These fucks are from “reverse.theplanet.com” in Houston, Texas.
feel free to CONTACT..the admin, “Peter Pathos” at 214-782-7802.
UPDATE: as of 2:58PM PST the site http://www.reverse.theplanet.com ceased to exist
RESPECT to the new hampshire UNIX wizards!!
By Eric Alterman
Republished from The Nation
Journalists, George Bernard Shaw once said, “are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.”
How odd, given the profession’s un-equaled reputation for narcissism, that Shaw’s observation holds true even when the collapsing “civilization” is their own.
Make no mistake: The Bush Administration and its ideological allies are employing every means available to undermine journalists’ ability to exercise their First Amendment function to hold power accountable. In fact, the Administration recognizes no such constitutional role for the press. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has insisted that the media “don’t represent the public any more than other people do…. I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”
Bush himself, on more than one occasion, has told reporters he does not read their work and prefers to live inside the information bubble blown by his loyal minions. Vice President Cheney feels free to kick the New York Times off his press plane, and John Ashcroft can refuse to speak with any print reporters during his Patriot-Act-a-palooza publicity tour, just to compliant local TV. As an unnamed Bush official told reporter Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality-<>judiciously, as you will-we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” For those who didn’t like it, another Bush adviser explained, “Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read the New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times.”
Middle America’s Trusted News Sources
But the White House and its supporters are doing more than just talking trash—when they talk at all. They are taking aggressive action: preventing journalists from doing their job by withholding routine information; deliberately releasing deceptive information on a regular basis; bribing friendly journalists to report the news in a favorable context; producing their own “news reports” and distributing these free of charge to resource-starved broadcasters; creating and crediting their own political activists as “journalists” working for partisan operations masquerading as news organizations. In addition, an Administration-appointed special prosecutor, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, is now threatening two journalists with jail for refusing to disclose the nature of conversations they had regarding stories they never wrote, opening up a new frontier of potential prosecution. All this has come in the wake of a decades-long effort by the right and its corporate allies to subvert journalists’ ability to report fairly on power and its abuse by attaching the label “liberal bias” to even the most routine forms of information gathering and reportage. Some of these tactics have been used by previous administrations too, but the Bush team and its supporters have invested in and deployed them to a degree that marks a categorical shift from the past.
Many of these lines of attack on the press might at first appear to have little in common. What does an increase in official secrecy have to do with payments to pundits, or the broadcast of official video news releases, or the presence of a right-wing charlatan in the White House press room pretending to be a reporter and serving up softball questions to the President in prime time? And how is any of this connected to the Administration’s willingness to mislead the nation on everything from stem cells to Social Security?
The right wing’s media “decertification” effort, as the journalism scholar and blogger Jay Rosen calls it, has its roots in forty years of conservative fury at the consistent condescension it experienced from the once-liberal elite media and the cosmopolitan establishment for whom its members have spoken. Fueled by this sense of outrage, the right launched a multifaceted effort to fight back with institutions of its own, including think tanks, advocacy organizations, media pressure groups, church groups, big-business lobbies and, eventually, its own television, talk-radio, cable and radio networks (to be augmented, later, by a vast array of Internet sites). Today this triumphant movement has captured not only much of the media and the public discourse on ideas but both the presidency and Congress (and soon, undoubtedly, the Supreme Court as well); it can wage its war on so many fronts simultaneously that it becomes nearly impossible to see that almost all these efforts are aimed at a single goal: the destruction of democratic accountability and the media’s role in insuring it.
The Bush attack on the press has three primary components—Secrecy, Lies and Fake News. Consider these examples:
SECRECY
All Presidents try to keep secrets; it comes with the job description. Following 9/11, the need for secrecy increased significantly. Bush, however, has taken advantage of this new environment to shut down the natural flow of information between the governing and the governed in ways that have little or nothing to do with the terrorist threat. As Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity points out, “The country has seen a historic, regressive shift in public accountability. Open-records laws nationwide have been rolled back more than 300 times—all in the name of national security.” Federation of American Scientists secrecy specialist Steven Aftergood adds, “Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent…. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.”
Some of these efforts may be justified as prudent preparation in the face of genuine threats, but this is hard to credit, given the contempt the Administration has demonstrated for the public’s right to information in non-security-related matters. Upon entering office, Bush attempted to shield his Texas gubernatorial records by shuttling them into his father’s presidential library. That was followed by an executive fiat designed to hide his father’s presidential records, as well as those of the Reagan/Bush Administration, by blocking the scheduled release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and issuing a replacement presidential order that allowed not only Presidents but also their wives and children to keep their records secret. (The records had already been scrubbed for national security implications.)
In the aftermath of 9/11, Administration efforts to prevent accountability accelerated to warp speed. Attorney General Ashcroft reversed a Clinton Administration-issued policy governing FOIA requests that allowed documents to be withheld only when “foreseeable harm” would likely result, to one in which merely a “sound legal basis” could be found. And that was just the beginning. Even when documents were not withheld de jure, Administration officials often withheld them de facto. When People for the American Way sought documents on prisoners’ cases being litigated in secret, the Justice Department required it to pay $373,000 in search fees before officials would even look. “It’s become much, much harder to get responses to FOIA requests, and it’s taking much, much longer,” David Schulz, the attorney who helps the Associated Press with FOIA requests, explained to a reporter. “Agencies seem to view their role as coming up with techniques to keep information secret rather than the other way around. That’s completely contrary to the goal of the act.”
In addition, as Aftergood notes, “an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, websites and official databases.” These sources were once freely available but are now being withdrawn from view under the classification “sensitive but unclassified” or “for official use only.” They include: the Pentagon telephone directory, the Los Alamos technical report library, historical records at the National Archives and the Energy Department intelligence budget, among many others. Even more alarming is the web of secrecy surrounding the operations of what has become the equivalent of a police state at Guantánamo Bay and other military prisons around the world, where the accused are routinely denied due process and traditional rules of evidence are deemed irrelevant. Exactly two members of Congress, both sworn to secrecy, are being briefed by the CIA on these programs. The rest of Congress, the media and the public are given no information to judge the legality, morality or effectiveness of these extralegal machinations, some of which have already resulted in officially sanctioned torture and possibly even murder.
LIES
FAKE NEWS
The Bush Administration has invested untold millions in video “news releases” that disguise themselves as genuine news reports and are frequently broadcast by irresponsible local news programs. In three separate opinions in the past year, the Congressional Government Accountability Office held that government-made news segments may constitute improper “covert propaganda” even if their origin is made clear to television stations. Yet the Administration has rejected these rulings, fortified by a Justice Department opinion that insists that the reports are purely informational. Of course, the Administration’s idea of “purely informational” is sufficiently elastic to stretch all the way from the White House to Ahmad Chalabi’s house. As the New York Times reported, a “jubilant” Iraqi-American chanting “Thank you, Bush. Thank you, USA” is deemed to fall into this category, as is a report of “another success” in the Administration’s “drive to strengthen aviation security” in which the “reporter” called the effort “one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history.” A third segment, broadcast in January, described the Administration’s commitment to opening markets for American farmers. The reports are clearly designed to simulate legitimate news programming. A now-infamous report narrated by PR flack Karen Ryan for the Department of Health and Human Services praising the benefits of the new Medicare bill imitated a real news report by having her sign off as “Karen Ryan, reporting” and by not identifying the story’s source. The Clinton Administration made use of video “news releases” as well, but now the government’s investment in them appears to have nearly doubled, as has its brazenness.
These phony news reports have much in common with stage-managed “public” presidential events that bar all potential dissenters and script virtually every utterance. In March, for instance, three people found themselves kicked out of a Bush Social Security event because of a bumper sticker on their car in the parking lot that read No More Blood for Oil. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said a volunteer asked the three to leave “out of concern they might try to disrupt the event,” but, of course, no evidence of any potential disruption could be found save the “thought crime” of coming to the event with an antiwar bumper sticker on a car. This was not, recall, a Bush/Cheney ‘04 campaign event but a presidential forum to discuss the future of Social Security. (Previously citizens had been kept out of Bush events because of clothing deemed inappropriate or for reasons unexplained, as when most of a group of forty-two, barred from an event in Fargo, North Dakota, later discovered that what they had in common was membership on a Howard Dean meetup.com list.)
In addition to creating its own mediated version of reality, the Administration has also invested considerable resources in corrupting members of the media with cash payments, in what George Miller, ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, has termed a “potentially criminal mismanagement of expensive contracts.” These include hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to right-wing pundits Armstrong Williams ($240,000), Maggie Gallagher ($21,000) and Michael McManus ($10,000), the conservative author of the syndicated column “Ethics & Religion,” who, like Williams, was paid to help promote a marriage initiative. And yet the resulting scandal has benefited the Administration’s war on the press by damaging journalism’s public image and reinforcing the false belief that everyone in the media is somehow “on the take.”
Undoubtedly the Administration’s most bizarre effort to manipulate the media was its embrace of former gay prostitute James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, who showed up at the White House under a phony name and worked for a right-wing shell operation that acted less like a news organization than an arm of the Republican National Committee, publishing articles like “Kerry Could Become First Gay President.” Gannon’s ostensible employer, Talon News Service, employed an editor in chief, Bobby Eberle, who served as a delegate to the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Texas Republican Conventions and to the 2000 Republican National Convention and enjoyed many direct connections to Republican and right-wing organizations. Press secretary McClellan would often call on Gannon when he wanted to extricate himself from a particularly effective line of questioning. The words “Go ahead, Jeff,” signaled that the press corps could be getting into an area that might embarrass the White House—or could be discovering a nugget of genuine news. Gannon’s ploy might have continued indefinitely had the President not helped make him famous by calling on him at a January 26 news conference in order to be served up a softball that mocked Democrats for being “divorced from reality.” Once exposed, Gannon resigned and Talon folded up shop like a rolled-up CIA cover-op. As James Pinkerton, an official in both the Reagan and Bush I White House, admitted on Fox News, getting the kind of clearance Gannon did in this security atmosphere must have required “an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House,” that it had to be “conscious” and that “some investigation should proceed, and they should find that out.” As Frank Rich observed, “Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press.”
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this war against the media has been the fact that members of the media have largely behaved as if it is just business as usual. In fact, much of the success of the effort derives from the cooperation, both implicit and explicit, of the press. No one, after all, forces local TV stations to run official propaganda videos in lieu of their own programming, or without identifying them as such, and no one forces CNN Newsource, among others, to distribute them. And why did the curious mystery of “Gannon,” despite its obvious newsworthiness-<>and sex appeal-receive so little critical coverage and virtually no outrage in the mainstream press? (Washington Post media critic and CNN talking head Howard Kurtz even went so far as to blame the scandal on “these liberal bloggers, [who] have started investigating his personal life in an effort to discredit him,” and the National Press Club invited Gannon to be an honored guest on a panel on blogging and journalistic credibility.) Mike McCurry, White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, says he marvels at the willingness of the press corps to swallow the various humiliations offered them by Bush & Co. He told a recent gathering of Washington reporters and editors, “I used to think that if I ever tried to control the message as effectively as the current White House did, that I would have been run out of the White House press briefing room. But clearly I misjudged the temperament that exists.”
The media’s failure to resist this assault is perhaps understandable. Members of the profession are under siege from so many directions simultaneously they may feel they can hardly keep up with each incoming salvo. Not only is much of the traditional media controlled by multinational corporations that view their operations not as a public trust but as profit centers to be squeezed, but newspapers are facing an alarming decline in readership (and more than a few are admitting to having padded those numbers all along). Broadcast news has been steadily losing audience share for decades. In a vicious cycle, the results of such declines are more declines, as resources are cut to match reduced profits and pressure escalates from above to do more with less. Meanwhile, more and more “news” programs are succumbing to the tabloid temptation, and the lowering of quality has been ac-companied by a proliferation of factual errors, plagiarism and outright fiction proffered as reportage, further undermining public respect for the field. As Philip Meyer recently wrote in The Columbia Journalism Review, there is a sense that journalism itself “is being phased out. Our once noble calling is increasingly difficult to distinguish from things that look like journalism but are primarily advertising, press agentry, or entertainment.” Throw in the nonstop ideological assault from the self-intoxicated section of the (mostly conservative) blogosphere, from (even more conservative) talk-radio and cable loudmouths like Limbaugh and O’Reilly, plus the fact that members of generations X and Y seem more likely to commit acts of terrorism than pick up a newspaper or watch a news broadcast, and it seems almost a luxury to worry about the Bush Administration’s attack as well.
Another reason for the press’s complacency is that many of these tactics are nothing new. Reporters have always engaged in a complex push-me/pull-you relationship with the President, alternately sucking up and pulling down as the political tides rose and fell. More than thirty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in Commentary that “in most essential encounters between the Presidency and the press, the advantage is with the former. The President has a near limitless capacity to ‘make’ news which must be reported…. The President also has considerable capacity to reward friends and punish enemies in the press corps…. Finally, a President who wishes can carry off formidable deceptions.” What’s unprecedented is the degree to which this Administration has employed these efforts to undermine the journalist’s democratic function.
His formidable deceptions notwithstanding, George W. Bush has charmed many in the press personally, and his Administration, in the person of Karl Rove, has impressed them with its political perspicacity. Media insiders believe Bush/Rove to be a tougher political combination than most but have trouble believing they are seeking to effect a fundamental transformation in press-presidential relations. Media insiders appear to like Bush a great deal more than the public does and frequently overestimate his popularity (in fact, in early April, Bush’s approval rating had fallen to the lowest level of any President since World War II at this point in his second term, according to the Gallup organization).
What’s more, for journalists to admit they are being deceived, or even manipulated, contradicts their sense of self-importance as “players” in a perpetual game of good governance. To read ABC News’s “The Note”-<>which has developed into a kind of Pravda for the “Gang of 500” who cover national politics every day-is to enter a world in which the President and his advisers are treated in a manner not unlike the way US Weekly treats “Brad and Jen.” Its affectionate tone speaks, too, to Washington reporters’ coziness with the subjects they’re ostensibly covering, their sources. McCurry notes that unnamed sources are such a problem today in part because reporters are frequently more eager to grant anonymity than officials are to demand it. “I have had probably thousands of conversations with reporters in twenty-five years as a press secretary, and I’d say 80 percent of the time I am offered anonymity and background rather than asking for it. I rarely have to ask for it and don’t ask for it because I prefer to keep on the record as often as I can.”
While individual reporters and even news organizations are undoubtedly vulnerable to White House retaliation if they refuse to play ball-<>former White House officials spoke openly of their desire to punish CBS and Dan Rather-if these organizations were to unite on behalf of their constitutional charge and collective dignity, they would likely find a White House that knows when it’s beaten. Alas, reporters, like Democrats and cats, are maddeningly hard to organize. When some recently tried to map out a collective response to the White House’s secrecy obsession, it got few takers. Knight-Ridder reporter Ron Hutcheson, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, walked out of an anonymous briefing last term to be followed by exactly no one. Len Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, has ruled out the possibility of participation in any such action. “We just don’t believe in unified action,” he explained in a note to former Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser, “and would find a discussion aimed at reaching agreement with others on ‘practicable steps’ or even agreement on when not to agree to various ground rules uncomfortable and unworkable.”
The net result of this one-sided battle is the de jure destruction of the balance that has characterized the American political system since the modern, nonpartisan media began to emerge a century ago. And unless journalists find a way to fight back for the honor, dignity and, ultimately, effectiveness of their profession, the press’s role in American democracy and society will continue to diminish accordingly, to the disadvantage of all our citizens. Bush adviser Karen Hughes has explained, “We don’t see there being any penalty from the voters for ignoring the mainstream press.” And there’s been none to date. Speaking to Salon’s Eric Boehlert, Ron Suskind outlined what he sees as the ultimate aim of the Administration upon which he has reported so effectively. “Republicans have a clear, agreed-upon plan how to diminish the mainstream press,” he warns. “For them, essentially the way to handle the press is the same as how to handle the federal government; you starve the beast. When it’s in a weakened and undernourished condition, then you’re able to effect a variety of subtle partisan and political attacks.”
“Two cheers for democracy,” wrote E.M. Forster, “one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.” But the aim of the Bush offensive against the press is to do just the opposite; to insure, as far as possible, that only one voice is heard and that no criticism is sanctioned. The press may be the battleground, but the target is democracy itself.
first it was NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND..then CLEAR SKIES INITIATIVE..and NOW….
By Sydney H. Schanberg
Republished from Village Voice
The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will,
is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. – Henry David Thoreau, 1848
The press is now looking squarely at a perversion of government.
The administration of George W. Bush has raised secrecy and information control to a level never before seen in Washington.
The falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction that gave the White House the public support to wage war in Iraq…
may be the most vivid example of the perversion, but the practice permeates all corners of the Bush government.
The press has been grappling with how to cope with this extreme control and distortion of news,
some reporters and editors more than others.
One possibility they might consider is civil resistance, as in quiet, nonviolent, respectful rebellion.
Take Ron Hutcheson, the White House correspondent for the Knight-Ridder papers.
He has been fighting the battle, and at times has found himself alone.
When the White House billed a press briefing about a Bush foreign trip last year as on the record and then changed it on the spot to off the record,
a couple of other journalists complained briefly.
Hutcheson kept arguing for a return to the original ground rules or at least an explanation. It was futile.
The anonymous official told him: “This is the way we do it. If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
“I just got pissed off and I walked out,” recalls Hutcheson. None of the others followed him.
What would have happened if the rest of the newspeople at the briefing had also walked out?
Well, not a great deal all at once, but a message would have been sent.
It would have said to the White House:
“We are professionals, and our job, from this country’s founding, is to elicit reliable information for the public,
and you are distorting that flow of information by delivering it off the record, anonymously, thereby making no one accountable for its credibility.”
I would guess the message might at first evoke some cynical laughter inside the White House,
but if other Washington reporters began embracing this and similar dissenting practices, and stand-up journalism became the norm, the laughter could fade.
It could turn into an embarrassment for the Bush stonewallers.
Especially if reporters and editors were able to effectively explain to the American people why the press’s role is still so important to them.
The public often seems to see us as part of the entertainment circus that parts of the “media” business have become and, therefore, not people to be taken seriously.
There are many other ways to confound stonewallers and fabricators.
When government officials distort the truth or tell lies at off-the-record briefings, reporters might contemplate exposing them by name.
Wouldn’t that break the off-the-record ground rules set by the officials and accepted by the reporters?
Yes, it would, but consider the compact that was agreed to. The reporters, for example, might have agreed not to name the officials or their jobs or agencies.
In return, the officials agreed to tell them the truth.
Once an official lies about or distorts events, he has broken the compact,
and as long as the reporter, in his article, can effectively demonstrate the official’s lies or distortions,
then I would argue that all bets are off and the reporter is freed from the ground rules and can describe the briefing in candid detail.
Can reporters get into trouble with their editors or publisher when they stand up to officialdom in these ways?
I would say it’s quite possible, since some editors dislike such tactics or are opposed to adversarial collective action by a press corps against government tactics.
Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, is certainly not known for being timorous about going up against government,
but last month he sent a message declining an invitation to a major Washington press symposium on these matters.
The message read:
“I’m sorry, but we just don’t believe in unified action and would find a discussion aimed at reaching agreement with others on ‘practicable steps’ or even agreement on when not to agree to various ground rules uncomfortable and unworkable. We can’t participate in a discussion of the kind you are proposing.”
I would suggest to the Post editor that it does not have to be “unified” action. But why not simply give your reporters ad hoc options that they might use as individuals in certain situations that are antithetical to the free flow of information?
There’s absolutely nothing new or outrageous about the methods of journalistic civil disobedience.
Those reporters or editors worried about offending officialdom and losing their access should step back and look at history.
Reporters from the time of Thucydides have been poking their noses and their physical selves into places where the powers had forbade them to go.
In my own 45 years as a reporter, I have often gone into areas, both domestic and foreign, that the press was barred from.
It was at times the only way to get the story.
At the same time,
you knew that under local law, you were trespassing and, if caught, could be arrested or deported,
both of which have happened to me and legions of other journalists. You have to be prepared to accept the penalties.
Bush was asked about his administration’s secrecy controls last Thursday in a question period after his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in Washington. In a jokey mood, he at times made light of the issue and drew some laughter. At another point, he contended that all his secrecy policies were made necessary to keep from “jeopardizing the war on terror,” in order not to “put somebody’s life at risk.” This was about as bald a falsehood as any president could tell. The public record shows that much of his information lockdown has to do with politics and with domestic issues that have no relation to terrorism or homeland security. One hopes the editors emerged from this snow job with stronger spines.
One of the reasons the public doesn’t have much empathy for the press’s troubles is that often they see us as people claiming privilege.
Another reason, maybe the primary one, is that we haven’t made our case with the public.
We haven’t gotten across why people need us or why what we do is important to the functioning of a free nation.
We haven’t effectively gotten our readers to understand that if they get lied to by their government or other power centers,
and we, or some other watchdogs, don’t quickly show them the lie, bad things can happen.
People can lose their health insurance or have their homes seized by the bank.
And wars can happen and people can die.
So we have to find better ways to show them why this is true and therefore why aggressive journalism is a necessity.
The “rights” to information that some in the press cite so automatically are not automatic.
They were fought for and won in difficult times.
They will have to be fought for now.
We have to continually earn them.
Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi resigned his position this week..
gotta love the Italians..
they dont take shit..
they invented the Mafia
they shut the WHOLE fuckin country down at the drop of the proverbial hat
and now they’ve pressured the greedy media-mogul turned politician
OUT OF OFFICE!
the “other” media won’t paint quite the picture citizen x will..
BUT the fact remains..
THE ITALIAN PEOPLE ARE AGAINST THE WAR IN IRAQ
THE ITALIAN PEOPLE DO NOT SUPPORT U.S. POLICY
THE ITALIAN PEOPLE BELIEVE THE U.S. TRIED TO KILL AN ITALIAN JOURNALIST IN IRAQ
(covering the seige of Falluja..an event which..in future.. will be seen as America’s Nanking)
THE ITALIAN PEOPLE SAID “ENOUGH!”
enough pandering to criminals in Washington D.C.
and THE CORPORATOCRACY they serve..
BRAVO!..BRAVA!!
note: Berlusconi is NOW busy creating a new coalition with EVEN STRONGER ties to U.S. imperial policy.
The media and local police officials throughout the country have repeated the claims of the Justice Department and the US Marshals Service that the recent FALCON arrests are the greatest number ever in a single operation. In point of fact, the numbers are roughly equivalent to those achieved by one of Gonzales’s predecessors, Alexander Mitchell Palmer, who headed the Justice Department 85 years ago.
The infamous Palmer Raids, named after the then-attorney general, were launched on November 7, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
Further mass arrests were carried out in December and January. In one of them, FBI agents led local police and vigilantes in simultaneous raids in 70 cities, rounding up 4,000 people in a single night.
They smashed down the doors of union halls and offices of communist, socialist and anarchist organizations and dragged people from their beds without warrants or criminal charges. Foreign-born workers bore the brunt of the assault, as the government sought to blame a wave of mass strikes and radical protests on “alien sedition.” Several hundred foreign-born activists and workers were deported without the benefit of a hearing. Many more of those detained were subjected to brutal beatings.
The target of the arrests in Operation Falcon was not political opponents of the government, but rather people who missed court dates, violated parole and, at least in some fraction of the cases, are wanted for criminal acts of violence.
But the way in which these raids—portrayed as serving crime victims and making communities safer—are being used to bolster so-called “anti-terrorist” policies that are a major step toward a police state must serve as a serious warning.
This is an administration that has asserted the right of the US president to declare anyone—citizen and non-citizen alike—an “enemy combatant,” and lock him up indefinitely without charges, without the right to a public hearing or lawyer, and without even an official acknowledgement that the person has been thrown into prison.
Under these conditions, the question is posed:
was Operation Falcon a dry run for a plan to be executed in the face of intensified political crisis or a resurgence of mass opposition to the government?
Was this extraordinary federal, state and local coordination of mass arrests a dress rehearsal for a modern-day version of the Palmer Raids?
citizen x wonders…
Ultra-right wing Attorney general (and Bush Supreme Court nominee) Alberto Gonzales
announced the results of “Operation FALCON” (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally)
“Among the 10,340 people captured between April 4 and April 10 are 162 accused or convicted of murder, 638 wanted for armed robbery, 553 wanted for rape or sexual assault, 154 gang members and 106 unregistered sex offenders.”
what..one wonders..were the OTHER 8700 odd people rounded up for?
immigration violations perhaps?
citizen x asserts..this is a preview..a “coming attraction”..designed to instill fear and trepidation (awe and respect for LAW) in the populace..
a people which, when confronted with increasing economic pressures (and the causes)..ARE EXPECTED to react violently
ATTENTION AMERICANS: you are living under open Facist rule….History will Judge your ambivalence in the face of this oppression.
just as it did the Germans during WWII..the Japanese for Nanking..Pol Pot in Cambodia..
Like mussels we sit in cafés,
one hunts for a business venture
one for another billion
a fourth wife
breasts polished by civilization.
One stalks London for a lofty mansion
one traffics in arms
one seeks revenge in nightclubs
one plots for a throne, a private army,
a princedom.
Ah generation of betrayal,
of surrogate, indecent men,
generation of leftovers, we’ll be swept away-
never mind the slow pace of history-
by children bearing rocks.
–Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998), “Children Bearing Rocks”
Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA-trained Cuban exile implicated in a series of terrorist incidents, applied for political asylum in the United States yesterday, prompting at least one congressman to assert that granting the request would undermine the nation’s credibility in the war on terrorism.
Posada is in hiding after recently slipping into the United States, said Eduardo Soto, the Miami area lawyer handling Posada’s asylum application. Now 77, Posada is a hero among some Cuban exiles for his fervent, four-decade effort to topple and kill Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Trained by the CIA in the use of explosives as part of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, Posada has been linked through the years with the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner that killed 73 people; bombings in Cuban tourist hotels that killed an Italian tourist and injured 11 other people; and a 2000 plot to assassinate Castro in Panama.
“If he is in the United States, he should be arrested and deported under the norms of international law,” said Rep. William D. Delahunt (D-Mass.), who wrote a letter Monday to leaders of the House International Relations Committee calling for an investigation into how Posada entered the country.
“Given the enmity between the Cuban and U.S. governments, it is possible that U.S. officials may have turned a blind eye to Posada’s entrance into our country — or even worse, facilitated it,” Delahunt wrote. “If that were true — and even if it were not and Posada is allowed to remain here — it would obliterate America’s credibility in the war on terrorism, because it would suggest that we share the views of those who support al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.’ ”
Posada’s defenders deny that he is a terrorist. They point out that Venezuelan courts twice acquitted Posada before he escaped from prison while awaiting a third trial there in the bombing of the Cuban airliner. Outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned Posada last year, after he served time in connection with the plot against Castro.
“Mr. Posada has never been convicted of any terrorist act,” said Santiago Alvarez, a Miami developer who is a close friend of Posada, whom he calls a hero. “He’s been a fighter against Castro all his life. He advocates violence, but that does not mean violence and terrorism are the same thing.”
In the asylum request, Soto said that Posada cites his longtime opposition to Castro, saying he would be in danger if he were not granted protection by the United States. Soto said Posada is also seeking permanent residency in the United States under the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cuban refugees to apply for the status after remaining in the United States one year.
Bill Strassberger, spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said asylum applications are reviewed for about a month, a process that includes a background check. Afterward, the applicant is called in for an interview with an immigration official who could grant asylum or refer the case for a hearing before an immigration judge.
The agency “is not going to provide safe haven to terrorists or killers,” Strassberger said. But even if an applicant were denied asylum, he said, the United States would not turn the person over to a country where he is likely to face persecution and would arrange transfer to another country.
Posada has been viewed as an oft-sinister figure in the nearly half-century he has been exiled from Cuba. Alvarez said he served in the U.S. Army in the mid-1960s. A few years later, Posada worked with the Venezuelan secret police, tracking down leftist guerrillas. In 1976, he was arrested in Caracas for the bombing of the Cuban airliner. Although he was tried in absentia, he is still wanted by Venezuelan authorities in connection with his escape.
Later, Posada went to Central America where he oversaw supply operations for contra guerrillas fighting the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In 1990, he was shot and seriously wounded in Guatemala City by gunmen who were widely suspected to be Cuban agents. Afterward, he was implicated in the Cuban hotel bombings and the plot to kill Castro in Panama.
Delahunt, co-chairman of a bipartisan congressional working group that aims to repair the long-frayed relationship between the Cuban and U.S. governments, said that given Posada’s past, he should be sought for arrest, rather than considered for legal protection.
“I can’t imagine how one could defend a terrorist where there exists overwhelming evidence that he was responsible or a co-conspirator in blowing up a civilian airliner. To me that is just inconceivable,” Delahunt said. “If this individual is indeed in the United States, I think we have to determine how he arrived here and under what circumstances.”
citizen x wonders…is there a difference between “violence” and “terrorism”?
research assignment: who was the co-conspirator in the airline bombing case (along with Posada)
pardoned by George H.W. Bush and now living in Miami?
by Mike Whitney
republished from: COUNTERPUNCH
“If the world’s central bankers accumulate fewer dollars,
the result would be an unrelenting American need to borrow in the face of an ever weaker dollar
- a recipe for higher interest rates and higher prices.
The economic repercussions could unfold gradually, resulting in a long, slow decline in living standards.
Or there could be a quick unraveling, with the hallmarks of an uncontrolled fiscal crisis.”
New York Times editorial 4-2-05
It seems that there are a growing number of people who believe as I do, that the economic tsunami planned by the Bush administration is probably only months away.
In just 5 short years the national debt has increased by nearly 3 trillion dollars while the dollar has continued its predictable decline.
The dollar has fallen a whopping 38% since Bush took office, due largely to the massive $450 billion per year tax cuts.
At the same time, numerous laws have been passed (Patriot Act, Intelligence Reform Bill, Homeland Security Bill, National ID, Passport requirements etc)
anticipating the need for greater repression when the economy takes its inevitable nosedive.
Regrettably, that nosedive looks to be coming sooner rather than later.
The administration is currently putting as much pressure as possible on OPEC
to ratchet up the flow of oil another 1 million barrels per day (well over capacity)
to settle down nervous markets and buy time for the planned bombing of Iran in June.
Like Fed Chief Alan Greenspan’s artificially low interest rates, the manipulation of oil production is a way
of concealing how dire the situation really is.
Rising prices at the pump signal an upcoming recession, (depression?)
so the administration is pulling out all the stops to meet the short term demand and maintain the illusion that things are still okay.
(Bush would rather avoid massive popular unrest until his battle-plans for Iran are carried out)
But, of course, things are not okay.
The country has been intentionally plundered and will eventually wind up in the hands of its creditors as Bush and his lieutenants planned from the very beginning.
Those who don’t believe this should note the methodical way that the deficits have been produced at (around) $450 billion per year;
a systematic and orderly siphoning off of the nation’s future.
The value of the dollar and the increasing national debt follow exactly the same (deliberate) downward trajectory.
This same Ponzi scheme has been carried out repeatedly by the IMF and World Bank throughout the world;
Argentina being the last dramatic illustration. (Argentina’s economic collapse occurred when its trade deficit was running at 4%; right now ours is at an unprecedented 6%.)
Bankruptcy is a fairly straight forward way of delivering valuable public assets and resources to collaborative industries, and of annihilating national sovereignty. After a nation is successfully driven to destitution, public policy decisions are made by creditors and not by representatives of the people. (Enter, Paul Wolfowitz)
Did Americans really believe they could avoid a similar fate?
If so, they’d better forget about it, because the hammer is about to come down big-time, and the collateral damage will be huge.
The Bush administration is mainly comprised of internationalists. That doesn’t mean that they “hate America”;
simply that they are committed to bringing America into line with the “new world order”
and an economic regime that has been approved by corporate and financial elites alike.
Their patriotism extends no further than the garish tri-colored flag on their lapel.
The catastrophe that middle class Americans face is what these elites breezily refer to as “shock therapy”;
a sudden jolt, followed by fundamental changes to the system.
In the near future we can expect tax reform, fiscal discipline, deregulation, free capital flows, lowered tariffs, reduced public services, and privatization.
In other words, a society entirely designed to service the needs of corporations.
There are a number of signs that the economy is close to meltdown-stage.
Even with cheap energy, low interest rates and $450 billion in borrowed revenue pumped into the system each year, the economy is still barely treading water.
This has a lot to due with the colossal shifting of wealth brought on by the tax cuts.
Supply-side, trickle-down theories have been widely discredited and Bush’s tax cuts have done nothing to stimulate the economy as promised.
Now, with oil tilting towards $60 per barrel, the economic landscape is changing quickly, and shock-waves are already being felt throughout the country.
The Iraq war has contributed considerably to our current dilemma.
The conflict has taken nearly one million barrels of Iraqi oil per day off line.(The exact amount that the administration is trying to replace by pressuring OPEC)
In other words, the astronomical prices at the pump are the direct result of Bush’s war.
The media has failed to report on the negative affects the war has had on oil production,
just as they have obscured the incredibly successful insurgent strategy of destroying pipelines.
This isn’t a storyline that plays well to the American public, who expected that Iraq would be paying for its own reconstruction by now.
Instead, the resistance is striking back at the empire’s Achilles heel..
(America’s need for massive amounts of cheap oil) and its having a damaging affect on the US economy.
Just as the economy cannot float along with sharp increases in oil prices, so too, Bush’s profligate deficits threaten the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.
This is much more serious than a simple decline in the value of the dollar.
If the major oil producers convert from the dollar to the euro, the American economy will sink almost overnight.
If oil is traded in euros then central banks around the world would be compelled to follow and America will be required to pay off its enormous $8 trillion debt. That, of course, would be doomsday for the American economy. But, a recent report indicates that two-thirds of the world’s 65 central banks have already “begun to move from dollars to euros.”
The Bush plan to savage the dollar has been telegraphed around the world and, as the New York Times says, “the greenback has nowhere to go but down”.
There’s only one thing that the administration can do to ensure that energy dealers keep trading in dollars…control the flow of oil.
That means that an attack on Iran is nearly a certainty.
The difficulties facing both the dollar and the economy are not insurmountable.
The world has been more than willing to compensate for America’s wasteful spending as long as America shows itself to be a responsible steward of the global economy.
However, the administration’s military and economic recklessness suggests that some of the key players on the world stage
(particularly Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Germany, France, China, Brazil) are collaborating on an alternate plan;
a contingency plan. If Iran is bombed in an unprovoked act of aggression, we will certainly see this plan activated.
The most likely scenario would be a quick switch to the euro that would have grave implications for the American economy.
(Russia has already indicated that it will do this)
For Iran, an attack would justify arming disparate terrorist organizations with the weaponry they need to attack American and Israeli interests wherever they may be.
In any event, an unprovoked attack will dispel the remaining illusions about Bush’s war against terror and confirm to everyone that we are engaged in a new world war;
a conflict for global domination.
The neoliberal chickens have come home to roost.
America has become the latest staging ground for the eccentric economic policies of the Washington Consensus.
The towering national debt coupled with the staggering trade deficits have put the nation on a precipice
and a seismic shift in the fortunes of middle-class Americans is looking more likely all the time.
The New York Times summarized the country’s prospects like this:
“The economic repercussions could unfold gradually, resulting in a long, slow decline in living standards. Or there could be a quick unraveling, with the hallmarks of an uncontrolled fiscal crisis.”
“An uncontrolled fiscal crisis”… America’s future under George Bush. We are facing years of collective struggle ahead. If there’s a quick fix, I have no idea what it might be.
citizen x has a suggestion: POPULAR UPRISING..smirk and chuckle if you please..we’ll see ya on the breadline..sucker!
With Pope John Paul II having departed at long last to meet his maker, the question of his legacy is not hard to answer: it is disastrous and bloody.
Having been enthroned relatively young, Karol Wojtyla had 27 years to spout the most evil bile from the world’s post powerful bully pulpit.
“People who renounce desires often turn, suddenly, into hypocrites!” said the immortal Jelaluddin Rumi. And while this Pope never found himself in a position of obvious hypocrisy, like so many odious conservatives in this country that preach one thing in public and do another in private, the list of which is very long, this Pope has been very diligent in cultivating a friendly image for himself full of goodwill toward all people and religions. It’s only upon close examination that the goodwill turns into hypocrisy and evil reeking to high heavens.
Take for instance his much ballyhooed opposition to the culture of death. You’d think that capital punishment would be high on the list, yet his cardinals in the United States have hardly been active campaigning against it. Unlike abortion, where some have refused to give Communion to politicians that support a woman’s right to control her own body. None of those Catholic clergymen refused to give Communion to politicians that support the death penalty or a Middle East war that the Pope allegedly opposed.(see end note)
Does this make sense? Well, actually it does.
While the Pope liked to wax lyrical about such lofty issues as social justice, the sanctity of life, and world peace, he did very little to advance such causes in practice. He could have single-handedly stopped the bombing of Iraq by taking up residence in Baghdad but he didn’t. And when Archbishop Romero went to Rome to plead for help in his fight against the excesses of the murderous right-wing regime in El Salvador, the Pope gave him a cold shoulder. Preach social justice, but only in the abstract; that was his motto. God forbid some of those murderous right-wing regimes get overthrown, they’ve been so good to the church.
And so have the US neocons and religious fanatics that are as reactionary as the Pope himself and crusade against the same “evils:” namely the sexual revolution, abortion, science, feminism, gay rights, godless communism, and such. That’s why the Catholic Church in the United States came out in support of Bush for president in 2004, despite the fact that he had killed 155 death row inmates and more then 100,000 Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians, and against John Kerry (who’s a Catholic, ironically). So much for the vaunted sanctity of life. Birds of a feather flock together, in this case hypocrites extraordinaire who preach life but kill people en masse.
And kill people en masse, both Bush and Pope John Paul II did.
It’s perhaps in developing countries that the deeds of Pope John Paul II are most nefarious and where his vile legacy will be most disastrously felt, not in Europe or North America. Few people at the end of the twentieth century, the Taliban included, have done more to harm the cause of women worldwide than this Pope. From his opposition to women priests (read: women are second class beings) to his traditional view of the family (read: “go back to the kitchen, you uppity witches”) to his opposition to contraception, millions of women suffer. Europeans have learned to respect the Pope for his stance on social issues (however hypocritical) and ignore his reactionary preaching on matters they consider private. For instance in Italy, home of the Pope, abortion is legal and nobody’s firebombing clinics or shooting doctors. And the use of contraceptive measures is widespread.
But as Marx (snigger) teaches us, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature.” And it is in developing countries that the Catholic Church is the most powerful and where the Pope’s reactionary doctrine on contraception has been most devastating. It is safe to say that millions of people have been infected with the AIDS virus because the Pope would rather see people die than use a condom, that sinful enabler of promiscuous sex. Like people are going to quit having sex just because the church has made sure that no condoms are available.
And since people infected with AIDS invariably die in Africa where access to anti-retroviral drugs is prohibitively expensive, those deaths are the direct results of the Pope’s reactionary preaching. Oh sure, he’s come out against the excesses of capitalism (which are responsible for high drug prices in the developing world, among other things), but he has done little to combat those excesses. Unlike the excesses of communism against which he has crusaded personally all his adult life.
Then there’s the issue of gay rights. Love the sinner but hate the sin? Well, Pope John Paul II certainly hated the sin. But he didn’t display much love for the sinner, either. For him gay people, when fighting for their most basic human rights, are promoting a “new ideology of evil.” Homosexuality is still a crime in more than 70 countries thanks to the efforts of religious fanatics, chief among them Pope John Paul II. And when gay people get killed, as it happens every day all over the world, it’s thanks to the flames of hatred and homophobia that the Pope helped fan personally.
But when closeted gay men put on a frock and go molesting young boys by the tens of thousands, that’s an internal affair of the Church, best kept secret, and certainly not a crime under the law. The current church sex scandal is the result of legal lawsuits and not any action on the part of the Catholic Church to purge its ranks from pedophiles, despite the Pope’s platitude on the subject. Hypocrisy as always. We are still to discover the full extent of this criminal abuse of children in countries where the victims do not have recourse to courts, i.e. in the developing world where the Catholic Church is most powerful and where nobody dares report or investigate their crimes.
It is customary not to speak evil of deceased people. So the obituaries will laud this pope as a compassionate clergyman who fought communism in his native Poland and inspired millions of faithfuls around the world. Inspire he did, that much is true. But the people he inspired the most are the reactionary religious zealots that would like nothing better than to turn the clock back to the 16th century.
So unless you happen to believe that God created the Earth 6000 years ago and it’s flat with the sun orbiting around it, the passing of this pope is very good news indeed. After all, Friedrich Nietzsche said it best, “I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.” Pope John Paul II has elevated that intrinsic depravity to new heights.
(guilt) NOTE: the Pope did, however, make the amazing statement (probably attributable to Alzheimer’s)
that due to its”omni-lethality” modern warfare as currently practiced was IMMORAL and UNETHICAL
a sentiment which citizenx guaranteees will be nullified by the NEW pope..
disappearing story=developing story
18 US soldiers killed in attack on Abu Ghairaib..
44 wounded
get your facts straight
YOU heard it HERE
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