101 is highly recommended and viewable online.
9. Roy P. Basler (ed.), Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1946): 187. Limited availability online.
10. Reuters, “UN to Israel: Ease ‘devastating’ Gaza blockade,” Haaretz, 3 April 2009
11. This is fine because the Israeli viewpoint often corroborates the abuses of the Jewish state that Kay denies. For example, see Amos Harel, “Testimonies on IDF misconduct in Gaza keep rolling in,” Haaretz, 22 March 2009.
12. Kay, however, poses on the issue of balance in education as she knows well — or should — that it does not exist within the corporate media. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have meticulously documented this in their Propaganda Model. See Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002).
13. See George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Proposed Preface to Animal Farm).
14. See “Statement by Dennis Rancourt Regarding His Dismissal by the University of Ottawa,” Academic Freedom, 10 April 2009.
15. Heklen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, Albert Einstein — The Human Side: New Glimpses from His Archives (Princeton University Press, 1979): 83. It should also be noted that the editors in their book make the argument that Einstein was a Zionist. It is debatable.
16. One school board in southern BC sought to censor the teaching of the Social Justice course in its district causing demonstrations by the students. Catherine Rolfsen, “Gay-friendly course halted by Abbotsford school board,” Vancouver Sun, 21 September 2008.

Galloway’s talk, “Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar,” sponsored by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, would have provided Canadians with a first hand account of conditions in Gaza following Israel’s invasion and destruction of that walled in strip of Palestinian land during the three week war from December 27 to January 18, 2009. Galloway is one of a handful of foreigners to see the devastation that others could glimpse only from You Tube videos made available through Al Jazeera news service. All western journalists were banned from Gaza by Israel’s IDF. Galloway led a convoy of trucks from England to Gaza carrying relief provisions for the people. The convoy entered Gaza just over a week ago.

Contrary to the CJC contention that the banning should be seen as a security measure under section 34 (1) of the immigration act, a close reading of the act would suggest that Galloway cannot be perceived as a person (c) “engaging in terrorism” or in (e) “acts of violence that would or might endanger the lives or safety of persons in Canada,” but rather an individual, by virtue of his recent experience in Gaza, who would be upholding the intent of Canada’s Criminal Code, Sections 318-320. Canada’s Criminal Code, passed in 1970, builds upon the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination of 1966, the conventions of which support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as defined by the Charter of the United Nations.

According to the Nizkor Project “The premise underlying Canada’s anti-hate laws is that in a democratic society, identifiable groups must be protected against racism, including its verbal manifestations, in order not to limit their basic freedoms and thereby their full participation in Canadian society.” Nizkor asserts that the catalyst for this legislation might well have been the experience of Nazism, “that unchecked racism and hate propaganda could lead even a highly educated, cultured and democratic society to justify the most heinous crimes against humanity.”

How does this code apply to Galloway’s “Resisting War from Gaza to Kandahar”? The answer would appear to be in the importance of his eye witness account of the conditions in Gaza resulting from the invasion and his investigation of those conditions from Gazans, NGOs, and newspaper reports made available since the attacks. Multiple human rights organizations including B’tselem out of Jerusalem, the PCHR in Palestine and Human Rights International have brought varying allegations of Israeli war crimes before the International Court and the United Nations, crimes of disproportionate force in a civilian enclave where escape was impossible, crimes against civilians intentionally executed especially of women and children, crimes against international law for the use of banned weapons like white phosphorous, and crimes against the Geneva Conventions through the use of children as human shields. Additionally, the United Nations envoy for human rights activities in Palestine, Richard Falk, has brought forth a report that details Israeli war crimes suggesting that the fact that the people of Gaza could not escape made the invasion even more of a crime since it meant that civilians had no recourse from the weaponry of this massive military incursion into the densely populated cities of Gaza.

Now to the actual sections of the Criminal Code as they are applicable here. Section 318: Advocating Genocide and Section 319: Defining Genocide. “The criminal act of ‘advocating genocide’ is defined as supporting or arguing for the killing of members of an ‘identifiable group’ – persons distinguished by their colour, race, religion or ethnic origin. The intention would be the destruction of members of the targeted group. Any person who promotes genocide is guilty of an indictable offence, and liable to imprisonment…” Section 319 defines genocide as “any acts committed with intent to destroy an identifiable group – such as killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”

Given the knowledge that Galloway brings regarding “criminal acts committed with intent to destroy an identifiable group – such as killing members of the group, or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the groups physical destruction,” because that identifiable group is distinguished by their colour, race, religion and ethnic origin, it would appear that Galloway has a responsibility to bring such awareness, no doubt recognized by the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, before the Canadian people to protect members of that group who reside in Canada.

In short, the CJC and the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith, along with other Jewish organizations that have supported the Israeli invasion of Gaza, including the Harper government, would appear to be guilty of promoting “unchecked racism and hate propaganda” that could “justify the most heinous crimes against humanity.” Clearly these organizations and the government of Canada realize the avowed intent of Avigdor Lieberman, a self- promoted Zionist and a member of Olmert’s government that executed the “war” in Gaza and now a member of Netanyahu’s new government, to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, including if necessary the use of the atomic bomb on them. It would appear that the Harper government and the Jewish Canadian organizations support Israeli governments that, in Lieberman’s words, want to “execute Israeli Arabs that are members of the Knesset,” or “Destroy the foundation of all the [Palestinian] authority’s military infrastructure … not leave one stone on another. Destroy everything.” Civilian targets included. Bomb all Palestinian commercial centers including banks and gas stations.

Ironically, it is not the Canadian Jews that are in danger by Galloway’s appearance because he is a “terrorist” and a security risk against the Jews as potential victims, but the fact that he brings information that identifies the Zionist party of the Israeli government, particularly in the form of Lieberman’s racist party, Israel Beytenu, as terrorists intent on destroying Palestinians. Hence the real danger in Canada exists for the Palestinian people living there not the Jews. Indeed, one might argue that it is the responsibility of the Canadian Government to support Galloway’s efforts to enlighten the Canadian people to the dangers inherent in the actions of the CJC and the League of Human Rights of B’nai B’rith of Canada that forced the Canadian immigration authorities to ban Galloway.

According to the Canadian Council on Human Rights, Section 319 (3), an individual cannot be convicted of breaking the Criminal Code if the statements or information provided can be established as true, are relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which is for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds it is able to be believed as true and is expressed in good faith and intended to point out … matters tending to produce feelings of hatred toward an identifiable group in Canada.” Quite obviously, the information George Galloway brings about the intent of the Israeli government as noted above is true and is of importance to the safety of Canadian citizens of Palestinian descent, since groups supportive of the genocidal acts committed by that government as alleged, recorded and advanced by respected Human Rights organizations before the proper world authorities, wants to prevent the citizens of Canada from hearing such information; they are the guilty parties not George Galloway.

It should be clear from the evidence presented here that a disturbing picture of an Israeli government emerges, one intent on the destruction of the Palestinian people as stated by members of that government and by the polls taken in Israel of Jewish support for the invasion, 94%, that a concerted effort to commit genocide against an identifiable group, the Palestinians, because of “race, ethnicity, and religion,” by “promoting the killing of members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction, ” is occurring, all actions condemned by Canada’s Council on Human Rights through its Criminal Code as defined in sections 318-319.

Alykhan Velshi, Jason Kenney’s spokesman, “said that the act (immigration act 34) was designed to protect Canadians from people who fund, support or engage in terrorism.” This article makes clear that those who “fund, support or engage in terrorism” are those who convinced Kenny to ban Galloway. He could provide Canadians with accurate, recent, detailed information related to the intended destruction of the people of Gaza and their livelihood. He can provide pictures and testaments from NGOs and the people of Gaza about the actions of the IDF as they launched missiles from the sea, from the air and from tanks on the surrounded civilians of Gaza, how they used illegal chemical weapons on children and women, how they intentionally destroyed United Nations schools housing children and mothers knowing some or all would be victims of that action, how they leveled with white phosphorous the humanitarian store house of the United Nations so that the people could not have food and water, how they maintained the locked gates so that no one could leave and no needed medical and food supplies could enter, and how even the soldiers of the IDF have now reported on the intentional killing of children and women.

This information is vital to the Canadian people if only to provide the truth that their government wants to suppress, if only to mark indelibly who the real terrorists are in Canada that want them, like their neighbors to the south, to be ignorant of that truth.

A longtime critic of US foreign policy in Latin America, Herman is a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a contributor to Z Magazine since its founding in 1988. He is the author of numerous books, including his 1979 book, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I, and Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

The Washington Connection has an interesting history. When Chomsky and Herman wrote its precursor, they found their analysis of U.S. foreign policy unwelcome by the corporate media establishment. Warner Modular Publications (at that time a subsidiary member of the Warner communications and entertainment conglomerate) was set to release it, but when the parent company learned about the book in the fall of 1973, it condemned its “unpatriotic” scholarship. William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, explained why the book upset him so much, citing the book’s “unpatriotic” argument that “the leadership in the United States, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counter-revolutionary efforts, has been the most important single instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II.”

As a result, Chomsky and Herman explain in The Washington Connection’s introduction that:

Although 20,000 copies of the monograph were printed, and one (and the last) ad was placed in the New York Review of Books, Warner Publishing refused to allow distribution of the monograph at its scheduled publication date. Media advertising for the volume was cancelled and printed flyers that listed the monographs as one of the titles were destroyed. The officers of Warner Modular were warned that distribution of the document would result in their immediate dismissal.

Following this, Warner backed down a little, and formally agreed to not suppress the book: reaching a compromise with the lower-level publisher (who struggled for distribution of the monograph). However, before the compromise could be enacted the publishing house was shut down, with Warner selling the house’s “stocks of publications and contracts to a small and quite unknown company” effectively killing the book.

Taking a closer look at the book’s content, Chomsky and Herman argue that the “ideological pretense…that the United States is dedicated to furthering the cause of democracy and human rights throughout the world, though it may occasionally err in the pursuit of this objective” has been constructed to mask: “the basic fact…that the United States has organized under its sponsorship and protection a neo-colonial system of client states ruled mainly by terror and serving the interests of a small local and foreign business and military elite.”

Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Chomsky and Herman argue that U.S. corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights. They write:

The proof of the pudding is that U.S. bankers and industrialists have consistently welcomed the “stability” of the new client fascist order, whose governments, while savage in their treatment of dissidents, priests, labor leaders, peasant organizers or others who threaten “order,” and at best indifferent to the mass of the population, have been accommodating to large external interests. In an important sense, therefore, the torturers in the client state are functionaries of IBM, Citibank, Allis Chalmers and the U.S. government, playing their assigned roles in a system that has worked according to choice and plan.

Chomsky and Herman cite official statements by State Department planner George Kennan, to illustrate the mindset behind US policy in Latin America and around the world. In 1948, Kennan wrote Policy Planning Study 23, stating that if the U.S. wanted to maintain (and expand) its position of world dominance, it could not truly respect human rights and democracy abroad. The document said:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only about 6 percent of its population…In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity…To do so we will have to dispense with sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives…We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization.

Kennan elaborated on this concept in a 1950 briefing of U.S. ambassadors to Latin American countries. Of prime importance was to prevent the spreading of the idea “that governments are responsible for the well being of their people.” To combat the proliferation of this idea, Kennan argued that “we should not hesitate before police repression by the local government…It is better to have a strong regime in power than a liberal one if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communist.”

According to a Wikileaks press release, “the spy chief claims to have already engaged the BND’s legal machinery.”

Threats against the journalists were triggered, according to Wikileaks, by the publication of my article, “The End of the Affair? The BND, CIA and Kosovo’s Deep State,” (Antifascist Calling, December 7, 2008) on their website.

I did not seek to become part of the story; nevertheless Uhrlau’s threats cannot go unchallenged. The censorship and prior restraint he demands are toxic to a free society.

In addition to my piece, the “files or reports” which the German spook insists they remove is a 2005, 25-page BND dossier on corrupt senior Kosovo politicians as well as unredacted pages from the Bundestag’s 2006 Schaefer Report pertaining to illegal BND domestic operations targeting journalists and left-wing political organizations in Germany.

In denouncing this unwarranted provocation, Wikileaks said: “The BND, like the CIA, is forbidden by law to engage in domestic activities. Yet the threats, which were made in German as well as in English, hold no legal power outside of Germany. They must be assumed to be an attempt to engage Wikileaks via its German component–or does Mr. Uhrlau suggest it is now BND policy to kidnap foreign journalists and try them before German courts?”

My article explored the parapolitical connections to a recent scandal in which three BND officers working under deep cover, were arrested and deported from Kosovo. What sparked the scandal was the arrest of one of the operatives when he was caught photographing the headquarters of the European Union Special Representative in Pristina, bombed under mysterious circumstances November 14.

The affair exposed the agency’s extensive covert operations in Kosovo through a cut-out, the “private security firm” Logistics-Coordination & Assessment Services (LCAS). Information on LCAS was in the public domain after exposure by German investigative reporters writing in Spiegel International. Compromising notebooks and electronic files were subsequently seized by Kosovan authorities.

While the “evidence” presented linking the agents to the blast was slim at best, one cannot rule out that Thaci’s intelligence service, with prompting by some “other government agency (OGA),” a foreign service with close ties to the corrupt statelet perhaps, exploited the agents’ poor tradecraft to roll-up their operation because of fears of what they might have discovered.

I speculated whether the operatives were convenient foils of a plot hatched by the Kosovan government in cahoots with the CIA over BND disclosure of extensive links amongst Thaci and his henchmen to international criminal syndicates involved in the global drugs, arms and sordid trade in human beings. Revelations which Thaci and the CIA would prefer never come to light. I speculated that one motive for rolling-up the BND’s operation may have been that the seized operative’s notebook contained information that Camp Bondsteel continues to serve as a CIA “black site” where prisoners are illegally detained and tortured.

Additionally, I cited Wikileaks documents that revealed the BND’s illegal manipulation of the media to influence domestic coverage of the spy agency through the infiltration of Focus Magazine as well as intelligence operations that sought to gain knowledge of journalists’ confidential sources.

Wikileaks German correspondent Daniel Schmitt and Investigative Editor Julian Assange, said that the Schaefer Report “in general shows the extent to which the collaboration of journalists with intelligence agencies has become common and to what dimensions consent is manufactured in the interests of those involved.”

Following Schmitt and Assange’s reporting, one must now add the criminal lengths that unaccountable spy agencies will go to prevent journalists from exposing their dirty and illegal operations.

Wikileaks also disclosed and posted a document that revealed the IP addresses “of an internally distributed mail from German telecommunications company T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom)” containing over two dozen IP “address ranges” used by the BND.

I cited this document in relation to a Berlin internet prostitution service (Belle-Escort.de) and said the following: “While the document does not spell out who was running the sex-for-hire website, one can’t help but wonder whether Balkan-linked organized crime syndicates, including Kosovan and Albanian sex traffickers, are working in tandem with the BND in return for that agency turning a blind eye to the sordid trade in kidnapped women.”

That question, as well as many others, is still unanswered.

My article cited open-source media reports from Spiegel International, the World Socialist Website, Mother Jones Magazine, as well as the work of scholars and investigative journalists Misha Glenny, Christopher Deliso, Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Dale Scott. Are journalists and researchers now expected to submit copy to spooky censors for appropriate redactions before publishing their findings? I think not.

I stand by my conclusions and denounce Uhrlau’s threats as an attack on the rights of investigative- and citizen journalists to reveal information that agencies such as the BND would rather never see the light of day.

Wikileaks should be commended, not attacked, for their brave documentary project and supported by everyone who upholds the rule of law, a free press and an open, democratic society.

As the heroic Israeli journalist Amira Hass told The Independent’s Robert Fisk “our job is to monitor the centers of power,” not shill for them.

And now, the P.U.-litzers Prizes for 2008:

HOT FOR OBAMA PRIZE — MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
This award sparked fierce competition, but the cinch came on the day Obama swept the Potomac Primary in February — when Chris Matthews spoke of “the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”

BEYOND PARODY PRIZE — Fox News
In August, a FoxNews.com teaser for the O’Reilly Factor program said: “Obama bombarded by personal attacks. Are they legit? Ann Coulter comments.”

UPSIDE DOWN “ELITIST” AWARD — New York Times columnist David Brooks
For months, high-paid Beltway journalists competed with each other in advising candidate Obama on how to mingle with working class folks. Ubiquitous pundit Brooks won the prize for his wisdom on reaching “less educated people, downscale people,” offered on MSNBC in June: “Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there. And so he’s had to change to try to be more like that Applebee’s guy.” It would indeed be hard for Obama to fit in naturally at an Applebee’s salad bar. Applebee’s restaurants don’t have salad bars.

GUTTER BALL PUNDITRY AWARD — Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball
In program after program during the spring, Matthews repeatedly questioned whether Obama could connect with “regular” voters — “regular” meaning voters who are white or “who actually do know how to bowl.” He once said of Obama: “This gets very ethnic, but the fact that he’s good at basketball doesn’t surprise anybody. But the fact that he’s that terrible at bowling does make you wonder.”

STRAIGHT SKINNY PRIZE — Wall Street Journal reporter Amy Chozick
In August, the Journal’s Chozick went beyond the standard elitist charge to offer yet another reason that average voters might be wary of Obama. Below the headline “Too Fit to Be President?” she wrote of Obama: “Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.” Chozick asked: “In a nation in which 66 percent of the voting-age population is overweight and 32 percent is obese, could Sen. Obama’s skinniness be a liability?” To support her argument, she quoted Hillary Clinton supporters. One said: “He needs to put some meat on his bones.” Another, prodded by Chozick, wrote on a Yahoo bulletin board: “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”

“OUR CENTER-RIGHT NATION” AWARD — Newsweek editor Jon Meacham
With Democrats in the process of winning big in 2008 as they had in 2006, a media chorus erupted warning Democratic politicians away from their promises of change. Behind the warnings was the repeated claim that America is essentially a conservative country. In an election-eve Newsweek cover story with the sub-headline “America remains a center-right nation — a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril,” Meacham argued that the liberalism of even repeatedly re-elected FDR offended voters. And the editor claimed that a leftward trend in election results and issues polling means little — as would Obama’s victory after months of charges that he stood for radical change. Evidence seemed to lose out to journalists’ fears that campaign promises might actually be kept.

BAILOUT BLUSTER AWARD — Pundit David Brooks
On Sept. 30, just after the House defeated the $700 billion Wall Street bailout measure, Brooks’ column in the New York Times denounced the balking House members for their failure to heed “the collected expertise of the Treasury and Fed.” But a week later, after the House approved a bailout — and with the credit crunch unabated and stock market still plunging — Brooks wrote: “At these moments, central bankers and Treasury officials leap in to try to make the traders feel better. Officials pretend they’re coming up with policy responses, but much of what they do is political theater.” Now he tells us.

“STATUS QUO CENTRISTS CAN’T BE IDEOLOGUES” AWARD — Too many to name
In late November, corporate media outlets began to credit Barack Obama with making supposedly non-ideological Cabinet picks. The New York Times front page reported that his choices “suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.” Conservative Times columnist David Brooks praised the picks as “not ideological” and the economic nominees as “moderate and thoughtful Democrats.” USA Today reported that Obama’s selections had “records that display more pragmatism than ideology.” In mediaspeak, if you thought invading Iraq and signing the NAFTA trade pact were good ideas, you’re a pragmatist. If not, you’re an ideologue.

“WHO WOULD HAVE PREDICTED?” AWARD — New York Times
The Times op-ed page marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in March by choosing “nine experts on military and foreign affairs” to write on “the one aspect of the war that most surprised them or that they wish they had considered in the prewar debate.” None of the experts selected had opposed the invasion. That kind of exclusion made possible a bizarre claim by Times correspondent John Burns in the same day’s paper: “Only the most prescient could have guessed … that the toll would include tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, as well as nearly 4,000 American troops; or that
America’s financial costs by some recent estimates, would rise above $650 billion by 2008.” Those who’d warned of such disastrous results were not only prescient, but were routinely excluded from mainstream coverage.

IMPERIALLY EMBEDDED PRIZE — John Burns, New York Times
Described as “the longest-serving foreign correspondent in New York Times history,” Burns seemed less a skeptical reporter than a channeler of Henry Kissinger when he offered his world view to PBS’ Charlie Rose in April: “The United States and its predominant economic, political and military power in the world have been the single greatest force for stability in the world, such as it is now, certainly since the Second World War. If the outcome in Iraq were to destroy the credibility of American power, to destroy America’s willingness to use its power in the world to achieve good, to fight back against totalitarianism, authoritarianism, gross human rights abuses, it would be a very dark day.”

Nowhere in the country has the problem with the Press been more serious than in the southern half of Vermont. Letters of support of non major Party candidates were not published. Campaign statements were not published. There was total news blackout in most of southern Vermont. Voters had almost no access to relevant candidate information.

This news blackout was so extreme that newspapers in the southern part of Vermont even refused to insert the Candidate Information Publication. This official, non-partisan publication had been authorized by the Vermont Legislature (17 V.S.A. 2810 b) and paid for by the taxpayers. As a contrast, newspapers in the central and northern parts of Vermont such as The Burlington Free Press, The Newport Daily News, The Rutland Herald, and The Times Argus inserted and distributed the publication. Those newspapers are to be commended for their public service.

The Office of Secretary of State is to be commended for sending more than a thousand copies of the publication to a private citizen in the southern part of the State. As a last resort, the citizen had volunteered to distribute the publication – a much less efficient system of distribution than insertion in the daily newspaper.

It is now necessary for the legislature to rewrite the law so that southern Vermont will have access to relevant information. Two amendments to the law (17 V.S.A. 2810b ) are recommended. First, set a publication date for the Candidate Information Publication that would precede the first day allowed for absentee voting. Becoming an informed voter after casting the ballot is not the proper sequence of events. Second, the law must provide for a plan of distribution in the southern part of the State.

In Vermont, and across the country, many have no access to the Internet. Some areas are not in a major media market; therefore, TV news is non existent. The newspaper is the only source of information – the lifeline of the community. It is that which transforms individuals into a community. In rural USA there is no voice that is more powerful than that of the local newspaper. When any newspaper fails in its sacred mission, the community is harmed.

The Vermont news blackout has had serious consequences. Not only were ordinary voters uninformed, but even campaign workers – usually a well-informed group of activists – were so lacking in information that it inspired an article, ‘Clueless at Campaign Headquarters’. It is published on this site. The article describes a phone call received from campaign headquarters in southern Vermont. The worker was not aware that there were any candidates on the ballot other than McCain and Obama. In Vermont there were eight candidates for president on the ballot. Many Vermonters were unprepared to see so many names on the ballot when they entered the voting booth.

Private companies that own newspapers have editorial rights. That right should be respected. Every newspaper has the right to print, or not print, anything it wants. That is not the issue. The issue is the lack of journalistic ethics. Ethics are not required by law – or are they? If any individual interfered with the electoral process in such an extreme way that it influenced the outcome of an election, would it be acceptable?

What occurred in Vermont was an extreme violation that resulted in many ripple effects on the outcome of the election. One such effect was that the Liberty Union/Socialist Party lost Major Party Status and all of the legal rights that accompany that status.

There can be no democracy where there is not a free-flow of political information.

I do believe that it was just a misunderstanding. But the insecurity experienced on a daily basis by innocent Palestinians is not. Innocent Palestinians are trapped in a violent, stateless twilight zone imposed on them by an international order that favors a country reported to have completed its nuclear triad as many as eight years ago, although Israel has remained ambiguous on the subject. President Jimmy Carter informed us that Israel had as many as 150 nuclear weapons, and Israel’s allies are among the most militarily sophisticated on the planet. Military engagement, then, is untenable. Therefore the exigency of diplomacy and international law.

The Palestinians should at least be able to count on the protections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What is happening to Palestinians in Gaza right now, subjected to an Israeli-imposed blockade, has drawn the attention of the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, who noted that over half of the civilians in Gaza are children. Even The Los Angeles Times criticized Israel’s lockdown of Gaza that is keeping food, fuel, and medicine from civilians. Even so, Israel stood fast by its decision to seal Gaza’s openings. But where are the voices of concern coming from the corridors of power inside the United States? Is the subject of Palestinian human rights taboo inside the United States Government and its government-to-be? I hope not. Following is the speech I would have given today had I been able to attend the Damascus Conference.

Cynthia McKinney
Right of Return Congregation
Damascus, Syria
November 23, 2008

Thank you to our hosts for inviting me to participate in this most important and timely First Arab-International Congregation for the Right of Return. Words are an insufficient expression of my appreciation for being remembered as one willing to stand for justice in Washington, D.C., even in the face of tremendously difficult pressures.

Former Prime Minister Tun Mahathir, thank you for including me in the Malaysian Peace Organisation’s monumental effort to criminalize war, to show the horrors of the treatment of innocent individuals during the war against and occupation of Iraq by the militaries and their corporate contractors of Britain, Israel, and the United States. Thank you for standing up to huge international economic forces trying to dominate your country and showing an impressionable woman like me that it is possible to stand up to “the big boys” and win. And thank you for your efforts to bring war criminal, torturer, decimator of the United States Constitution, the George W. Bush Administration, to justice in international litigation.

Delegates and participants, I must declare that at a time when scientists agree that the climate of the earth is changing in unpredictable and possibly calamitous ways, such that the future of humankind hangs in the balance, it is unconscionable that we have to dedicate this time to and focus our energies on policies that represent a blatant and utter disregard for human rights and self-determination and that represent in many respects, a denial of human life, itself.

In the same year as Palestinians endured a series of massacres and expulsions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights became international law. And while the United Nations is proud that the Declaration was flown into Outer Space just a few days ago on the Space Shuttle, if one were to read it and then land in the Middle East, I think it would be clear that Palestine is the place that the Universal Declaration forgot.

Sadly, both the spirit of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights and the noblest ideals of the United Nations are broken. This has occurred in large measure due to policies that emanate from Washington, D.C. If we want to change those policies, and I do believe that we can, then we have to change the underlying values of those who become Washington’s policy makers. In other words, we must launch the necessary movement that puts people in office who share our values.

We need to do this now more than ever because, sadly, Palestine is not Washington’s only victim. Enshrined in the Universal Declaration is the dignity of humankind and the responsibility of states to protect that dignity. Yet, the underlying contradictions between its words and what has become standard international practice lay exposed to the world this year when then-United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour proclaimed:

“In the course of this year, unprecedented efforts must be made to ensure that every person in the world can rely on just laws for his or her protection. In advancing all human rights for all, we will move towards the greatest fulfillment of human potential, a promise which is at the heart of the Universal Declaration.”

How insulting it was to hear those words coming from her, for those of us who know, because it was she who, as Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, willfully participated in the cover-up of an act of terror that resulted in the assassination of two democratically-elected Presidents and that unleashed a torrent of murder and bloodletting in which one million souls were vanquished. That sad episode in human history has become known as the Rwanda Genocide. And shockingly, after the cover-up, Louise Arbour was rewarded with the highest position on the planet, in charge of Human Rights.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that justice delayed is justice denied. And 60 years is too long to wait for justice.
The Palestinian people deserve respected self-determination, protected human rights, justice, and above all, peace.

On the night before his murder, Dr. King announced that he was happy to be living at the end of the 20th Century where, all over the world, men and women were struggling to be free.

Today, we can touch and feel the results of those cries, on the African Continent where apartheid no longer exists as a fact of law. A concerted, uncompromising domestic and international effort led to its demise.

And in Latin America, the shackles of U.S. domination have been broken. In a series of unprecedented peaceful, people-powered revolutions, voters in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and most recently Paraguay used the power of the political process to materially change their countries’ leadership and policy orientation toward the United States. Americans, accustomed to the Monroe Doctrine which proclaimed U.S. suzerainty over all politics in the Western Hemisphere, must now think the unthinkable given what has occurred in the last decade.

Voters in Cote d’Ivoire, Haiti, Spain, and India also took matters clearly in their hands to make “a clean break” from policies that were an affront to the interests of the majority of the people in those countries.

In country after country, against tremendous odds, people stood up and took their fates in their hands. They did what Mario Savio, in the 1960s, asked people in the United States to do. These people-powered, peaceful revolutions saw individuals put their bodies against the levers and the gears and the wheels of the U.S. imperial machine and they said to the owners if you don’t stop it, we will. And I know that people of conscience inside my country can do it, too: especially now that the engines of imperial oppression are running out of gas.

Even though the Democratic Party, at the Convention that nominated Barack Obama, denied its microphone to Former President Jimmy Carter because of his views on Palestine, let me make it clear that Former President Carter is not the only person inside the United States who believes that peace with justice is possible in Palestine.

Inside the United States, millions who are not of Arab descent, disagree vehemently with the policy of our government to provide the military and civilian hardware that snuffs out innocent human life that is also Arab.

Millions of Americans do not pray to Allah, but recognize that it is an inalienable right of those who do to live and pray in peace wherever they are–including inside the United States.

Even though their opportunities are severely limited, there are millions of people inside the United States struggling to express themselves on all of these issues, but whose efforts are stymied by a political process that robs them of any opportunity to be heard.

And then there are the former elected officials who spoke out for what was right, for universal application of the Universal Declaration, and who were roundly condemned and put out of office as a result. My father is one such politician, punished—kicked out of office–because of the views of his daughter.

In my case, I dared to raise my voice in support of the World Conference Against Racism and against the sieges of Ramallah, Jenin, and the Church of the Nativity. I raised my voice against the religious profiling in my country that targets innocent Muslims and Arabs for harassment, imprisonment, financial ruin, or worse. Yes, I have felt the sting of the special interests since my entry onto the national stage when, in my very first Congressional campaign, I refused to sign a pledge committing that I would vote to maintain the military superiority of Israel over its neighbors, and that Jerusalem should be its capital city.
Other commitments were on that pledge as well, like continued financial assistance to Israel at agreed upon levels.

As a result of my refusal to make such a commitment, and just like the old slave woman, Sojourner Truth, who bared her back and showed the scars from the lashes meted out to her by her slave master, I too, bear scars from the lashes of public humiliation meted out to me by the special interests in Washington, D.C. because of my refusal to tow the line on Israel policy. This “line” is the policy accepted by both the Democratic and Republican Party leadership and why they could cooperate so well to coordinate my ouster from Congress. But I have survived because I come from the strongest stock of Africans, stolen then enslaved, and yet my people survived. I know how to never give up, give in, or give out. And I also know how to learn a good political lesson. And one lesson I’ve learned is that the treatment accorded to me pales in comparison to what Palestinian victims still living in refugee camps face every day of their lives.

The treatment accorded to me pales in comparison to the fact that human life is at stake if the just-released International Atomic Energy Agency report is true when it writes that “The only explanation for the presence of these modified uranium particles is that they were contained in the missiles dropped from the Israeli planes.” What are the health effects of these weapons, what role did the U.S. military play in providing them or the technology that underlies them, why is there such silence on this, and most fundamentally, what is going on in this part of the world that international law has forgotten?

Clearly, not only the faces of U.S. politicians must change; we must change their values, too. We, in the United States, must utilize our votes to effect the same kind of people-powered change in the United States as has been done in all those other countries. And now, with more people than ever inside the United States actually paying attention to politics, this is our moment; we must seize this time. We must become the leaders we are looking for and get people who share our values elected to Congress and the White House.

Now, I hope you believe me when I say to you that this is not rocket science. I have learned politics from its best players. And I say to you that even with the failabilities of the U.S. system, it is possible for us to do more than vote for a slogan of change, we can actually have it. But if we fail to seize this moment, we will continue to get what we’ve always been given: handpicked leaders who don’t truly represent us.

With the kind of U.S. weapons that are being used in this part of the world, from white phosphorus to depleted uranium, from cluster bombs to bunker busting bombs, nothing less than the soul of my country is at stake. But for the world, it is the fate of humankind that is at stake.

The people in my country just invested their hopes for a better world and a better government in their votes for President-elect Obama. However, during an unprecedented two year Presidential campaign, the exact kind of change we are to get was never fully defined. Therefore, we the people of the United States must act now with boldness and confidence. We can set the stage for the kind of change that reflects our values.

Now is not the time for timidity. The U.S. economy is in shambles, unemployment and health insecurity are soaring, half of our young people do not even graduate from high school; college is unaffordable. The middle class that was invested in the stock market is seeing their life savings stripped from them by the hour. What we are witnessing is the pauperization of a country, in much the same way that Russia was pauperized after the fall of the Soviet Union. There are clear winners and the losers all know who they are. The attentive public in the United States is growing because of these conditions. Now is the time for our values to rise because people in the United States are now willing to listen.

So the question really is, “Which way, America?”

Today we uplift the humanity of the Palestinian people. And what I am recommending is the creation of a political movement inside my country that will constitute a surgical strike for global justice. This gathering is the equivalent of us stepping to the microphone to be heard.

We don’t have to lose because we have commitment to the people.

And we don’t have to lose because we refuse to compromise our core values.

We don’t have to lose because we seek peace with justice and diplomacy over war.

We don’t have to lose.

By committing to do some things we’ve never done before I’m certain that we can also have some things we’ve never had before.

I return to the U.S. committed to do my part to make our dream come true.

Thank you.

Matías was kidnapped as he left the newspaper to go home on the evening of 25 October. His abductors beat him and terrorised him for hours, simulating an execution, asking him how he preferred to die and variously threatening to drag him along the ground behind their car, cut off his genitals, rape him or behead him. They also threatened his family members, saying they had been “located.”

He was released the next morning some 30 km outside Oaxaca in Tlacolula de Matamoros, without his car and without his papers, which his abductors also took from him.

Matías does much reporting on the social movement in Oaxaca, usually giving it fair, if not occasionally favorable, coverage. According to Reporters Without Borders, he also is a contributor to a radio station and on it has criticized the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), the party which has ruled Oaxaca for almost 80 years.

This is not the first attack against Noticias or its reporters, which for several years has been the lone local mainstream media outlet which is critical of the state government. Mexico is also the most deadly country in the Americas for journalists.

On November 19, 2004, masked gunmen took over Noticias‘ warehouses and printing presses, holding it for several days and murdering a 19 year old.

On June 17, 2005, Governor Ulises Ruiz, with the help of a state congressman and a PRI-controlled union called the CROC (Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants), fomented a fake strike against Noticias in an attempt to shut it down. Union members, paramilitaries and local police blockaded the building with 31 Noticias employees inside, cutting off the electricity, phones and water. After a month, the thugs raided the building, dragging out the 31 employees and destroying the offices.

On August 9, 2006, during the rebellion in Oaxaca, two armed, masked men entered the offices of Noticias, shooting equipment and people, wounding two employees.

This year, on January 16, two Noticias reporters received death threats from Rubén Marmolejo Maldonado, aka “El Dragón,” a leader of porros (paid thugs), who has instigated numerous conflicts on the campus of the state university in Oaxaca (UABJO) as well as organizing attacks against the APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca). He has been denounced by the Chair of the Law and Social Sciences Departments of UABJO of working for the state government.

And now Pedro Matías has been kidnapped and tortured. While this event should be seen as another occurrence of government repression against Noticias, it also has a place in the increasingly tense climate of repression against the social movement which has been escalating these past couple of weeks. Oaxaca has seen the October 16 arrest of three APPO members for the October 27, 2006, murder of Brad Will, the issuing of more that 300 more arrest warrants, and the October 25 warrantless raid and trashing of a house belonging to CODEP, a group aligned with the APPO, by the AFI, Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI.

Things may only get worse as the anniversary-laden month of November approaches. November 2 marks not only the Day of the Dead but also the unsuccessful 2006 Federal Preventive Police (PFP) attack on the barricade of Radio Universidad. And November 25 is the two year anniversary of the massive and brutal PFP, paramilitary, state and local police attacks against the APPO. Clearly, the government of Oaxaca is trying to preemptively intimidate and frighten a rebellious populace that it still very much fears.

Stories about the Iraq occupation lead the list. Unreported in the US corporate media is how over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths resulting from the 2003 US led invasion. According to a study conducted by the British polling group Opinion Research Business the human toll exceeded 900,000 as of August 2007. In addition, a United Nations Refugee Agency study found that five million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country.

Also ignored by mainstream media was the report of how three hundred Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans came forward in March of 2008 to recount the brutal impact of the ongoing occupations. The Winter Soldier hearings in Silver Spring, Maryland, organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, presented multiple testimonies by veterans who witnessed or participated in atrocities against Iraqis or Afghans.

Independent media reported that the United States Federal Reserve shipped $12 billion in US currency to Iraq at the beginning of the war of which at least $9 billion went missing, but this story never saw the light of day in the US mainstream.

Additionally, many anti-war activists will be surprised to learn that President Bush has signed two executive orders that would allow the US Treasury Department to seize the property of any person perceived to, directly or indirectly, pose a threat to US operations in the Middle East.

Also not reported in the US news is how the leaders of Canada, the US, and Mexico have been secretly meeting to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to form a militarized tri-national Homeland Security force and how more than 23,000 representatives of US private industry are working with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect information on fellow Americans.

Coverage of how massive new US-backed military funding threatens peace and democracy in Latin America and that NATO officials are considering a first strike nuclear option was also missing from the corporate press.

Unreported news also includes the stories that the Justice Department believes it is legal for the president to secretly ignore previous executive orders anytime he wants, and the FDA is complicit in allowing drug companies to make false, unsubstantiated, and misleading advertising claims.

Censored news stories also included why the No Child Left Behind program is a huge success for corporate profits, but have had little positive impact on public education. Children in juvenile detention centers in the US face conditions that involve sexual and physical abuse, and even death. And radioactive materials from nuclear weapons production sites are being dumped into public landfills, and being used as recycled metals.

Untold news includes CARE announcing last year that it was turning down $45 million in food aid from the United States government because the procedures the US demands for handling the food actually increases starvation instead of relieving it.

Rounding out the Project Censored list is the news that the guest worker program in the United States victimizes immigrant workers and creates a new form of indentured servitude and that twenty-seven million slaves exist in the world today.

Censorship is a harsh term, but the shocking fact is that the corporate-mainstream media in the US was so busy entertaining us that these and many other important news stories became lost in a news system run amuck.

PC works cooperatively with numerous independent media groups, primarily to train SSU students “in media research, First Amendment issues and the advocacy for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States.” Since its founding, it’s trained over 1500 students in investigative research and the importance of our most fundamental right without which all others are at risk and now currently hang by a thread.

PC is a “partnership of faculty, students, and the community” to conduct research “on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media.” Each year, it ranks the top 25 and publishes them in its yearbook, “Censored: Media Democracy in Action.” The latest “Censored 2009: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-2008″ may now be purchased at bookstores or online.

The current edition is larger than ever. It includes the year’s honorable mention choices and additional chapters covering these topics:

– Updates on previous PC stories;

– Junk Food News and News Abuse;

– The News is Good!: Stories of Hope and Change from 2007 and 2008;

– Oiling the Dangerous Engine of Arbitrary Government: Newspaper Coverage of the Military Commissions Act (aka the torture authorization and habeas rights revocation act);

– Universal Healthcare, Media, and the 2008 Presidential Campaign;

– US Media Bias, Human Rights, and the Hamas Government in Gaza;

– The Gardasil Sell Job – on the controversial human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine thought to be unsafe for adolescent girls, yet Merck dishonestly markets it in collusion with the FDA;

– Fear & Favor 2007: How Power Still Shapes the News;

– Index on Censorship 2007 – 2008;

– Truth Emergency Meets Media Reform;

– Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan — Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations;

– The Pentagon’s Child Recruiting Strategy;

– Deconstructing Deceit: 9/11, the Media, and Myth Information; and

– Thirty-Three Years of US Military Domination and Economic Deception.

In all, over 400 power-packed pages of vital information in the current PC Censored 2009 edition. Must reading for everyone. Even those familiar with the issues for more information than they now know.

Project Censored’s Definition of “Modern Censorship”

It’s the dominant media’s “subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality” in their role as “guardians of power” and to serve their single-minded pursuit of profit. It includes ignoring vital news stories. Parts of them. The whys that explain them, and systematically withholding vital truths from the public. It’s done through and because of political, economic and legal pressures in fundamental violation of a free and open press. Run by CEOs, not journalists. Serving their interests and advertisers, not ours.

PC believes in a “healthy and functioning democracy.” Supports independent media and the right of free people to be informed. It also holds the dominant media accountable and serves as an antidote to their practices.

Why Project Censored and Why Now?

Democracy requires a free, open, vibrant and diverse media. Elements very much absent under our corporate-dominated system. As a result, the media system today is in crisis. Fiction substitutes for fact. News is carefully filtered. Dissent marginalized, and supporting the powerful substitutes for full and accurate reporting. Aggressive wars are thus called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good. Anything government does, we’re told, business does better, so let it, and patriotism means supporting lawless imperial regimes.

Media scholar and activist Robert McChesney asks whether “the media system… promote(s) or undermine(s) democratic institutions and practices. Are media a force for social justice or oligarchy?” Given their concentrated state, profits as a be all and end all, and partnership with an imperial state, their current condition is corrupted, broken, and in violation of the public trust they disdain. “Rich media, poor democracy” for McChesney. A powerful antidemocratic force. More dominant than ever. Hyper-commercially driven. Unresponsive to public needs, and serving only the interests of wealth and power the way Alex Carey brilliantly explained in his classic work, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy:

“The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

Journalist Walter Lippmann called it the “manufacture of consent” in a democratic society where it can’t be done by force, and Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman titled their landmark 1988 book “Manufacturing Consent” to describe the dominant media’s “propaganda model” to program the public mind.

It “filter(s) out the news to print, marginalize(s) dissent, (and assures) government and dominant private interests” control all information dissemination. It’s done through a set of “filters” to remove what’s unacceptable and “leav(es) only the cleansed residue fit to print” or broadcast.

It raises the dilemma James Madison posed that “A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

Today it’s from the media, and therein lies the problem. An opportunity as well from alternative sources and organizations like Project Censored promoting the best they have to offer. Publishing it in annual volumes. Spreading it by word of mouth through lectures, on-air discussions, and in classroom instruction on journalism as it was meant to be in a free and open society. Understanding Thomas Jefferson’s warning that emerging “banking institutions and moneyed incorporations” would destroy our democratic freedoms and replace them with a “single and splendid government of an aristocracy” if given a free hand.

What Lincoln also feared by “see(ing) in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country… corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” Made easier today given the dominant media’s power and ability to use it against the public interest the way Alex Carey explained:

Through a “propaganda-managed democracy….to identify the free-enterprise system in popular consciousness with every cherished value, and to identify interventionist governments and strong unions with tyranny, oppression and even subversion.” Carey called propaganda “communications where the form and content is selected with the single-minded purpose of bringing some target audience (the public or a company’s employees, etc.) to adopt attitudes and beliefs chosen in advance by the sponsors.” It’s as important in democratic societies as in authoritarian ones. In addition, “the success of business (or government) propaganda persuading us that we are free from (this type influence) is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.”

Even truer today with round-the-clock news. Hundreds of cable channels, and a more dominant media than in Carey’s day. All the greater need for organizations like Project Censored to dispel official propaganda with real news and information that refutes it. All the more reason also to support its vital work. Countering the giants with what a free society needs to survive.

Stories the Dominant Media Censor

Hundreds of them have been covered since 1976 when PC’s top story was “Jimmy Carter and the Trilateral Commission.” Carter was a charter member of David Rockefeller’s organization to counter the threat of democracy — too much of it. To assure that political power rests with the few. That public interests go unaddressed. That governments serve multinational banks and giant corporations. That people and resources are exploited for their benefit, and that popular democratic movements are suppressed. David Rockefeller chose Jimmy Carter to be president for that agenda. To be an interregnum executive after the turbulent Nixon years, then hand back the office to Republicans in 1980.

The same year, PC covered:

– the “Corporate Control of DNA;”

– selling banned pesticides and drugs to third world countries;

– unsafe workplaces causing “untold numbers of injuries, disease and deaths…;” and

– the sale of worthless and harmful non-prescription drugs to the public along with 20 other censored stories.

The top two 1977 stories covered the myth of black progress and “Cancer, Inc.” About billions spent for cures, yet the US rate was 50% above the world average. It’s still epidemic. Kills millions. Is a huge health care industry money-maker and too profitable for providers to want a cure.

In 1978, nuclear power plant dangers won top honors, and long before the proliferation of GMO foods and their hazards, the feasibility of organic farming ranked second.

Dumping illegal/dangerous production on third world countries was called “The Corporate Crime of the Century” and PC’s top 1979 story. Number two was that “The (Iranian embassy) Seizure Should Not Have Been A Surprise” even though as late as summer 1978 the US media portrayed the Shah “as a modernizing, reform-oriented leader (with) a broad base of popular support.”

In 1980, the distorted coverage of El Salvador’s civil war won top honors followed by “Big Brother Is Listening to You” — the National Security Agency (NSA) that can do it today with much improved technology and legally with institutionalized spying legislation in place. Most recently The Protect America Act of 2007 and FISA Amendments Act of 2008. They assail civil liberties. Legalize warrantless wiretapping. Remove judicial oversight, and grant telecom companies retroactive immunity post-9/11 to violate our privacy.

“The Real Story Behind Our Economic Crisis” and the flagrant miscarriage of justice in Greensboro, NC ranked one and two in 1981.

Back then, a lack of “a competitive economy, monopoly, militarism, and multi-nationalization” (were) at the root of our economic crisis.” Those factors still apply but much more as well. The current situation far exceeds any crisis since the 1930s. Is in most respects unparalled. No one fully understands it. How much harm if may cause. Its effect on world economies. How bad things may get or what alleviating measures may work best, if any.

Industrial capitalism is eroding. Replaced by a kleptocracy. Grand theft America. Rewarding criminals for their crimes. Backed by the full faith and credit of the government with taxpayer money. An unimaginable wealth transfer to the rich. When this ends, things won’t ever be the same again in our lifetimes. The old system didn’t work. The new one will be worse, and along the way the human fallout will be catastrophic. Talk about a big story. Short of Armageddon or world war, it doesn’t get any bigger than this. Factors responsible include:

– the ruinous effects of militarization; a permanent war economy for profit and dominance; unsustainable spending for it; the accumulation of mountains of unrepayable debt; the drain on a weakened economy; the implications are chilling — a future default, hyperinflation, potential bankruptcy, and demise of the republic;

– a speculative finance-created crisis; called financialization or Frankenstein finance;

– a totally deregulated, anything goes, environment permitting the most extreme, outrageous practices; free from government oversight that created the real under and unreported dilemma of: multiple imploding bubbles affecting housing, mortgage finance, and an alphabet soup menu of levered-up, high-risk securitized assets amounting to financial alchemy and largely outright fraud; the most dangerous being a “quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble” (a thousand trillion) crucial to contain to avoid the implosion of the entire global banking system and world economies with it; in a word, potential financial armageddon touching everyone; in 2003, Warren Buffett called derivatives a “time bomb” that pose a “mega-catastrophic risk;” said they’re “financial weapons of mass destruction” capable of wrecking the whole economic system;

– at the root of today’s crisis is a corrupted, broken system; Chicago School fundamentalism; unfettered capitalism; unbridled greed, and the human wreckage it causes; driving it is a government-business partnership for global dominance and the single-minded pursuit of profit;

– no freedom in our “free markets;” they’re manipulated (up and down) for profit in either direction; in a crisis like today, small, expendable, and less favored enterprises are destroyed to benefit powerful ones like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and the Rockefeller family JP Morgan Chase Bank; the scheme is for greater consolidation among fewer giant players; the losers — the vast majority of people unaware that what’s going on was planned; although this time the best and brightest were too smart by half; they may have set off a chain reaction global financial market meltdown; world governments are frantically scrambling to contain it with no idea if they can because the current crisis is unprecedented; no one’s sure what can work, and the sums needed are unimaginable; in the trillions, with a fraction of it proposed for starters; a down payment; perhaps international help to raise more; and

– fraud on a massive scale involving many trillions of dollars; placing world economies at risk; a Ponzi scheme writ large; a calculated crime; the greatest one ever with media complicity through silence as things progressively worsened and now approach the abyss; the story is still unfolding; it won’t be easily or soon resolved; and its outcome is far from clear; one thing that is: this affects the entire world community of nations and everyone in them; there’s no place to hide anywhere.

In 1982, fraudulent toxicity and cancer testing was PC’s top story followed by “Americans ‘Bugged’ by Super-Secret (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance) Court.” Institutionalized, illegal spying goes way back.

In 1983, “Israel: Merchant of Death in Central America” as the region’s largest arms supplier and Ronald Reagan’s massive peacetime military buildup ranked one and two.

In 1984, the myth of the “well-publicized Soviet military buildup” (to incite fear), and the Reagan administration’s use of “international terrorism” as a pretext to assail civil liberties were the year’s top two stories.

In 1985, intense saturation El Salvador bombing and unregulated military toxic waste were PC’s picks for numbers one and two.

In 1986, spying on US Central American policy critics took top honors, followed by the Reagan administration’s official policy of suppressing information from the public — with near-silence from the dominant media.

In 1987, PC’s top story was on “The Information Monopoly” — what journalist/author Ben Bagdikian wrote about in his book, The Media Monopoly, now titled The New Media Monopoly in its seventh edition. Ranked second was the “Contra-drug connection in America.”

In 1988, George HW Bush’s 25 years of “Dirty Big Secrets” was PC’s top story followed by “How the EPA Pollutes the News and the Dioxin Cover-Up.”

In 1989, media dominance again took top honors in an story titled “Global Media Lords Threaten Open Marketplace of Ideas.” Second ranked was “Africa Turning into the World’s Garbage Can.”

In 1990, PC’s top story was on the Cheerleader Press’ Gulf War coverage. Second ranked was “The S & L Crisis: The Solution Is Worse Than the Crime” — about Reagan era criminal bankers and the $500 billion taxpayer bailout it cost. Appropriate to look back on given today’s financial crisis. The unease about how bad it may get, and the realization that this time things are far more potentially disastrous than anything experienced in the past. See above comments under 1981’s top story.

In 1991, “CBS and NBC Spiking Iraq Bombing Carnage Footage” ranked first. Number two was “Operation Censored War” about the secretive GHW Bush administration and an obliging cheerleading media.

In 1993 (the next PC-listed year), “The Great Media Sell-Out to Reaganism” won top honors followed by corporate crime dwarfing what occurs on streets. The US prison gulag system (by far the world’s largest and adding 1000 new inmates weekly, mostly poor blacks and Latinos) holds 2.3 million inmates. People not rich enough to buy justice. Seldom are corporate criminals prosecuted, and when they are, punishment is inconsequential by comparison.

In 1994, the US killing its young (through violence, poverty and indifference to human needs) ranked first. Second was “Why Are We Really in Somalia?” Humanitarian intervention is never the reason. Strategic resources (especially oil and gas) always are primary along with advancing our imperial agenda and making the world safe for capital.

In 1995, PC’s top story was “The Deadly Secrets of the (US) Occupational Safety Agency” — keeping 170,000 toxically-exposed workers uninformed about the risks. Second-ranked was about a “Powerful Group of Ultra-Conservatives (including influential Christian fascists) Secret Plans for Your Future.” They haven’t changed and are now more dangerous than ever.

In 1996, “Telecommunications Deregulation: Closing Up America’s Marketplace of Ideas” ranked first after passage of the (grand theft media) Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowing greater than ever consolidation. Number two was a story on cutting social services by balancing the budget on the backs of the poor. Now affecting everyone to advance a global militarist agenda.

In 1997, PC’s top story was “Risking the World: Nuclear Proliferation in Space.” One part of an agenda for “full spectrum dominance” over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any potential challengers using all weapons in our arsenal. “Shell’s Oil, Africa’s Blood” was number two for the year.

In 1998, the Clinton administration’s aggressive global arms sales ranked first followed by personal care and cosmetic products being potentially carcinogenic.

In 1999, PC’s top story was on the secret Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). Designed to undermine national sovereignty by creating an open field for capital. Next was the story of chemical corporations profiting from breast cancer.

In 2000, multinational corporations profiting from international brutality ranked first followed by Big Pharma putting profits ahead of human need. By developing products like Viagra instead of cures for diseases killing millions in developing countries.

In 2001, World Bank and multinational corporate collusion to privatize water took top honors followed by OSHA failing to protect US workers.

In 2003 (the next listed year), PC’s top story was on FCC efforts to privatize the airwaves followed by a story on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to privatize social services and make them available only to those who can pay.

In 2004, top ranked was “The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance” followed by how “Homeland Security Threatens Civil Liberty” with plenty of ammunition from pre-and-mostly-post-9/11 repressive laws.

In 2005, PC’s top story was on the unprecedented 21st century wealth inequality threatening the economy and democracy followed by a story about Attorney General John Ashcroft’s attempt to strike down Alien Torts Claim Act (ATCA) protections against corporate human rights abuses in foreign countries.

In 2006, the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy ranked first followed by the media’s failure to cover the Fallujah and overall Iraqi civilian death toll.

In 2007, PC’s top story was on the “Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media” followed by “Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran.”

In 2008, the Military Commissions Act (MCA) denial of habeas rights for everyone (including US citizens designated “unlawful enemy combatants”) won top honors followed by the Bush administration moving toward martial law by inserting an obscure provision in the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 annulling the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.

Project Censored’s current top 25 2009 stories are just out and available for purchase as explained above. Top ranked was about “Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation” as documented by Johns Hopkins researchers earlier and British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). Other selected stories included:

– the North American Union (NAU) Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) or militarized NAFTA;

– InfraGard on the FBI deputizing business;

– the US International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) training Latin American security forces in counterterrorism techniques; a possible scheme to restart the region’s dirty wars;

– two George Bush executive orders (EOs) criminalizing the anti-war movement and allowing the Treasury Department to seize property from anyone opposing the administration’s Middle East wars;

– The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act (HR 1955), called “the thought crime prevention bill;” passed by the House and introduced in the Senate in August 2007 (S. 1959) but not acted on;

– Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking or near-slavery in America;

– executive orders (EOs) can be changed secretly even though the Constitution has no provision giving presidents the right to make new law through one-man decrees;

– Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify;

– the American Psychological Association’s (APA) complicity in CIA torture;

– El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror;

– Bush profiteers collecting billions from the No Child Left Behind Act scheme to destroy public education in America by privatizing it;

– Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq through fraud, waste and other war profiteering schemes;

– Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste;

– Worldwide Slavery at a time most people don’t know it exists, let alone in America;

– the Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights;

– the UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights;

– Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers;

– Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction;

– Marijuana Arrests Set New Record;

– NATO Considers “First Strike” Option while the US 2001 Nuclear Policy Review, 2002 and updated 2006 National Security Strategy, and other US documents assert the right to wage preventive or proactive wars with “first strike” nuclear or any other weapons of mass destruction;

– CARE Rejects US Food Aid because it causes more hunger than it prevents;

– FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs;

– Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror; and

– Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer to stop his exposure of subprime predatory lending fraud responsible for much of the current world financial crisis.

Project Censored annually present awards for the corporate media’s most important suppressed stories. For its work, its Director, dedicated staff, and student interns deserve our award for being one of our national treasures. Holding the dominant media accountable.

Follow their work. Support their activities. Know what’s at stake. A free and open society. The type media vital in it. The risk of losing it, and need for assertive, decisive action to assure that won’t happen. Nor will it if Project Censored can help it.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.¹ Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits from Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land — and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity — and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism — absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.

The Power of Nightmares

In October 2001 it was revealed that the Pentagon was consulting Hollywood writers and producers specializing in spy thrillers and disaster flicks to imagine future attacks in order to best prepare for them. Developments such as the colour-coded threat alerts that change hue at the Department of Homeland Security’s caprice have alarmed even cold war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski enough to lament this ‘culture of fear’:

Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue… Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum.

In Britain each of the New Labour government’s political missteps has been accompanied by similar fear-mongering. While a terrorist threat does exist, its magnitude is wildly exaggerated. The European Police Office (Europol) released its first report on terrorism last year which listed 498 terrorist attacks for Europe in 2006; only one was attributed to Muslims. The majority — 136 — were carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA; only one of them deadly. When it came to the arrests on terrorism related charges, however, a good half were Muslims.²

It began with the ‘Ricin plot’: the highly publicized arrests, national hysteria and front page headlines. There was no Ricin, or a plot. It wouldn’t be until 2005, well after Colin Powell had used it in his case to sell the Iraq war to the UN, that the ban on reporting on the case was finally lifted and the public apprised of the truth. The February 2003 ‘terror alert’ had Blair scrambling tanks to Heathrow, timed conveniently to coincide with the large scale demonstrations against the coming war. Notable support in the media came from BBC propagandist Fred Gardner, long suspected of ties to the intelligence services,³ themselves busy fanning the fire. Simon Jenkins, the conservative columnist noted, “In 2002-03, before the Iraq war, the security service supplied the Cabinet Office with a weekly catalogue of ‘terror fears’ — anthrax, smallpox, sarin, dirty nuclear devices and a Christmas bombing campaign — to soften public opinion for the war.”

In June 2006, 250 heavily armed police men acting on ‘specific intelligence’ raided a home in Forest Gate arresting two young Muslims, shooting one in the process. The chemical weapons that they were alleged to have possessed were never found. Both were acquitted without charge. The police apologized. On August 10th, 2006, a day after then Home Secretary John Reid had hinted that new anti-terror measures were in order, the Deputy Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Paul Stephenson, announced that the police had foiled a plot to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Officials were soon conceding that the immediacy and scale of the threat may have been “exaggerated”; however, the scare succeeded in deflecting attention from Blair’s widely-denounced manoeuvres preventing a ceasefire in Lebanon. From Beirut, an outraged Robert Fisk wrote:

Stephenson’s job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened … I’m all for arresting criminals… But I don’t think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice.

In November 2006, the MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller warned of a violent threat from 1,600 suspects in 200 groups that could last “more than a generation”. Although she identified government policy towards Iraq as the main factor contributing to the rising radicalism, Blair endorsed the statement. He continued his scapegoating of Muslims with the periodic reiterations of the ‘Islamic threat’ to rationalize the fear, repression, lies and resentment brought in on the heels of the Iraq war. When Blair announced that “the rule of the game have changed”, no one took it more seriously than the tabloid press; they demonstrated just how toxic things could get when gloves come off with government sanction. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian confessed: “I try to imagine how I would feel if this rainstorm of headlines substituted the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’ — I wouldn’t just feel frightened. I would be looking for my passport.”

One can’t miss the Islamophobic nature of much of the hysteria when one compares the difference in the treatment of the cases of Robert Cottage and David Bolus Jackson of the BNP with that of Mohammed Atif Siddique. The case of the former two, arrested for the possession of rocket launchers, a “record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs”, extremist literature, and bomb-making information, barely got covered in national media; the latter, a 20 year old, received front page attention and eight years in prison for merely downloading extremist literature, and his attorney Aamer Anwer, got charged with ‘contempt of court’ for calling the trial a “tragedy for justice”.

The new MI5 chief, Jonathan Evan, raised the fear factor a year on with the warning that 15-year-olds were being “groomed” for terror and that there were up to 2,000 people involved in “terrorist-related activity”. Recalling Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknown’s”, the man appointed by John Reid with Tony Blair’s approval, bizarrely added “there are as many again that we don’t yet know of”. Described variously as “lurid”, “inflammatory”, “highly ideological”, “playing Halloween”, it came on the eve of the Queen’s address calling for yet another terror bill. The institutional imperative of self-preservation may also have been at play: MI5 has already expanded by 50% with eight new regional offices, and will have doubled in size by 2011. Eyebrows have been raised at these very public interventions by the heads of a clandestine service. Simon Jenkins noted that chiefs of the secret service have long feared that the absence of a public profile may diminish funding appropriation. “The answer of both MI5’s Evans and MI6’s John Scarlett is to join the fear factory.”

Taking Liberties

The assault on constitutional rights that started in the US with Clinton’s Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty law of 1996 was replicated in Britain with the Terrorism Act 2000. Section 41 of the Act granted police the right to detain terror suspects for up to one week without charge (criminal law on the other hand requires that suspects be charged within the first 24 hours of arrest, or be released). Section 44 granted police stop and search rights all across Britain (it has since been used against: Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinto for protesting outside Europe’s biggest arms fair in London, the 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang for heckling Jack Straw at the Labour Conference, Sally Cameron for walking on a cycle-path in Dundee, the 80-year-old John Catt for being caught on CCTV passing a demonstration in Brighton;, the 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft for accompanying her parents to an anti-nuclear protest, and a cricketer on his way to a match over his possession of a bat).

In the United States, September 11 occasioned the most robust assault yet on civil liberties in the form of Bush’s ‘USA Patriot Act’ leading eminent constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson to describe Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi legal authority, as “the true éminence grise of the Bush administration” to the extent that the Administration (advised by Dick Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington) espoused a view of presidential authority “that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer”.⁴ The respected lawyer Gareth Peirce noted equally worrying tendencies in the UK:

Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security.⁵

The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 succeeded in ramming through measures that had been rejected in the 2000 Act. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 doubled the period of detention without charge to 14 days. Although the government suffered a significant setback when the Law Lords swept aside the indefinite detention ruling since it broke European human rights legislation (described by the Law Lords as “draconian” and “anathema” to the rule of law, it was seen by Lord Hoffmann as a bigger threat to the nation than terrorism). Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, immediately made clear his intention to undermine it. The government obliged by subsequently passing the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 which gave the Home Secretary the right to use Control Orders and opt out of human rights laws.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, the government upped the ante with the Terrorism Act 2006, which doubled — yet again — the detention period to 28 days, a period far longer than any other state in the western world. The bill marked the first parliamentary defeat for Tony Blair, whose original proposal was for 90 days detention without charge.

Blair’s determination to deflect attention from the failures of his scandal-ridden government by turning the war on terror into a permanent undeclared state of emergency seemed to have come up against a wall. However, despite a noticeably prudent start, Brown’s multiplying political problems soon had him reaching for Blairite nostrums. He renewed the case for doubling the period of detention without charge subsequently settling for an arbitrary 42 days which the supine parliament duly passed.⁶ This despite the fact that the newly appointed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had conceded that circumstances had not yet arisen where it had been necessary “to go beyond 28 days”. Seumas Milne reported in The Guardian that “it’s widely acknowledged in Westminster that a key motivation for this latest assault on long-established rights and freedoms is Brown’s determination to wrong-foot the Tories tactically and portray them as soft on terror”.

The deleterious effects of a creeping surveillance state cannot be discounted. While the public may have little enthusiasm for an ID card scheme after discs containing personal details of 25 million individuals were lost by the government, Brown remains adamant. Given the government’s record for handling personal data, proposals for a universal register of citizen’s DNA samples is very worrying. So are Tony Blair’s remarks about identifying problem children who may grow up to pose a menace to society by intervening before they were born. A new plan under the government’s e-borders scheme would require each person entering or leaving UK to answer 53 questions including “credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights”. Taken when a ticket is bought, the information, it was reported, “will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place.” When popular shows bear names like Big Brother, the appurtenances of mass surveillance society, such as the 4.2 million CCTV cameras, become an acceptable, even desired, part of the scenery. While the terrorist threat today has nowhere near the intensity of the IRA campaign, police are using military aircraft such as the Britten-Norman Islander used previously only in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Reaper robot drones of the type being used in Afghanistan will also be in operation during the Olympics.

Reign of the Terrorologist

Riding the back of the raft of anti-terror legislations are the terrorologists and the “security” entrepreneurs; and they have found green pastures in Fortress Britain. With governments unwilling to address political causes, the trend is increasingly one of framing the subject in cultural terms: ‘they hate our way of life’, ‘they hate our freedoms’, etc. This clears the way for the terrorologist to step in and sell a toxic brew of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology packaged in pseudo-academic jargon as expertise. In his study of the trade, James Petras detects the following “eerily predictable patterns”:

They use a common language to describe their subjects and their environment; they are extremely ideological under a thin veneer of scientific jargon; they possess a keen sense of selective observation; they always pretend to possess a psychological understanding though few if any have dealt close up with their subjects in any clinical sense except perhaps under conditions of incarceration and interrogation.

Their style… slippery with euphemisms when it comes to dealing with the violence of their partisan states… Psychobabble provides a ‘legitimate’ sounding channel for… assuming a state of civilized superiority in the face of their dehumanized subjects. Indeed, the dehumanization process is central to the whole terrorist-political-academic enterprise…

One consequence of earning an elevated place in official demonology is that the bar for those passing judgement drops radically. When it comes to Islam, Muslims and their alleged links to terrorism, any shoddy indictment passes muster. Doom-laden sensationalism makes for good copy; it makes no demands on rigour and scepticism, and a stable of ‘experts’ is readily at hand to amplify fear. The degree to which this has penetrated public discourse was demonstrated by the Big Issue — a publication generally about as provocative as a phonebook — with a front page story on ‘cyber terror’ and ‘online vigilantes’. Trotting out a stable of ‘terror experts’ the story served as a platform for several tendentious claims (”There are no longer clear boundaries between real-world cells and ‘amateurs’ assisting terror plots via their computers”; “al-Qaeda is equal in the media war”). Rather than question why a dubious source such as Evan Kohlmann — the man used as a ‘expert witness’ in the Atif Siddique trial who, according to sociologist David Miller, “has no expertise beyond an undergraduate law degree and an internship at a dubious think-tank” — should be consulted by the Scotland Yard, the story served as a puff piece for three Israel lobby hacks with an ideological axe to grind. Rita Katz has served in the Israeli military; Aaron Weisburd runs Internet Haganah (Hebrew name for the paramilitary that later became the IDF) a project of the Society for Internet Research that works with the Mossad-linked Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; and both Katz and Kohlmann are protégés of Steve Emerson whose own expertise includes having seen “the hallmarks of Middle Eastern terror” in the Oklahoma bombing (actually carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a decorated white Christian war-hero).

The trade of the terrorologist is not new: incubated in the Reagan administration’s earlier ‘war on terror’, its proponents had been exposed and elegantly debunked by Edward Herman. September 11 ushered in a new breed – ubiquitous, ideological, and relentless. Some, such as Rohan Gunaratna of the St. Andrews-based Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), reinvented themselves over night as ‘experts on al-Qaeda’. Gunaratna’s book Inside Al Qaeda became an instant best-seller, even though before the date his expertise was limited to South Asian groups, such as the Tamil Tigers. In the book he claimed he was the “principal investigator of the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch”. However, after a Sunday Age investigation, he admitted that no such position existed. Intelligence services have been generally dismissive of his claims. However, despite all this, he keeps making appearances as an ‘expert witness’ at various UK prosecutions and in media reports.

CSTPV itself bears some scrutiny. Established by an alumni of the RAND Corporation (a US think-tank which played a key role during the Cold War; satirized as the ‘Bland Corporation’ in Dr. Strangelove, it was an enthusiastic supporter of the arms race), the Centre has links to the government and intelligence agencies. Shaping discourse on terrorism through its two influential academic journals, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence, CSTPV emphasises terror directed against states, while mostly ignoring violence by states, excluding however those not allied to the West (‘Hell is other people’, Sartre might say). Reports by the Centre have been used by the government to rationalize permanent anti-terror legislation. The RAND-CSTPV nexus also has stakes in the Iraq conflict through its links to mercenary firms operating in the country. However, despite the conflicts of interest, the Centre’s embedded expertise remains much in demand.⁷

CSTPV’s output may be ideological; but it still retains a degree of sophistication. With the low demands on rigour, joining the fray now are some actors less restrained. In early 2006 it was revealed that authorities at several universities, including this writer’s own, were co-operating with Special Branch as a result of a recently published study by the right wing Social Affairs Unit. Conducted by Anthony Glees, the Director of Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, the study claimed to find evidence of Islamist, animal liberation and British National Party recruitment on UK campuses. The evidence comprised of the fact that people who have been arrested under anti-terrorism legislation attended universities at some point. It castigated Universities for teaching students “theoretical tools for understanding the world”, such as Marxism, which could lead to further radicalization when students moved “from campus to Mosque”. Policy Exchange, another dubious neoconservative outfit, shouldered its way into the debate with an Islamophobic report on extremist literature allegedly being promoted through various Mosques which, to the BBC’s credit, was publicly debunked by a Newsnight investigation. This, however, did not deter Policy Exchange members from using the report to lobby the EU.

Hero and Horse

On November 18, 1822, the Observer reported that nearly “a million bushels of human and inhuman bones” had been imported in the previous year from Europe into the port of Hull. Battlefields swept alike of the “bones of the hero and the horse which he rode” delivered their haul to Yorkshire bone grinders who reduced them to granulary state. “In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.”⁸ Two centuries on, the gap between the ‘support our troops’ rhetoric and reality has yet to be bridged.

An internal report into the state of the British Military obtained by The Independent on May 11 reveals that soldiers are living in such poverty that they can’t even afford food, with many living on emergency food voucher schemes set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). “Commanders are attempting to tackle the problem through ‘Hungry Soldier’ schemes, under which destitute soldiers are given loans to enable them to eat” the paper reported. With its proclivity for market solutions, the tradition of soldiers getting three square meals a day for free has been replaced with a controversial Pay as You Dine (PAYD) regime, which charges soldiers not on active duty for their meals, leading many into debt.

Likewise, slightly more than a year back on March 11, 2007, the Observer had revealed the shocking picture of neglect and poor treatment of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. It reported, for example, that “the youngest British soldier wounded in Iraq, Jamie Cooper, was forced to spend a night lying in his own faeces after staff at Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital allowed his colostomy bag to overflow. On another occasion his medical air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in ‘considerable pain’ overnight despite an alarm going off.” Another complaint alleged that one soldier “suffered more than 14 hours in agony without pain relief because no relevant staff were on duty”. (This, of course, is as much a reflection of the chronic lack of surplus within the health system as it is of the wider militarised draw on public resources.) The MoD has already revealed a serious shortage of medical staff in the armed forces: “There was a 50% shortfall in the number of surgeons required by the army, an 80% shortfall of radiologists and a 46% shortfall of anaesthetists.”

Soldiers in the field haven’t fared any better: for example, both Reg Keys and Rose Gentle lost sons in Iraq due to the lack of proper equipment. Iraq has taken its toll on an overstretched military. Due to “continuing high level of operational commitment” an MoD report has revealed, “more than 1 in 10 soldiers were not getting the rest between operations they needed.” The report also referred to a “continuing difficult environment for army recruitment and retention”. With a high number of officers and other ranks going over voluntarily with another 2,000 awaiting approval of their applications to quit, the armed forces as a whole are nearly 7,000 under strength, the report revealed.

The crisis has caused the military to redouble its recruitment efforts with visits to Scottish schools up by more than 180% in the last three years, The Herald revealed. The news comes only weeks after the National Union of Teachers voted to block future military careers’ presentations “to pupils as young as 14″ in England and Wales. “Despite the outlay of almost £500m, in 2006-07 the field army – the frontline operational part of UK ground forces – missed its ‘gains to strength’ (GTS) recruitment goal by 12%. In 2007-08, it achieved only 63% of its target.” (In the US, the military has been reduced to enlisting former convicts and the mentally ill.) The degree of desperation is also evident in the recent advertising campaign for military recruitment: the military experience is presented as a sanitized adventure, an adrenaline-soaked escape from ennui. High-minded calls of duty and honour have been replaced with ones such as “for the travel, for the action, for the adventure”; “for the fun, for the friendship, for the Friday nights”.

The MoD caused much consternation among the National Union of Teachers when it distributed materials on the Iraq war for use in schools. The ministry was accused of “misleading propaganda” which “unethically” targeted recruitment materials at schools in disadvantaged areas. One worksheet described the purpose of the UK mission in Iraq as “helping the Iraqis to rebuild their country after the conflict and years of neglect”. Touting “achievements” in “security and reconstruction” it failed to mention the US-led invasion, its legality, Iraqi civilian deaths or the absence of WMDs. This is not the MoD’s only advance on the classroom. Another example is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) outreach programme, which sends DSTL scientists to talk to university and school students to encourage them to think about a career at the lab. According to Frances Saunders, the chief executive, DSTL sponsors “year-in-industry students, and are working with the MoD to develop school lesson texts to get people interested in the science behind defence.” Although DSTL already has strong links with universities including Southampton, Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge, Saunders plans to broaden this network.

Not since Suez has the military suffered a greater loss of prestige. RAF airmen in Cambridgeshire were recently advised against wearing uniforms in public in order to avoid being “verbally abused” for their participation in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the demoralizing effect of ill-conceived interventions abroad, the struggle for politicians is then of rehabilitating the myth of the military, rather that the military itself. What interests policy makers is not so much the military, but the cult of military. Plans are also underway to introduce US-style citizenship ceremonies for children and a new public holiday to celebrate ‘Britishness’ by 2012, as part of “wide-ranging proposals to strengthen British citizenship.”

In sharp contrast to the decrepit military stands the fortunes of the private military industry. The preference of recent governments for market solutions has facilitated the transfer of most military R&D to the private sector, with giants like QinetiQ and BAe Systems securing plum deals. When the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (Dera) was split in two in 2001, QinetiQ, a British company with links to the US-based Carlyle Group, absorbed the majority of its activities. Along with a raft of other lucrative PFIs, the private military industry is set to benefit from the largest to date, involving at least £14 billion of taxpayers’ money, for a privatised Military ‘Academy’ at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan to train all-service personnel and private ’security services’. The corporate bonanza in Iraq has had Private Military Contractors — mercenaries — reaping windfalls profits for investors with stakes in the businesses, such as Frederick Forsyth and former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind (of Aegis and ArmorGroup respectively). The lure of salaries, at times reaching as high as £1,000 a day, may be one reason why the military is losing so many of its men to the mercenary business.

While the defence establishment has long complained of funding shortages for the forces, the R&D budget remains secure. The MoD, it was reported, has promised not to raid the R&D budget to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this injunction doesn’t apply in the reverse, as it has been revealed that the Conflict Prevention Fund set aside for clearing landmines and removing arms from conflict zones was being raided to pay BAe Systems to subsidise the £5m-£10m servicing cost of six Tornado jets in Iraq. The measure was needed because the MoD has closed its own state-of-the-art facility for servicing Tornado jets as a way of saving £500m over 10 years.

Sensing opportunity as the war on terror grinds on, its neoconservative architects have swooped in from across the Atlantic to establish their presence in Britain. With ties to the arms industry and the neoconservative wing of the Israel lobby, the Henry Jackson Society seems to be assuming the role that the Committee on Present Danger played in the United States. Its Israel-centric worldview, as exhibited by its roster of speakers, predisposes it towards perpetual conflict. The support for a militarized ethnocracy is not the natural inclination of a liberal-democratic Britain; it can only be sustained in a context where Israel can be seen aligned with Britain in an overarching conflict against a common enemy. So it is that the Israel lobby has contrived to pass its enemies off as those of the ‘West’. HJS appears well placed to sustain this state of conflict should the Tories get in as its supporters include two of David Cameron’s key advisers. There is a dangerous confluence of interests here. Fortress Britain is as much a consequence of ill-conceived alliances as it is a response to the neoliberal order’s need for distraction from its inherent contradictions. While not nearly as unscrupulous as his predecessor, Gordon Brown’s growing travails may lead him to seek the politician’s time-tested remedy: scare the hell out of the population. One only hopes that Fortress Britain is the apogee of what Tony Blair had set in motion with his promise to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with George W. Bush in his so-called ‘war on terror’, because things could always be worse.

1. Might he be the same Amnon Maor of the squad of six Israeli border policemen who back in 1994 were sentenced to six months in prison with one year suspended sentences and a fine of NIS 1,000 each, for brutally assaulting an Arab in a supermarket whose cart had accidentally knocked one. ‘The six also arrested a passerby who witnessed the beating, and had asked them to stop and to show identification’, the Jerusalem Post reported. The Judge castigated them for abuse of authority and violating ‘all norms of acceptable behaviour’. (Jerusalem Post, 8 December 1994)
2. European Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2007; David Miller, ‘The statistical invisibility of Islamist “terrorism” in Europe’, Spinwatch, 23 May 2007.
3. While Gardner admits MI6 tried to recruit him while stationed in Cairo, he insists he turned them down. See David Rowan, ‘Interview: Frank Gardner’, Evening Standard, 15 June 2005.
4. Sanford Levinson, ‘Torture in Iraq & the rule of law in America’, Daedalus, Summer 2004.
5. Gareth Peirce, ‘Was it like this for the Irish?’, London Review of Books, 10 April 2008.
6. Interestingly, this led to the first resignation on principle from the the British parliament in nearly half a century, of David Davies, a Tory former SAS man. By contrast voting for the bill were Labour MPs such as Muhammad Sarwar, the bovine cipher who represents Glasgow with its large Muslim population.
7. J. Burnett and Dave Whyte, ‘Embedded expertise and the “War on Terror”‘, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media, 2005, 1(4): 1-18.
8. Quoted by veteran correspondent Chris Hedges in his incisive study of the social consequences of conflict, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

It strikes me that, in many ways, Carlin had turned himself into a modern Socrates, always questioning our words, thoughts, and actions, and finding himself disappointed in the lack of reflection in the rest of us. Carlin acknowledged this in perhaps his most important routine:

“I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love, as I say, they’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really.”

The Seven Words routine was a milestone not just because Carlin managed to highlight the dilemma at the core of the modern condition, but also because it gave us a landmark Supreme Court case on freedom of speech that highlights how dangerous words can be to the guardians of mainstream mores, FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation. Carlin’s monologue, played on Pacifica Radio in NYC, engendered a dispute as to what constituted decent speech on broadcast media — and the Court decided that the population needed to be protected from hearing those “deadly” words spoken by Carlin, who had done so in an effort to help us enlighten ourselves about the power of speech.

Justice William Brennan, writing in a stinging dissent from the majority on that decision, stated that: “because the radio is undeniably a public medium, these actions are more properly viewed as a decision to take part, if only as a listener, in an ongoing public discourse.”

Censorship of language is an attempt to silence this public discourse, to stifle thoughts, actions, and ideas. George Carlin understood this perfectly well.

Carlin was concerned with pointing out how we, as a society, have started using euphemistic language as a way to avoid dealing with tough concepts. This is a corollary — and perhaps more dangerous than the official censorship — to the FCC’s abrogation of speech on TV and radio: self-censorship. In one of his books he noted:

“I mentioned several reasons we seem to employ so much of it [euphemistic language]: the need to avoid unpleasant realities; the need to make things sound more important than they are… but no matter what the purpose, the one thing euphemisms all have in common is that they soften the language. They portray reality as less vivid. And I’ve noticed Americans have a problem with reality; they prefer to avoid the truth and not look it in the eye. I think it’s one of the consequences of being fat and prosperous and too comfortable.”

Of course, the easy political examples are those we’ve been familiar with for a time now: George W. Bush’s “enemy combatants,” the “homicide” bombers, collateral damage. Carlin was adept at pointing these out along with the more common expressions we use between friends and colleagues. Religious, political, and cultural hypocrites were not spared his withering gaze — I once noted how a portion of his audience left during one of his anti-religious diatribes at a concert of his that I attended.

So what, then, is Carlin’s legacy? At the end of another of his famous routines he said that “the planet is fine, the people are fucked.” He was amused with our capacity to, essentially, kill ourselves off as a species. He said that:

“… it amuses me. Because it means the system is beginning to collapse, beginning to break down. I enjoy chaos and disorder. Not just because they help me professionally; they’re also my hobby. I’m an entropy buff.”

We are inundated with food yet prices are rising and people starve; we are awash in oil and prices have never been higher; we are aware of the effects of human-caused global warming and most of us choose to do nothing except complain about the weather; our government openly lies and violates Constitutional rights and all we do is shrug. Carlin’s choice was not to simply laugh at the downward spiral we were all on (by our choice); that is too superficial a reading of his humor. He was deeply concerned by the stupidity and violence we do to each other through laws, morals, and simply not acting.

His legacy, I think, is that our understanding of speech, of words, and our constant questioning of their meaning and use is our only outlet to discovering potential truths, to exposing lies, and perhaps building a world that’s a little nicer to live in, or at least, a little more amusing. It is, perhaps, a call to action, to understand that he was bitterly disappointed in how passive most people are in the face of injustice. In that respect, those of us who are political activists, or even those of us who are just trying to make small changes in our lives, could learn from Carlin to keep thinking and to be the gadfly that won’t let things rest, to tell the truth about the world in which we live.

Carlin, of course, put it best:

“Here’s the Secret News:
All people are afraid.
No one knows what they’re doing.
Everything is getting worse.
Some people deserve to die.
Your money is worthless.
No one is properly dressed.
At least one of your children will disappoint you.
The system is rigged.
Your house will never be completely clean.
All teachers are incompetent.
There are people who really dislike you.
Nothing is as good as it seems.
Things don’t last.
No one is paying attention.
The country is dying.
God doesn’t care.
Shhhhhh.”

Many critics frame Wright’s Black Liberation Theology as reverse racism, Black supremacy, anti-Americanism, class resentment, and hatefulness. These remarks grossly distort the Reverend’s views and, more importantly, ignore the hermeneutical principles of his theology. These hermeneutical principles were clarified by Wright during his PBS interview with Bill Moyers (April 25, 2008), his NAACP presentation in Detroit (April 27, 2008), and his National Press Club presentation (April 28, 2008). Hermeneutics, as the study of interpretation, argues that every human being has a different interpretation of the world. This is not to say that everything is relative and thus meaningless. Instead, our individual standpoints affect our worldviews. Each of us is uniquely positioned — but never determined — by our social, cultural, political, economic, religious, racial, sexual, and even physical standpoints. My positioning in the world affects my interpretation of the world. While I can potentially change my standpoint, I can never forgo a standpoint. I forever stand in relationship to the world. This relationship produces an interpretation that is then shared with, and perhaps explained to and even defended before, other human beings. This interpretive principle is addressed by Reverend Wright when he discusses his religious tradition, the tradition of the Black Church, the Black Liberation Theology tradition, the differences among people’s social positions, and the fact that different people see the world through different lenses.

These hermeneutical principles actually align with the American experience of democratic governance: Because each of us sees the world differently, we are called to critically debate policies, structures, institutions, and ways of life. Democratic discussion is about laying our interpretations on the table and deciding which views are most appropriate for today’s purposes. Reverend Wright laid his interpretation on the table and invited dialogue and even ferocious debate. Most people balked at the challenge and chose, instead, to yell, shout, misrepresent, name call, and smear. These responses are not democratic, dialogical, or even argumentative. These responses are examples of emotionally charged mob think.

Wright’s Black Liberation Theology is an interpretation of the world grounded in his experience of being a Black pastor in America. His interpretation is further fleshed out by decades of research, reading, thinking, debate, discussion, and reflection upon himself and his society. We should also acknowledge that Wright holds two master’s degrees, a doctoral degree, and speaks five different languages. Thus, to say that his interpretation is ignorant is simply foolish. Wright is a smart man who has consciously sought to widen, deepen, and most of all justify his interpretation of both the world and America. Reverend Wright’s interpretation thus deserves honest discussion, debate, and analysis. Yes, Wright has made some controversial and potentially offensive statements. But just about any statement can be deemed controversial or offensive when divorced from the larger context. In this case, that larger context is Wright’s overall worldview. That worldview must be considered when addressing Wright’s statements about the events of 9/11, U.S. power structures, social inequalities, and the possibility of the government’s social engineering of Black communities. Our worldviews inform our reasoning processes and thus precede and exceed our isolated comments. Ignoring this fact allows people to render Wright’s statements unreasonable and dismissible. However, when contextualized within his worldview, his statements are very reasonable and worthy of debate. He’s basically saying that American history is filled with unsavory acts and because of that we must hold accountable our politicians, our government, our media, and most of all ourselves and each other.

The majority of Americans are ignoring all of this, focusing, instead, upon decontextualized sound bites. What began as an inquiry into the Wright-Obama relationship has turned into mass avoidance: People are shying from the possibility that Reverend Wright might actually be raising important points about America. But why this avoidance? Why are we ignoring the possibility that Wright’s comments are worthy of debate?

This avoidance plays out on at least three levels — the mass media, Barack Obama, and the American people. At the first level, the media have pretty much created and undoubtedly exacerbated this situation. There’s no doubt that the media have systematically avoided any true engagement with Wright’s ideas. Perhaps media pundits and guest commentators are simply unfamiliar with hermeneutical principles and the importance of contextualizing comments within an individual’s overall worldview. That’s possible, but it’s hard to believe. As mentioned above, Reverend Wright has already addressed the relationship between Black Liberation Theology and interpretation. The media ignored his explanation, period. And generally speaking, media pundits and commentators are intelligent, well trained, and quite familiar with the complexities of statements and contexts. For instance, Bill O’Reilly of FOX News, Lou Dobbs of CNN, and Chris Matthews of MSNBC, combine for three bachelor’s degrees, three master’s degrees, twelve books, numerous awards, in-depth Whitehouse experience, and decades of journalistic knowledge. There’s little chance that they are incapable of understanding—or are unfamiliar with — the hermeneutical principles addressed in this essay. Instead, they ignore and thus delegitimize Wright’s wider interpretation of America.

At the second level, Barack Obama addressed the nation on April 29th, one day after Wright’s National Press Club presentation. Obama unequivocally denounced Reverend Wright, pointing out that Wright’s comments about U.S. involvement with AIDS, about Minister Louis Farrakhan being one of the great voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and about U.S. wartime efforts being the same as terrorism are ridiculous and saddening. In one sense, Obama had to make such comments. His campaign would effectively end if he did not. But, taking him for his word, Obama may very well be offended by Wright’s views. That’s fine. But even Obama misrepresented Wright’s words and like above, ignored Wright’s overall worldview. A more accurate account would acknowledge and contextualize what Wright actually said. The following three paragraphs attempt to do that.

For example, Wright said that the U.S. government is capable of injecting AIDS into the Black community. That capability is not just about technological know-how, but about motivation and intent. This statement seems ridiculous at first, but it becomes more possible once we acknowledge, for instance, the history of the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” This study was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932-1972. The government basically tracked the health digression of poor black men infected with syphilis, never informing the men of the nature of their disease and even preventing them from getting alternative and perhaps life saving treatment. The government wanted to see what would happen when syphilis when unchecked. Such an “altruistic” intention brought undo suffering upon completely innocent people. This study is a well-documented historical fact that lends a layer of credibility to the idea that the government is capable of injecting AIDS into the Black community. Yes, it’s a crazy idea, but it is possible.

Likewise, Wright said that Louis Farrakhan is one of the great voices because he is influential within the Black community. When Farrakhan speaks, people listen. Farrakhan is thus important and influential regardless if we agree with him or not. Wright never said that he likes Farrakhan or that he agrees with the Minister’s views. Wright did say, though, that “Farrakhan is not my enemy.” This strategically worded statement suggests that Wright and Farrakhan are political associates for the purpose of advancing the Black community. That’s very different than being personal friends.

Lastly, Wright said that we cannot do terrorism onto others and not expect it to come back onto us. Here, Wright is referring to America’s history of foreign policy, which includes the nuclear bombing of Japan, the embittered Vietnam War, the two-sidedness of the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan Administration’s backing of the El Salvadorian government’s atrocities, and our support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. Wright’s references are not equating the U.S. government and the likes of al Qaeda. He’s simply stating a basic truism that others treat you the way you treat them. U.S. foreign policy has been quite brutal in many cases. That brutality is bound to come back on us, and it unfortunately did with the events of 9/11. This in no way blames the 9/11 victims, but rather, acknowledges the possible consequences of America’s past (and present) policies. The C.I.A. even has an official term for this: it’s called blowback.

At the last level of this three-tiered analysis, we get the American people. Generally speaking, average Americans are taking their cues from the two sources above (the media and Obama) and repeating the sound bites: that Reverend Wright is a racist; that he’s stuck in the 1960s; that he’s hateful; and that he has nothing important to say. Such comments are problematic since many people have not even seen the entirety of Wright’s interview with Bill Moyers or his NAACP or National Press Club presentations. But of course many people did, and even these folks concentrate on isolated comments while ignoring the wider context of Wright’s ideas. This suggests that people want to focus on the sensationalized and condemnable sound bites. But why would we want to do this? Because it allows us to delegitimize, dismiss, and basically avoid the implications of Wright’s worldview.

This process of avoidance is somewhat sensible since Wright’s worldview directly challenges commonly held American presumptions. For example, many Americans believe that America has always been and will always be inherently benevolent; that capitalism is an honest competition occurring upon an equal playing field; that race and class are minor speed bumps to an individual’s social mobility; that racism is a personal rather than social, cultural, and historical problem; that U.S. governments occasionally falter but are generally altruistic; and that religion is about personal salvation rather than social and political liberation. These presumptions formulate a worldview common to the average America citizen. Reverend Wright’s presumptions formulate a different worldview. We thus have a clash of interpretations. But this clash is going unacknowledged as if there is only one correct or at least one legitimate interpretation of “America.” Reverend Wright is then easily labeled an out of touch, unpatriotic fanatic. This simply spotlights the problem: America is evading any clash of interpretations.

A truly democratic nation seeking to improve itself would invite debate and discussion between these and other competing worldviews, allowing the best interpretation to shine through. The “best interpretation” would be accurate, well-grounded, justified, explained in detail, capable of withstanding intellectual interrogation, and capable of accounting for as many issues as possible. I believe that Reverend Wright’s interpretation meets these criteria. I say this as a White, male, non-theistic heterosexual who is 33 years younger than Wright. I am not Black, Christian, or from the “older generation.” But I do believe America needs changing and I do believe in true democratic debate. Such issues are absent from the national scene. The criteria for evaluating the “best interpretation” are rarely if ever seen within our nation: not within the corporate media’s profit-seeking infotainment glitz and glam; not within the branding of presidential campaigns; and not within everyday conversations, radio call-ins, heated email exchanges, online arguments, or blog posts. It’s almost as if present day America must ignore these criteria, debates, and hermeneutical principles. Acknowledging let alone applying such principles could threaten the very foundation of American society. If people start questioning their interpretation of America, they may just realize that America is due for some serious change. That realization often creates cognitive dissonance, political confusion, and existential anxiety. It is thus easier to evade meaningful debate and to linger within superficial and misplaced shouting matches. Reverend Wright has become the poster child for (misplaced) anti-Americanism when in fact he should be the center piece of self-reflection, democratic discussion, and critical exchange. Embracing these principles is the unspoken call of any true democracy.