Left I on the News

AP Syrian coverage gets even worse

2012-02-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

Almost unbelievable (but all too believable). AP not only reports the absurd claim that it was the Syrian government that employed suicide bombers to kill its own security forces, but reports it above and more prominently than the Syrian government claim that it was the rebels who were responsible. They then continue to report on the assault on Homs, where the only hint that there is an actual two-sided battle going on (and not just a "government assault") is the claim that the population there is "restive." Yes, "restive" and well-armed.

The big lie on Iran, yet again

2012-02-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

President Obama yesterday:

President Barack Obama said the U.S. has a "very good estimate" of when Iran could complete work on a nuclear weapon.

Technically speaking, there is a "c" there - "could" and not "would." But even with that caveat, the rest of the sentence - "complete work on a nuclear weapon" - conveys a very clear (and completely false) message to the American people - Iran is working on a nuclear weapon, the only question is when will they be finished. After all, you wouldn't talk about "completing" something that you not only haven't started, but aren't even planning on doing.

The big lie on Iran continues

2012-02-03T17:44:00.000-08:00

I just listened to Richard Engle on NBC News say that "Iran continues to insist that a decision to make a nuclear bomb has not been taken." But that is a grotesque lie. In actual fact, Iran has repeatedly said that it has made a decision - a decision not to build nuclear weapons. That decision came from both the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, in the form of a fatwa, as well as multiple times from the country's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (here, here, and here). As far as I know, none of these very clear, unambiguous statements have ever been reported by Richard Engle or any other reporter for the Western corporate media.

"200" dead in Syria - but who were they?

2012-02-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

Today's news from Syria "informs" (or misinforms, depending on what the actual facts are) us that 200 "people" were killed in the Syrian city of Homs by a government assault using tanks and machine guns. I've written before about the "source" of this "information," which is basically an organization based in London. But let's assume for the moment that this information is completely true and ask a few more questions:

1) Who were these people? If you've been watching the same news as I have for the past few days, you've seen pictures of the rebels armed with all sorts of weapons including RPGs. Were these 200 people armed rebels, or "unarmed innocent civilians"? The article wants us to believe the latter, since there is no hint whatsoever in the article that an armed rebellion in progress. Every reference in the article is simply to "people" who were killed. Far more likely, however, is that is was mostly, or perhaps exclusively, armed rebels who were killed. Now I am completely in support of the right to armed rebellion. However, people who take up arms can expect to be met with force, and whatever reason there is to condemn the government against which they are taking up arms, the fact that that government responded with force can hardly be a reason for additional condemnation.

2)Were there any government forces killed? If a battle of this magnitude took place, chances are high that they did. However, since AP's only source for this story is the anti-government opposition, and since that opposition has every reason to portray the deaths as a one-sided affair, it's not surprising that no such deaths are reported. The opposition does periodically make claims (backed up by the Syrian government) that government forces were killed, although in almost all cases when that happens, it is a separate event, not connected with the deaths of opposition forces. Again, this is a consequence of the source. On the one hand, the opposition wants to make itself look successful, so as to inspire more support from the Syrian people. Hence the stories about killed government troops. On the other hand, they want to make the government look as barbaric as possible, hence the absence of any mention of the deaths of government troops on the days when they want to emphasize their own losses.

3) Did AP make any effort to obtain any sort of comment whatsoever, even a "no comment," from the Syrian government? We know from vast experience that if it were the U.S. government being accused of killing people, AP (or any other corporate media outlet) wouldn't consider running the story until and unless they could obtain some comment from the U.S. government, no matter how unbelievable ("the incident is being investigated," "all the dead were terrorists," etc.).

As with Iran, the drumbeat for war continues, with politicians and the media working hand and hand to prepare the American public.

Syria is a laughing matter

2012-01-31T17:46:00.000-08:00

OK, it really isn't, it's deadly serious. But these two items in the news today quite literally made me laugh out loud:

Item: Hillary Clinton at the U.N.

"Now, I know that some members here may be concerned that the Security Council could be headed toward another Libya. That is a false analogy. Syria is a unique situation that requires its own approach, tailored to the specific circumstances occurring there."

Right. There are now far more alleged dead in Syria (almost none of them actually documented, but all of them implied in the press to be the result of Syrian government assaults on unarmed civilians) than there were in Libya, where there was the claim of an impending slaughter, yet we're to believe that military intervention is the farthest thing from the mind of the U.S. government, and that "regime change" doesn't enter into it.

Item:

"The United Nations, which has said more than 5,400 people have been killed, said last week it could no longer reliably document the death toll."

No longer? As noted above, the U.N. has never had any reliable documentation of deaths occurring in Syria. Their sole source of "information," by which we mean allegations, comes from an anti-Syrian government organization based in London. But now for some reason they can "no longer reliably document" the deaths. What a joke.

Liberals and libertarians on Iran

2012-01-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

Last night on Bill Maher's TV show, the discussion turned to Iran and the recent assassination of an Iranian scientist. David Frum, Republican conservative and on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, waxed eloquent in justifying the murder, quoting the "Psalmist" (from Psalm 7): "Those who prepare violence will discover that violence will fall upon their own head." He asserted that "these people were making bombs, they were engaged in work that is intended to kill millions."

And the response from the liberals and libertarians on the panel? Bill Maher (the libertarian) said "I agree with you" (presumably both on justifying the murder, and on the totally unsupported claims about making bombs and intending to kill millions). Rob Reiner, noted Hollywood liberal, only objected that it might result in retaliation. Congressman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, another noted liberal, chair of the Democratic National Committee, and, like Reiner, also Jewish, said nothing, acquiescing by silence.

Murder of an innocent man? No problem for liberals and libertarians.

The face of terrorism...victims

2012-01-12T07:32:00.000-08:00

This is Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the latest victim of Israeli/U.S. terrorism. Like all the others, a real person with a real family. Compare the (lack of) outrage over the very real killing of this very real man, vs. the days of hyped outrage against the almost certainly bogus plot by an Iranian-American (with the even more certainly bogus participation of the Iranian government) in the allegedly planned assassination of the Saudi Ambassador.

More demonization of Syria

2012-01-11T15:16:00.001-08:00

A French journalist and 7 other people are killed while on a *government-sponsored tour* of Homs, and once again the U.S. corporate media is happy to spin the absurd claims by the Syrian opposition that the government killed the journalist and its own people just to make the opposition look bad. Huffington Post's story doesn't even bother to mention that the journalist was on a government-sponsored tour at the time, a rather relevant fact.

Demonizing Syria, no matter how laughable

2012-01-06T08:07:00.000-08:00

The absurd lengths that the U.S. corporate media will go to to demonize Syria stagger the imagination. Just before Christmas, and again yesterday, bombings in Syria have killed dozens of people; 44 in December and probably 25 yesterday. And in both cases, corporate media have dutifully reported "opposition claims" that the government itself was responsible for the bombings, in order to make the opposition look like terrorists rather than a "peaceful opposition."

Why is this absurd? Well, to begin with, we know that the opposition is not simply a nonviolent movement (although certainly some of it is). Hundreds or perhaps thousands of members of Syrian security forces are acknowledged, even by the Western media, to have been killed in attacks, and the opposition itself even announced a "cease-fire" in advance of the arrival of the Arab League monitors.

But the real reason this contention is laughable on its face, and why such absurd charges do not deserve to be repeated, much less featured as an equally plausible explanation by the media, is that the target in both cases has been the Syrian security forces themselves - the intelligence services in December, and a police bus yesterday. If, hypothetically, the Syrian government wanted to set off a bomb to "prove" that they were facing terrorists, they could choose all sorts of targets to do so. Choosing themselves, and not just any part of the government, but the very part of the government accused of doing the repressing? The idea is simply laughable. But not so for the Western corporate media, always ready to do its part in demonizing the latest target of imperialism and helping to beat the drums of war.

Update: CNN's coverage seems particularly despicable in the extent of coverage it gives to the ludicrous opposition claims, although I admit I haven't surveyed all the news sources, so they may well be some that are even worse.

Death in Iraq

2012-01-05T19:51:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, Iraq Body Count released a report documenting the deaths of 162,000 people, almost 80% of them civilians, in Iraq from the beginning of the U.S. assault on Iraq until the U.S. "withdrawal," that is, the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops. The problem with this report is that it might give the impression that that is now a static total, the number of Iraqis dead as a result of the invasion.

But death in Iraq has not taken a holiday since U.S. combat troops left. Today, 71 Iraqis were killed in a bombing, adding to the dozens if not hundreds that have been killed since U.S. combat troops left. And here's the thing - these deaths, and the ones which will follow in the days, weeks, months, and years to come, just as much as the 162,000 (or whatever the right number is) that occurred while U.S. combat troops were in the country, are completely the responsibility of the United States government. Not only not one of those 162,000 Iraqis, but not one of today's 71, or those who have been killed in recent days and weeks, were effectively murdered by the U.S. Who set a bomb, who pulled the trigger, is irrelevant. Every one of those people would be alive today were it not for the U.S. invasion.

Of course, this is not the only Iraqi blood on U.S. hands. There are the estimated one million Iraqis, largely women and children, who died as a result of a decade of U.S. sanctions, not to mention the much smaller number who were killed by U.S. bombing in the course of enforcing its self-imposed "no-fly zone." There are another 125,000 Iraqi soldiers killed by the U.S. during its 1991 invasion.

Today on the news, a Syrian defector was talking about the "genocide" taking place in Syria, where an alleged (but hardly proven) 5000 deaths (of both opposition forces and government troops) have taken place. I have yet to hear on the news anyone applying the word "genocide" to the 1.3 million Iraqis who have met their fate at the hands of the U.S. government.

NDAA Hypocrisy

2012-01-04T10:20:00.000-08:00

Paraphrasing Stephen Colbert: "Obama? Big hypocrite, or the biggest hypocrite?"

"I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation."

Unlike killing American citizens without trial, which is a vital part of those "traditions and values."

The "peaceful" opposition in Syria

2011-12-31T08:00:00.001-08:00

What is wrong with this sentence?

In a further attempt to appeal to the monitors, dissident troops who have broken away from the Syrian army said they have halted attacks on regime forces to reinforce the activists' contention that the uprising against Assad is a peaceful movement.

Um, wouldn't that announcement refute the contention that theirs is a "peaceful" movement? Rebut it? Put the lie to it? "Reinforce" it? I think not.

Also in the article, we're told that 500,000 people demonstrated against the government. How do we know it was 500,000? It's "according to an activist and eyewitness who asked to be identified only as Manhal because he feared government reprisal." Gee, don't you wish you could call AP anonymously with estimates of the demonstrations you take part in and have them print your estimates?

How "facts" are manufactured

2011-12-23T08:41:00.000-08:00

Two days ago, I wrote about an alleged massacre in Syria. As noted then, the proof behind these allegations was thin indeed, and it was at least clear to a discerning reader that these were claims, not necessarily facts.

By today, however, such distinctions are gone, as the same AP writes simply:

Bashar Assad's regime would appear to be setting itself on a collision course: It let in outside observers for the first time Thursday to monitor his commitment to halting the crackdown on dissent, even as his security forces unleashed a fiercer onslaught this week, killing more than 200 in two days.

No ifs, ands, or buts, no claims, simply "facts," as pushed into the Western consciousness by the always-cooperative media, ready to promote the next "humanitarian" intervention.

America's "Human Rights" record

2011-12-23T07:01:00.001-08:00

In 1982, Elliot Abrams was in charge of "Human Rights" at the U.S. State Department. Also in 1982, a military junta in Argentina was in the process of killing tens of thousands of its opponents, and taking hundreds of children away from the families of those opponents and giving them to military families.

Now a secret memo (remarkably, revealed through a FOIA request rather than by Wikileaks) has revealed that the U.S. government (in the person of Elliot Abrams and undoubtedly many more) knew precisely what was going on in Argentina, and condoned it (by certifying that the junta's human rights record was "improving"). Of course this also means that for nearly 40 years the U.S. government has been lying (by omission) about this fact as well.

Yet another fact to remember the next time you hear the U.S. government preaching "human rights" to the world (like Hillary Clinton, whose husband was responsible for signing the "Defense of Marriage" [sic] Act and putting "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" into practice, lecturing the world on gay rights the other day).

Massacre in Syria?

2011-12-21T11:28:00.000-08:00

The Huffington Post currently has a huge red headline splashed across its front page, reading "HORROR: SYRIAN TROOPS SLAUGHTER 100," together with a picture showing...five armed people walking down a street (a picture taken in an unknown place, on an unknown day, proving absolutely nothing about any massacre). Did this happen? It is of course possible, but believing it based on the evidence in the article (which I believe is an AP article, although it's not labeled as such) certainly requires a lot of faith.

There are three "sources" in the article. The only "primary" source is "one villager who is an anti-government activist [who spoke to] The Associated Press by telephone." In other words, this person could have been anyone, calling from anywhere. The other two "sources" are the "head of the British-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" (that is, some one with no personal knowledge of the events, but who is claimed to have "corroborated the account of the witness," even though his source of the information is completely unknown and may well have been the same person, which would negate any "corroboration") and "The Local Coordination Committees, another activist group," whose source of information is also completely unspecified.

What is noteworthy, compared to protests after the elections in Iran from which pictures and videos and tweets were being uploaded continuously, is the singular lack of any such hard evidence from Syria. Are we to believe that none of the people in the villages where massacres are allegedly occurring have cell phones and the ability to send pictures or video out to the world? Clearly that isn't the case, as the picture noted above proves. The "witness" tells AP that 56 villagers were buried, something that would be a rather observable event, yet no actual evidence is presented.

You'll search in vain to find any such skepticism in the Western media, however, aside from standard boilerplate about "can't be independently confirmed" placed as far down in the article as possible.

Saving lives, spending money

2011-12-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

Just under 3000 Americans (and others) died on 9/11/2001. Even if that event were to be duplicated every decade, which seems unlikely, that's an average of 300 Americans a year dying from terrorist attacks. Allegedly to combat that threat (but in reality for other reasons), the U.S. has spent a trillion dollars (and will spend much more, likely three or more trillion, by the time we're done paying).

45,000 Amerians die every year because of the lack of health insurance. That's 150 times as many people as the "annual death toll" from 9/11. If the government bought each one of those people a $5,000 health insurance policy, the total cost would be $225 million. Which is less than the U.S. is spending fighting a war against the people of Afghanistan every single day ($334 million).

The Haditha massacre, (almost) up in flames

2011-12-14T17:07:00.001-08:00

A telling article from the New York Times about the massacre of 20 Iraqis at Haditha:

The 400 pages of interrogations, once closely guarded as secrets of war, were supposed to have been destroyed as the last American troops prepare to leave Iraq. Instead, they were discovered along with reams of other classified documents, including military maps showing helicopter routes and radar capabilities, by a reporter for The New York Times at a junkyard outside Baghdad. An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.
...
Told about the documents that had been found, Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the United States military in Iraq, said that many of the documents remain classified and should have been destroyed.

"Classified" not because it was such "top secret" information, but because of what they have to say about the U.S. role in Iraq.

This event did stand out, although the fact that not a single soldier has been punished makes it not stand out, but fit right in with everything else that happened in Iraq. And here's the truth:

Marines came to view 20 dead civilians as not "remarkable," but as routine.

Iraqi civilians were being killed all the time. Maj. Gen. Steve Johnson, the commander of American forces in Anbar Province, in his own testimony, described it as "a cost of doing business."

"Doing business", that is, for imperialism.

Who qualifies as a "person" exactly?

2011-12-13T11:19:00.001-08:00

Not Syrian soldiers, according to the U.N. Human Rights Chief:

More than 5,000 people have been killed in nine months of unrest in Syria, the U.N. human rights chief said...Navi Pillay reported the death toll to the U.N. Security Council as 1,000 higher than the previous toll just 10 days ago. It includes civilians, army defectors and those executed for refusing to shoot civilians, but not soldiers or security personnel killed by opposition forces, she said.

Those poor unfortunate "things" killed by opposition forces amount to "1,100 members of the army, police and security services" according to the Syrian government. Just a minor issue, apparently, not worth mentioning.

By the way, the number 5,000 comes from "the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights," based presumably on claims made in phone calls or emails from people in the opposition inside Syria. There isn't even a pretense that this data comes from hospitals, morgues, or cemeteries. The credibility of this number is an order of magnitude lower than any that were coming out of Iraq in the early days, that were routinely poo-poo'ed or ignored by the corporate media and U.S. government. This number, in contrast, is simply reported as fact, without the slightest questioning as to its accuracy.

Update: Listening to TV news, the story is broadcast as "The United Nations now estimates that 5000 people have been killed in Syria..." Aside from the confusion about who qualifies as a "person," this is complete nonsense. The "United Nations" hasn't estimated anything, and, as far as I can tell, has no independent information whatsoever on the subject.

Today's edition of: Capitalism Kills

2011-12-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

All in today's paper:

Item:

"Shortages have dramatically worsened for normally cheap generic injected medicines that are the lifeblood of hospitals: drugs for cancer, pain, infections, even liquid nutrition and anesthesia for surgery...at least patient 15 deaths since mid-2010 have been blamed on the shortages...As of Nov. 30, there had been 251 different new drug shortages this year. Multiple causes have been cited, including manufacturing deficiencies leading to production shutdowns, companies ending production of some drugs with tiny profit margins, consolidation in the generic drug industry and limited supplies of some ingredients."

Item:

A Texas woman who for months was unable to qualify for food stamps pulled a gun in a state welfare office and staged a seven-hour standoff with police that ended with her shooting her two children before killing herself.

Item:

In the biggest settlement ever reached in a U.S. mining disaster, the new owners of the West Virginia coal mine where 29 men were killed in an explosion agreed Tuesday to pay $210 million over a tragedy the government blamed on the ruthless pursuit of profits ahead of safety.

Not in today's paper (or yesterday's or tomorrow's) - the estimated 50-100 people who died yesterday (and every day) because they lacked health insurance.

Who is dying in Syria?

2011-12-01T04:15:00.000-08:00

Multiple headlines today proclaim: "19 killed in Syria." No doubt that's all that will stick in people's minds, as they reinforce the lesson that is being drummed into them — the Syrian government is slaughtering its citizens. But if you read closer, you find the truth is more complicated:

Seven soldiers and 12 civilians, among them a woman and child, were killed in the fresh violence that engulfed areas in the provinces of Daal and Idlib. 'Two security force vehicles were blown up. Seven (troops) were killed.'

And who were those 12 "civilians"? Well, they might have been "innocent civilians," killed by Syrian government troops in a wanton slaughter. No doubt that's what most people will believe. But they might also be innocent civilians killed by the blast which blew up the government vehicle, that is, they might have been killed by the rebels. Or, presumably excepting the woman and child, they might not have been "innocent civilians" at all, but armed rebels who were killed as the army counter-attacked after the attack which killed 9 soldiers.

The Syrian Office of Human Rights (per Wikipedia) says 2,738 civilians and 970 security forces have been killed. But that's conveniently nebulous. Who were those "civilians"? Were they all just non-violent "Occupy Syria" protesters, and not a one part of the group responsible for the deaths of 970 security forces? Hardly likely. The Syrian government claims that 1,400 security forces, 716 insurgents, and 700 civilians have been killed, which may reflect its own bias, but at least tries to differentiate between the types of civilians killed.

Whatever the exact numbers, one thing is clear — the one-sided picture presented to consumers of Western media of a Syrian government slaughtering innocent civilians and nothing more is utterly false. And also utterly intentional.

"Perceived" "malevolence"

2011-11-26T10:05:00.000-08:00

Spin away, AP [Emphasis added]:

Pakistan on Saturday accused NATO helicopters and fighter jets of firing on two army checkpoints in the country's northwest and killing 24 soldiers. Islamabad retaliated by closing the border crossings used by the international coalition to supply its troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

The incident before dawn Saturday was a major blow to already strained relations between Islamabad and U.S.-led forces fighting in Afghanistan. It will add to perceptions in Pakistan that the American presence in the region is malevolent, and further fuel resentment toward the weak government in Islamabad for its cooperation with Washington.

Yes, it's just a "perception" that Americans are killing Pakistanis by the score, and that their presence in the region is "malevolent," and not totally benign, or even beneficial. I'm not even going to mention (oh wait, yes I am) that the real "major blow" will be to the families of 24 Pakistani soldiers, who will have to be content with a pro-forma "apology" from the generals (and maybe a few bucks as well, though nowhere near as many as if they were "real" people, you know, Americans).

Police "nudge" students

2011-11-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

Props to Stephen Colbert for catching this incredible description of events in Berkeley by AP:

"Television news footage from outside the university's main administration building showed officers pulling people from the steps and nudging others with batons."

"Just like the Rodney King 'nudging'", noted Colbert, as he showed video of that "nudging" that police were giving to UC students.

The "bellicose" Ayatollah

2011-11-10T19:13:00.000-08:00

The New York Times thinks Ayatollah Khamenei is "bellicose":

The supreme leader of Iran added his voice on Thursday to the country’s bellicose backlash against the incriminating United Nations report about the Iranian nuclear program.

And what exactly did he say that caused him to be described as "bellicose"? This:

"If the thought of invasion against the Islamic republic of Iran crosses anybody’s mind he must ready himself to receive a strong slap and iron fist...The enemies, especially the United States and its puppets and the Zionist regime, should know that the Iranian nation will not invade any country or nation, but it will respond to any invasion or threat with full force in a way that it will break up invaders from within."

Apparently the Times isn't familiar with the meaning of the word "bellicose":

"inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; pugnacious."

There are of course bellicose actors in this discussion. The United States and Israel just to name the top two. But not someone who says they will defend themselves if attacked. That's not "bellicose," it's just rational.

All you need to know about the Libyan "revolution" in one picture

2011-10-20T10:15:00.001-07:00

The "revolution" continues on its entirely unsurprising course.

Obama mischaracterizes Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama, is a lame attempt to indicate sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street movement, said today:

So, yes, I think people are frustrated, and the protestors are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our [sic] financial system works.

It is true that there is a component of OWS, the Ron Paul component, who carry signs saying "Abolish the Fed" or "Fire Geithner" and probably do think that the problem is "how our financial system works." But the vast majority of OWS protesters, are concerned with "how our entire system works" - the financial system, the political system, and the economic system. A system which is controlled by, and run for the benefit of, the "1%". It's true that not all of those people would agree that the solution is a complete replacement of that system with socialism and real democracy. But almost all of them think that the solutions go far beyond reforming the way the financial system works.

Capture or kill?

2011-09-30T12:18:00.001-07:00

Why does the media refer to a "capture or kill order" with respect to Awlaki? A "capture or kill order" means you try to capture someone, and if they fight back, you're allowed to kill them. Clearly, what was in effect with Awlaki was a "kill order," not a "capture or kill order."

A soldier in the "Nobel Peace Prize" army

2011-09-30T11:35:00.001-07:00

Evidently, this dead soldier was convinced by Obama's Nobel Peace Prize that you could bring world peace by waging world war:

Described by family and friends as a young man passionate about the military and also finding world peace, American Canyon soldier Garrett A. Fant, 21, died Monday doing what he loved -- serving in the U.S. Army.
...
Fant was quiet and a "deep thinker" who would often stay after school and have long conversations with his instructors about world events and how to achieve peace, Cisneros said.
...
"He was one of our hopeful ambassadors to give a message of peace over war."

He certainly had a strange way of sending that "message."

Where does change come from?

2011-09-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

It's easy to get disillusioned with mass protest. Did it stop the invasion of Iraq? Has it ended the war against Afghanistan? Is the current "occupation" of Wall Street really likely to end the power of the bankers and overthrow capitalism?

But a recent interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg might shed a little light on the subject for those with a negative view:

"The question is," Williams asked, "what made you think [as an ACLU lawyer arguing a case before the Supreme Court] you could get the court to overrule over a century of precedent (regarding women's rights)?"

"The times," Ginsburg said. "The court is a reactive institution. It's never at the forefront of social change. There's always a movement in society that's pushing the court. By 1970, the women's movement was revived, not just in the United States, but all over the world. It was an issue that people cared about."

So there you have it, from the mouth of a Supreme Court Justice. Here, she's talking about the effect of the people, as expressed through mass movements, on the Supreme Court, but precisely the same thing is true of Congress. It is the people who make change, not the Court and not the Congress.

Stay in the streets!

More U.S. punishment of Cuba

2011-09-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

The National Committee to Free the Cuban Five has put up an urgent online petition here, which they (and I) urge you to sign. I'll let the text of the petition explain what it's all about:

René González is one of the "Cuban Five" prisoners who have now spent 13 years in U.S. prisons, having been falsely labeled as "spies," unjustly convicted in the anti-Cuban environment of Miami, and condemned to long terms in prison, all for the "crime" of fighting terrorism by infiltrating Miami-based terrorist groups to expose their continuing terrorist plots against Cuba. González will be the first of the Five to be released from prison on October 7, and, in a measure that can only be described as vindictive, the U.S. government wants to force him to spend his three years on probation in the United States, where he has no family, rather than allowing him to return to Cuba.

González' wife, Olga Salanueva, has been continually denied visas to enter the U.S. to visit him in prison, and as a result the two have not seen each other since August, 2000 - more than eleven years. The U.S. government now wants to add three more years to this punishment, something which surely qualifies as "cruel and unusual," not to mention a violation of all standards of human rights.

Judge Joan Lenard has issued an order which forces González to live in Florida. Her decision also dictates certain conditions of parole, including prohibiting him “from associating with or visiting specific places where individuals or groups such as terrorists, members of organizations advocating violence, organized crime figures are known to be or frequent..." This is an incredible admission by the court that terrorists run free in Miami! Those terrorists, the very ones whose actions González was in the U.S. to monitor and expose, pose a constant danger to him while he is forced to reside in the United States.

Furthermore, although he was never charged with, much less convicted of, "espionage," the U.S. government calls him a "spy" and a "threat to national security." Yet they want to force this "spy" to remain in the U.S. for three more years! Surely only pure vindictiveness can explain this almost absurd state of affairs.

I add my name to those calling on President Obama to end this injustice immediately, and to allow René González, a man whose anti-terrorist mission was saving lives, a man who has been a model prisoner for more than 13 years, to return immediately to his beloved family and country of Cuba upon his release on October 7.

For more information about the case, please visit http://www.freethefive.org

Adding my own $0.02 to this petition - one may wonder why the U.S. would be so vindictive against this individual (and against Cuba)? What purpose does it serve? As I see it, there are two purposes. One, that was reported (or rumored might be a better word) in the press, is that the U.S. was trying to "trade" González' immediate return to Cuba for the release of Alan Gross (as opposed to swapping all five of the Cuban Five for Gross, something which various commentators have argued for). It's probably not a coincidence that the Judge's order requiring González to remain in the U.S. for three years was issued just days after Bill Richardson returned empty-handed from Cuba, reportedly having tried to arrange such a swap.

There is a larger purpose, however, which explains why the Cuban Five were put in prison in the first place, rather than being sent back to Cuba like most "spies". The U.S. is sending a message to Cuba, and to future potential Cubans who attempt to infiltrate the right-wing terrorist groups in Miami to prevent acts of terrorism against Cuba, that they may pay a terrible price if they are caught doing so. And why would they U.S. want to send such a message? Because terrorism against Cuba is one weapon in their arsenal in overthrowing the Cuban revolution, and one which they do not wish to see weakened by Cuban agents exposing future plots.

Anyway, please sign the petition.

Obama's Cuba hypocrisy

2011-09-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday at a press conference, President Obama was asked about the U.S. maintaining its blockade ("embargo" in the inaccurate U.S. language) on Cuba. His response (in part):

"What we haven’t seen is the kind of genuine spirit of transformation inside of Cuba that would justify us eliminating the embargo."

He claims that the "embargo" is all about human rights, political prisoners, and so on.

But earlier this year, Obama renewed the statement which legally justifies the blockade. It asserts that the U.S. is in a state of "national emergency" (!), and that

The Cuban government has not demonstrated that it will refrain from the use of excessive force against U.S. vessels or aircraft that may engage in memorial activities or peaceful protest north of Cuba. In addition, the unauthorized entry of any U.S.-registered vessel into Cuban territorial waters continues to be detrimental to the foreign policy of the United States.

Of course this is lie upon lie. How Cuba could "demonstrate" that it will "refrain from the use of excessive force" is of course an impossibility. The phrase "north of Cuba" is curiously ambiguous. Cuba retains the right, as do all nations, to deal with foreign aircraft overflying its territory in however they see fit, based on the perceived threat of such aircraft. And all this has nothing whatsoever with Obama's claimed justification for the continuation of the blockade, which could never be legally justified based on U.S. perceptions of human rights in Cuba (and if it could, the U.S. would be blockading an awful lot of countries in the world, starting with stopping the importation of oil from Saudi Arabia). Not to mention the preposterous notion that the U.S. is in a state of "national emergency" over anything happening in Cuba.

The blockade has one purpose and one purpose only - overthrowing the government of Cuba. Regime change. It has been thus ever since 1959, when the U.S. State Department wrote this:

"The majority of Cubans support Castro...the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship… every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba...a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."

The Peace Prize President pontificates

2011-09-21T13:15:00.000-07:00

At the U.N. (emphasis added):

So this has been a remarkable year. The Qaddafi regime is over. Gbagbo, Ben Ali, Mubarak are no longer in power. Osama bin Laden is gone, and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him.

Also today, in the real world:

Admitting heavy losses from the assault on Muammar Gaddafi's hometown, National Transitional Council fighters were forced to retreat from Sirte last night to allow NATO warplanes to blitz unexpectedly heavy resistance from loyalist forces.

"Blitz" is such a nice word. "Slaughter by bombing" sounds so much cruder.

Unilateral

2011-09-20T12:26:00.001-07:00

Obama keeps condemning the Palestinians for seeking a "unilateral" solution at the U.N. If a majority of nations on the Security Council or in the General Assembly votes for something, how exactly does that qualify as "unilateral"?

Obama also claims that the bombing of Libya was "the very purpose of the United Nations." Really? I guess I was fooled by the U.N. Charter which says the purpose is "To maintain international peace and security."

"No boots on the ground"

2011-09-12T16:35:00.001-07:00

There are now four (acknowledged!) American troops in Libya, and the State Department is hastening to assure us that

"When the president made his commitment to 'no boots on ground' ... obviously that had to do with entering into the fray between the Qaddafi forces and the Libyan freedom fighters, and that's not what these guys are engaged in."

Which is no doubt true. That's what the pilots and the drone operators are for.

Why is the U.S. government punishing the Cuban Five?

2011-09-12T09:33:00.001-07:00

The Cuban Five - Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, René González, and Ramon Labañino - are today starting their 13th year in U.S. prisons. Leaving aside the case of Gerardo (who was accused of complicity in the shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue planes and the death of the pilots, a charge which the prosecution actually admitted in a motion it could not prove (!) but on which the jury convicted him anyway), the other four were charged merely with typical "foreign agent" charges - false passports, unregistered agent of a foreign government, and conspiracy to commit espionage (not "espionage" as is commonly reported, because not a shred of evidence was presented that any of the Five ever possessed or even attempted to possess a single item of classified information). And as a USA Today columnist pointed out just a few days ago, similar cases (e.g., involving Russian agents) involve a quick deportation, not 13 years (and counting) in prison.

Two of the five have been denied visits from their wives for the entire 12 years. One of them, Gerardo, is serving a double life sentence, so this means that the government intends to prevent him from seeing his wife (and vice-versa) for the rest of their lives. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment!

And in the latest example, the one of the Five with the shortest sentence, René González, is due to be released from prison on Oct. 7, having served his time. René, it turns out, has dual U.S. and Cuban citizenship, and the U.S. intends to force him to serve his three years' probation in the U.S., where he has not a single relative (his wife, children, and aging parents are all in Cuba). His attorney filed a motion asking for him to be allowed to serve his probation in Cuba, and the government has actually now opposed that motion.

So what is this all about? It certainly isn't about justice, taking five men whose mission was the prevention of terrorism and putting them in jail for years and years. No, it's about war, specifically, the ongoing U.S. war on Cuba and its attempt to destabilize and overthrow the Cuban government. War has two parts. One is offense, and the U.S. conducts vigorous economic warfare against Cuba, and through its terrorist proxies in Miami, terrorist warfare as well. The other is defense, and that's where the Cuban Five come in, because they were part of Cuba's defenses against U.S.-based (and U.S.-tolerated and U.S.-backed) terrorism. Obviously these five men have been "neutralized" as defenders of Cuba. But they are far from the only Cuban agents, or potential Cuban agents.

The punishment and persecution (no other word suffices) of the Cuban Five is designed for one purpose and one purpose only - to send a message to any Cuban thinking of volunteering for a similar mission that they will pay a severe price if they are caught, and thereby to discourage them from doing so. It's a message that is unlikely to succeed, given the passionate defense of the Cuban revolution by so many of its citizens, but it's one the U.S. insists on sending. And it's sending it through its cruel and unusual (and completely unjust) punishment of five men - the Cuban Five.

Today attorneys for the Five had a press conference organized by the National Committee to Free the Cuban Five to discuss their current legal status. You can listen to the conference here.

We refuse to live in fear?

2011-09-12T07:44:00.001-07:00

Obama's latest nonsense:

"They wanted to terrorize us, but, as Americans, we refuse to live in fear."

Really, Barack? We take off our shoes at airports, get groped by TSA, and put up with countless infringements on our civil liberties, but we "refuse to live in fear"? Really? Isn't "fear" what it's all about as a justification to keep the military machine (and the "national security [sic]" apparatus humming?

Kept our values?

2011-09-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama, today, talking about what has happened in the U.S. since Sept. 11, 2001:

"We preserved our values. We preserved our character."

Locking up people indefinitely without trial or even charges? Claiming the right of the President to assassinate anyone, even American citizens, without the slightest right to due process? These are the "values" and "character" that have been "preserved"?

Obama's selective memory

2011-08-31T08:45:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama, speaking to the American Legion:

"Through their service, through their sacrifice, through their astonishing record of achievement, our forces have earned their place among the greatest of generations. Toppling the Taliban in just weeks. Driving al Qaeda from the training camps where they plotted 9/11. Giving the Afghan people the opportunity to live free from terror. When the decision was made to go into Iraq, our troops raced across deserts and removed a dictator in less than a month. When insurgents, militias and terrorists plunged Iraq into chaos, our troops adapted, they endured ferocious urban combat, they reduced the violence and gave Iraqis a chance to forge their own future."

"Topped the Taliban in just weeks"...and U.S. forces are still there, still fighting, still dying, ten years later. "Removed a dictator in less than a month"...and U.S. forces are still there, still fighting, still dying, eight years later. U.S. troops "reduced the violence" in Iraq...after killing hundreds of thousands of them and forcing millions to flee their homes or even their country.

There's a lot more in the speech to take note of, but I'll leave it there. Your recounting of history leaves a lot to be desired, Mr. Obama.

How to tell "your" enemies from "your" friends

2011-08-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

In the San Jose Mercury News this morning, one article reports on "hundreds of thousands" of people demonstrating against the regime. It's two short paragraphs in the "In Brief" section.

A second article reports on "tens of thousands" of Syrians demonstrating against their regime. It's seven long paragraphs under a top-of-the-page, 5-column headline, plus subhead.

NBC's Brian Williams hides the military nature of the space program

2011-08-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

In a feature on tonight's NBC Nightly News entitled "What we've missed this week", Brian Williams told a story this way (my transcript from the video):

"This was the thing that was going to make us feel good about ourselves after a rough week. The U.S. has been anxious to launch a space plane, a hypersonic flying wing, that could go from New York to L.A. in 12 minutes at 13,000 miles an hour, unless it crashes, which is what it did this week, nine minutes after takeoff. Thankfully no one was on board, just don't call your travel agent just yet until they work the bugs out."

We'll overlook the fact that, thanks to U.S. foreign policy and the enemies it has created around the world, it takes more than 12 minutes just to get through security at an airport. But the truly outrageous nature of this story is the pretense that this plane is something we might look forward to, and even one day call our travel agent to book a flight on.

Wrong! This plane has nothing whatsoever to do with civilian air travel. And you don't have to look any further than the website of NBC itself, where the real nature of this "space plane" is in no way a secret:

The rocket-launched vehicle is part of an advanced weapons program, called Conventional Prompt Global Strike, which is working to develop systems of reaching an enemy target anywhere in the world within one hour.

And by "reaching" an enemy target, I don't think they have "delivering passengers" in mind, unless you regard bombs as passengers. And actually, the final sentence of the article (as well as the name of the program) makes that quite clear:

An engineering review board was to analyze that data in order to help shape future global strike programs, DARPA officials said.

"Global strike programs." Programs of delivering death from the air anywhere on the planet. That's what Brian Williams thinks was going to "make us feel good about ourselves."

The culture of violence

2011-08-12T06:54:00.000-07:00

British P.M. David Cameron, on the riots in Britain:

"This is...about culture, a culture that glorifies violence..."

George Galloway, on Press TV this morning:

"Every single day, Britain is causing as much destruction and death in Libya as has happened in all four days of the rioting in Britain."

Dealing with problems with violence? Gosh, David, where on earth could that "culture" have come from?

The imperialist merry-go-round of death

2011-08-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

Today in Afghanistan:

Eight civilians, including women and children, have been killed in a US-led NATO airstrike in the southern Afghan province of Helmand.
...
In a separate incident, at least four people were killed when police opened fire during an anti-US demonstration held in the southern province of Zabul on Friday.

A provincial police chief said people took to the streets to protest an attack by US-led NATO forces in the Qalad district of Zabul province that killed three Afghan civilians.

And in tomorrow's news, Afghans in Helmand will take to the streets to protest today's NATO killings, and some of them will be killed when people open fire on their demonstration.

Why, oh why, do "they" hate "us"? It's just so...inexplicable.

This war, just like the ones in Iraq and Libya, are doing nothing positive for the national security of the United States, or for the security of the people of the nations in question.

Update: In what I'm pretty sure is a reference to the same incident, the New York Times reports today that those eight people killed were one woman and seven children under the age of seven. Terrorists all.

NATO bombs Libyan state TV

2011-07-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

In a familiar pattern, "NATO" (most likely the U.S.) has now bombed Libyan state television, just as they did in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan (not state TV in the latter case but rather Al Jazeera TV), with the same specious claim of military justification, that TV was being used to "intimidate the Libyan people and incite acts of violence against them." In reality, one more war crime.

Any bets on whether a single member of the U.S. corporate media will speak out against this crime, since precisely the same "justification" would allow them to be bombed?

Update: Three Libyan journalists were killed in the bombing. Meanwhile, coverage of this war crime in the Western media remains spotty at best, and I'm still waiting for the first journalist or editorial to speak out against it.

Update 2: Although there was a several paragraph AP story on the bombing that one could find online, in the two days since, not even a one-paragraph version in the "News of the World" section appeared in print in my local paper (San Jose Mercury News), nor have I heard word one about the bombing on various TV news programs (although it did make the New York Times). War crimes aren't what they used to be (although just imagine if Libya succeeded in bombing the BBC, what coverage would ensue).

Rich and poor alike

2011-07-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama:

"If I’m saying to future recipients of Social Security or Medicare that you’re going to have to make some adjustments, it’s important that we’re also willing to make some adjustments when it comes to corporate jet owners, or oil and gas producers, or people who are making millions or billions of dollars."

Anatole France:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

News schizophrenia

2011-07-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

These stories are both are in the "news" (we use that term loosely) today:

Story 1:

"The State Department is warning Americans that al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks against U.S. interests around the world, including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

Story 2:

The United States is “within reach’’ of defeating Al Qaeda...Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said."

Obama's confusion on interest vs. taxes

2011-07-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

In his address to the nation about the debt ceiling "crisis," President Barack Obama had this to say about the consequences of failing to raise the debt ceiling:

"Interest rates would skyrocket on credit cards, on mortgages and on car loans, which amounts to a huge tax hike on the American people."

But this is completely wrong on two counts. First of all, a tax hike on the American people would go to the government, and allow the government to fund needed social programs, with the ancillary benefit that such spending creates jobs for the people delivering those social services. Interest is paid to banks and other corporations, and funds private profit (which quite often leads to one corporation buying another one with subsequent job cuts).

And secondly, higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans will not come out of the pockets of "the American people." No, they'll come out of the people who actually pay interest on their credit cards because they can't pay off their bills, people who have to borrow money to buy houses and cars rather than paying for them in cash. Who are these "people"? The poor and middle class, not the rich. And of course home owners itemizing deductions on their income tax get to deduct that increased mortgage interest directly from their income anyway, meaning even less money for the government.

No, President Obama, increased interest rates are in no way the equivalent of a "tax hike on the American people."

No white terrorists at the New York Times (nor unpeaceful Norwegians)

2011-07-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

In an almost unbelievable display of anti-Muslim bias, the New York Times repeatedly describes the suspect in the murder of 87 people in Norway as a "lone political extremist," not as a "terrorist," which is certainly how they would have described any alleged murderer had he been a non-white Muslim, rather than a "conservative Christian." Adding to the offense, the characterization (attributed to the police) asserts categorically that this was a "lone" attack, although it's obvious that in such a short time, no one could possibly know if the alleged attacker didn't have accomplices.

But the real sin of the Times comes later in the article. Despite having what seems to be a pretty clear suspect in custody, and despite a fairly clear picture of the basic characteristics of that suspect (right-wing, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant), the article closes with six paragraphs describing suspicions and reasons why the attack might reasonably be expected to have originated with "Islamic terrorism." Suspicions which never should have been voiced in this article to begin with, but all the more so since a suspect not fitting that description has already been apprehended.

The final insult in the article is its perpetuation of the entirely undeserved "peaceful" image of Norway, "a nation better known for its active diplomacy and peacekeeping missions than as a target for extremists." We even have a Norwegian telling us how "Norway is such a neutral country." The article does note (later) that Norway has 550 soldiers serving in Afghanistan; it fails to note, as Glenn Greenwald does this morning, that Norway is actively participating in the assault on Libya, and Norwegian planes have dropped more than 300 bombs on that country! Not exactly your concept of a "neutral country."

Of course, Norway is also the country in which Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. So it's certainly no stranger to irony.

Again on who's dying in Libya

2011-07-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

The press (and the U.S. and NATO) count on nothing more than people not paying attention. Here are two excerpts from the same article:

NATO will keep bombing Moamer Qadhafi’s forces during Ramazan in August as long as the Libyan regime continues to attack civilians during the Muslim holy month, the alliance said on Tuesday.
...In Brussels, alliance spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said: "It is hoped that the Qadhafi forces will stop attacking and threatening to attack civilians not just for Ramazan but immediately."

That's what the "alliance" spokespeople say. But what is actually happening? Hey newspeople it was right there in your own headline:

19 rebels killed in Misrata, Algeria

Even more instructive is the article:

Forces loyal to Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi shelled rebel positions in the coastal city of Misrata overnight, killing 19 rebels and wounding 22, rebels said in a statement on Tuesday.

So the source of information about who is being killed is the "rebels." Now isn't it 100% certain that if there were any grounds on which the rebels could have claimed that the 19 dead and 22 wounded were "civilians" and not "rebels," they would have, just like the U.S. and NATO claim that everyone they kill (be it in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere) is not a civilian? Of course they would. The plain fact of the matter is that Qaddafi forces are not "attacking and threatening to attack civilians," and that NATO's claim as to why they are continuing to attack and kill Libyans is just as bogus as their claim why they started in the first place.

And just how many Libyans have the U.S. and NATO killed? 1,108 civilians, with another 4,537 wounded, according to Libya's prosecutor-general, who "intends to prosecute NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in Libyan courts for "war crimes.'" Sadly, good luck with that. And, by the way, NATO is responsible for the deaths of all the Libyans it has killed (including quite a few rebels, by the way), not just those classified as "civilians."

"NATO says..."

2011-07-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

More NATO bombs fall on Libya, and, at least one news outlet picks a good picture to accompany their story. But the story, which is an AP story, asserts about the site which was bombed:

Government troops used the missile site outside the rebel-held port city of Misrata to fire indiscriminately on civilians in the area, NATO said.

Yes, "NATO said." But was it true? Did we get to read "...but AP could not verify this claim"? Of course not.

And again, what is the truth? Let's consult another source which is hardly likely to be sympathetic to the Libyan government - the Voice of America. Here's their story from July 5:

At least 11 Libyan rebels have been killed in clashes with pro-government forces near the opposition-held city of Misrata....more than 40 rebels have been wounded.

And July 8:

Medical sources say at least two rebels were killed in the shelling of the western city that has been under siege for months.

Now don't you think that if there were any chance they could label the dead as "civilians," they would have?

Here's one of the only sources I could find which seems to offer proof of such "indiscriminate bombing," claiming that "Day and night attacks from Grad ground-to-ground rockets claim victims indiscriminately. The hospitals are overwhelmed, attending to an average of 70 casualties a day." Really? And VOA isn't reporting that? They also report: "About 1200 of the city's inhabitants have been killed and more than 8000 injured. Hospital staff say that about 40 per cent are civilians." But who is a "civilian"? A doctor who is likely the source of the reporter's information says: "For me all of them are civilians because even those who take a gun are businessmen, engineers, students - none of us are soldiers." Well, on the one hand, he's certainly correct. Which points out why, in a civil war like this, the correct terms should be "combatants" and "non-combatants." Clearly, killing combatants, be they civilians or uniformed soldiers, is "acceptable" behavior (to the extent that any war or any killing is acceptable) and of a different character than killing non-combatants. But given that clarification, the numbers are still suspect. Obviously, some non-combatants have been killed, as always happens. But are they being killed by "indiscriminate bombing," as "NATO says"? Based even on reports from U.S. government-friendly media, I see no evidence of that.

And, as a counterpart to the picture of the Washington, D.C. demonstration which accompanies the first article linked above, here's a video of yesterday's action in San Francisco:

Obama: "Constitution and laws are just 'noise'" and other lies about Libya

2011-07-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Via fellow blogger WIIIAI, I was alerted to an Obama press conference I somehow missed on Wednesday. One could use up a lot of electrons on picking apart what he had to say on lots of subjects, but let's concentrate on the most egregious statements - the ones on Libya (a subject which, curiously enough, was apparently not important enough to be addressed by Obama in his introduction, and only came up in the Q&A session).

Q: There have been a lot of questions about the constitutionality -- constitutional interpretations of a few decisions you’ve made, so I’ll just simply ask: Do you believe the War Powers Act is constitutional?...

A: I’m not a Supreme Court justice so I’m not going to -- putting my constitutional law professor hat on here. Let me focus on, initially, the issue of Libya. I want to talk about the substance of Libya because there’s been all kinds of noise about process and congressional consultation and so forth.

Absolutely remarkable. To a man who was a Constitutional law professor, discussions of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress are just "noise." The Constitutional mandate for Congress to declare war is just a "process." Are we sure this man actually was a "Constitutional law professor"? I have my doubts.

Obama: And throughout this process we consulted with Congress. We’ve had 10 hearings on it. We’ve sent reams of information about what the operations are. I’ve had all the members of Congress over to talk about it.

Not only is he unfamiliar with the Constitution, apparently he's unfamiliar with the English language as well. Congressional hearings are not "consultation." Sending information to Congress is not "consultation." Talking to members of Congress could potentially be "consultation," if the members of Congress were allowed to talk back and if what they had to say had the slightest effect whatsoever. However the Constitution and the War Powers Act don't require "consultation." They require Congress to authorize the war.

Now, when you look at the history of the War Powers resolution, it came up after the Vietnam War in which we had half-a-million soldiers there, tens of thousands of lives lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent -- and Congress said, you know what, we don’t want something like that happening again. So if you’re going to start getting us into those kinds of commitments you’ve got to consult with Congress beforehand.

A straight-out lie about the War Powers Resolution. Regardless of how you interpret the "meaning of Congress," the WPR doesn't say the President has to "consult" with Congress. It says they have to authorize his actions.

Muammar Qaddafi, who, prior to Osama bin Laden, was responsible for more American deaths than just about anybody on the planet, was threatening to massacre his people.

First of all, Qaddafi threatened to crush an armed rebellion, which every government in the world would do, not to "massacre his people." Second of all, "more Americans than just about anybody"? Really? Hitler comes to mind. So do George Bush and his fellow conspirators, who were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama himself is responsible for the deaths of more than a thousand Americans who he has kept fighting in Afghanistan. I could also mention the American health "care" system, which is responsible for the deaths of 18,000 (some estimates are higher) Americans every single year.

And as part of an international coalition, under a U.N. mandate that is almost unprecedented, we went in and took out air defense systems so that an international coalition could provide a no-fly zone, could protect -- provide humanitarian protection to the people on the ground.

The entire operation, dropping hundreds of bombs and missiles a day on Libya, summed up as "providing a no-fly zone." Please, Barack, the American people are naive, but not that naive. Everyone in the world knows the operation is way beyond a "no-fly zone." But you'd still like to maintain that fiction, apparently.

And as a consequence, we’ve protected thousands of people in Libya.

"Protected" hundreds of them from the hazards of breathing by putting them safely in their graves, including small children. Some people will say that that number is not proven, and it could be less. No doubt that's true. But the "thousands" that Obama claims the U.S. has protected (in the sense that he's using the word) is entirely unproven and unknowable, pure conjecture.

What we’ve seen is reports of troops engaging in horrible acts, including potentially using rape as a weapon of war.

Obama resorts to the same dodge that I wrote about the other day when the U.S. Ambassador to Libya claimed to have seen "reports" that up to 30,000 people had died. "Seeing reports" means almost less than nothing, and Obama even dodges a second time with the word "potentially." And whatever the ICC says, that rape charge is as bogus as they come.

No wonder people think Obama is a Kenyan

2011-06-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

Multiple times today I heard about how a "Nigerian man" had passed through TSA and boarded a plane with a boarding pass belonging to someone else. I'll leave the discussion of the security issues concerned to others. I want to note another problem: the man is actually a U.S. citizen, not a "Nigerian." Do you suppose if he were an Irish-American instead of a Nigerian-American, the press would have described him as "Irish"? No, me neither.

How many have died in Libya?

2011-06-28T13:11:00.001-07:00

Michelle Bachmann, who's running for the Republican nomination for President, has developed a bit of a reputation for having a loose relationship with the truth, some not so serious (it was mass murderer John Wayne Gacy who lived in her hometown, not movie hero John Wayne), and some more serious (claiming the Obama administration has issued one new drilling permit since coming into office, when the actual number is more than 200). But when AP decided to "fact-check" her on these and other statements, one thing was particularly interesting - her claim that a NATO airstrike in Libya had killed between 10,000 and 30,000 people!

Putting aside from the obvious (no single airstrike has killed that many people since Nagasaki as far as I know), let's assume she misspoke and meant "NATO airstrikes" rather than "a NATO airstrike." So why did she make such a claim? Because she's opposed to the intervention (probably just to distinguish herself from Obama and score political points), and wants to make the intervention look as bad as possible. AP's fact-check notes that the basis for her absurd statement was clearly a statement made by "the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, [who] said in late April that U.S. officials have seen reports that 10,000 to 30,000 people may have died in Moammar Gadhafi's crackdown on protesters and the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces." In other words, total deaths in the civil war.

And, to AP's (minor) credit, it does go on to "fact-check" Ambassador Cretz, when it writes "it is hard to know if that is true." I'll say. Ambassador Cretz carefully couches his statement in the old "People say..." language. He's "seen reports," you see, and quite possibly he has. Of course "reports" by themselves have no credibility, a fact I've been emphasizing with respect to Wikipedia, whose disclosures primarily consist of "reports," some true, some not. Bush & Co. claimed they "had reports" that Saddam Hussein was buying yellowcake in Niger, and that they "had reports" that agents of Al Qaeda had met with Iraqi government officials, and the Obama administration "has reports" that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Merely because someone writes a report about some rumor they've heard does not make it true!

So what is the truth? How many people have been killed in Libya, and by whom? This site contains a very interesting comparison of the wide variety of claims that have been made, claims which range from the low hundreds to more than 10,000 (by the way, none as high as the 30,000 claimed by Cretz). Those claims themselves are quite revealing. The high estimate of 10,000 was made on February 24, very early in the conflict, by "informed sources on the ICC," with no actual source or indication of where that number came from given. The article claims that of those 10,000, "at least 2,000" were in Benghazi, which begs the question of where the other 8,000 deaths occurred. Surely not in Tripoli (although there were certainly some deaths there), where 8,000 deaths would hardly be undocumented. And even the deaths in Benghazi are questionable. Why? Because according to this article, "the main city of Benghazi and several other Libyan cities have been conquered by the revolutionary forces." So a mere seven days after protests had started, the second largest city was in the hands of the rebels, but 2,000 deaths had happened in those seven days? This can hardly be considered credible.

Wikipedia contains one of the few sources of actual information, a table of reported fatalities (rather than the vague claims of people like the U.S. Ambassador). And what do they tell us? For example, in Benghazi, in the period February 17–20, 332-479 rebels deaths were reported, and 163 deaths of government forces. Quite clearly a battle was going on as early as the very first days of the revolt, and not a one-sided battle either. Through June 26, Wikipedia tallies reports of 2,384-3,084 opposition members/fighters (including some civilian supporters) and 1,425-1,673 Gaddafi loyalists have been killed. Again, evidence of a civil war, and again hardly a one-sided war.

Wikipedia also summarizes reports of 3,452-3,461 reported civilians killed by June 20, 2011. Of those, 856 are the reported deaths from the NATO bombing campaign. Another 1,472 are deaths of refugees fleeing the country whose boats sunk on the way to Italy. The vast majority of those were Black Africans fleeing the racist pogroms being carried out by the "revolutionaries" in Benghazi. All of these numbers must be taken as rough figures only. But taking them at least as roughly accurate, this means that 2,338 out of 3,450 civilian deaths (67%) have come either at the hands of NATO (not literally the hands, of course, NATO doesn't get its actual hands dirty) or as a result of the actions of the rebels.

All in all, there have been up to 8,500 deaths in Libya, including deaths of forces engaged in combat on both sides, as well as civilians killed (or whose deaths were caused) by both sides. Quite a few deaths, obviously. But not at all to be confused with "the number of innocent civilians killed by the Gaddafi regime," which is the impression that the U.S. government and the corporate media would like to leave in order to justify the U.S./NATO intervention.

Why is this important? Michelle Bachmann is just a bonehead (ok, she's more than that, but for this discussion only). But statements like the ones from the U.S. Ambassador to Crete, dutifully repeated in the corporate media and definitely not fact-checked, were no boneheaded mistakes. They were deliberate statements designed to give credibility to the "Gaddafi is committing and/or about to commit genocide and we need to start bombing to prevent it" argument. In actual fact, no such thing was happening or was likely about to happen. There was most certainly a civil war in progress. Some civilians were certainly killed by both sides, some deliberately, some "collateral damage." Nothing which would have remotely justified a U.N. resolution or NATO intervention, if the facts hadn't been distorted from the very start.

Love that passive tense

2011-06-26T09:28:00.001-07:00

From AFP, with emphasis added:

Hundreds of activists are preparing to board aid ships bound for Gaza this week in defiance of an Israeli blockade and UN warnings and in spite of the violent end to an operation last year which left nine dead.
...
Nine Turks died when Israeli forces seized the Mavi Marmara.

They just died. No one killed them. Might have been heart attacks, for all we know.

AP is no better:

The warning reflected Israeli jitters about the international flotilla, which comes just over a year after a similar mission ended in the deaths of nine Turkish activists in clashes with Israeli naval commandos.

A little better; at least there were Israeli forces involved in "clashes." You know, the kind where one side is firing guns and the other side is trying to grab the guys with the guns. Not a word about how those activists died. Perhaps they slipped overboard and drowned in the midst of these "clashes." The reader will never know they were shot, some at point-blank range, some in the back, by Israeli commandos. Killed. Executed.

Who knows how the nine Turkish activists died? Actually AFP and AP know, but they're not telling.

Update: CNN's take:

The flotilla is meant to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a similar flotilla that resulted in a clash in international waters with Israeli navy commandos that left nine people -- including an American citizen -- dead.

Hell, from CNN, we might even imagine that some of those nine people were Israeli commandos. After all, it was a "clash."

The Commander-in-Chief

2011-06-24T08:54:00.000-07:00

Why is it that Congress is so eager to question the President's decisions when it comes to his Constitutionally mandated responsibilities (being Commander-in-Chief and hence having the final word about such things as troop levels), but so uneager to question his decisions when it comes to going to war in the first place, a responsibility the Constitution assigns to them?

Did Israel really leave Gaza?

2011-06-21T14:58:00.000-07:00

We all know that Israel exerts total control over what happens in Gaza by controlling everything that comes in or out (including, by the way, power, as well as, of course, people, at least until recently). But I must admit I didn't realize how much control they claim inside Gaza until I saw this:

Israel allows construction of 1,200 new homes in Gaza

You might think that was some kind of magnanimous gesture, until you get to this:

The homes will replace some of the 60,000 houses the United Nations says were damaged or destroyed during Israel’s military offensive against Hamas in early 2009, as well as others destroyed in earlier operations in 2003 and 2004.

For the math-challenged, 1,200 out of 60,000 is a whopping 2%.

Not that I expect anything better from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, from which this story comes, but the war in 2009 was not waged against "Hamas," it was waged against the population of Gaza.

The "unconventional" Jon Huntsman?

2011-06-21T14:29:00.000-07:00

Today's laugh of the day - this headline from Business Week:

Huntsman Enters White House Race as Unconventional Candidate

OK, let's read the article and see if we can figure what's "unconventional" about him:

"a campaign based on themes of American renewal...said Reagan, who announced his successful 1980 presidential bid at the same spot, "assured us we could ‘make America great again"...he called for "broad and bold changes to our tax code and regulatory policies"...He also urged...steps to "manage the end" to ongoing conflicts abroad...as Utah’s governor he took on health care and "did it right: no mandates, free market-based, not government- run"

Man, does it get more "unconventional" than that? Oh, and, by the way, his father is a billionaire. Which makes him totally unconventional amidst a field of mere multi-millionaires.

Those lavish foreigners

2011-06-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

One of the classic ways in which imperialism and its media try to build support for its interventions is to demonize its enemies. Of course there's the obvious "next Hitler" line, about how dangerous they are. But the other frequently invoked line is how fabulously wealthy they are (implicitly, at the expense of their people). But this, describing the house of the Gaddafi associate where 15 people were just killed by NATO bombs, is a pretty pathetic attempt:

The tour of the devastated property revealed the lavish lifestyle available to those close to Colonel Qaddafi. According to the photographs and the accounts of journalists who made the trip, the property included at least five large villas; vast stores of pasta and bottled water; at least one large swimming pool; aviaries; and a menagerie including horses, camels, antelope, lamas, ostrich and deer.

Wow. Vast stores of pasta (!) and bottled water (!!). And a pool! I'm going to guess there at a minimum tens of thousands, if not indeed millions of houses, in the United States which would put this one to shame, starting with every single house in Beverly Hills, Montecito, Los Altos Hills, and dozens of other cities populated by the rich and famous.

NATO "responsibility" claims 15 more victims

2011-06-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

The press is reporting that NATO has "taken responsibility" for Sunday's house bombing in Tripoli that killed at least nine people. But in fact, they did no such thing (nor did they, as far as I can tell, even use that word). They did admit that their bombs "probably" hit the house and killed the people (can't be 100% sure, you know, it could have been some of those stealth Libyan planes). But they insist it was an "accident," and after all, you're not really responsible for accidents. However, even if, in this case, this was an "unintended target," the fact is that these deaths were a statistical certainty. If you have a failure rate of 1 in 1000, and you drop 10000 bombs, 10 of them are going to fall on targets you didn't intend. It may not be what you intended, but it's not an "accident."

Of course, such excuses aren't really necessary for imperialists. Today, one day later, another 15 civilians were killed by a NATO airstrike (and, once again, despite the fact that journalists actually saw the bodies and the destroyed house, we still have to be told in the headline that this is just an assertion by the "Libyan regime"). And was this another random house hit by "accident"? No, it was hit on purpose, with the usual preposterous claim of it being a "command and control" center (the house belongs to a former military officer, not even a current one!). So NATO not only really takes "responsibility" for this strike, but claims it was part of fulfilling its purported mission. Among the dead? If I sort out the relationships correctly, two of them were great-grandchildren of Muammar Kaddafi. Still more civilians "protected" into the grave.

A trash-filled bay - one more cost of war

2011-06-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

49% of trash that ends up in San Francisco Bay comes from fast food restaurants. But here's the kicker: cities are unable to install trash-catching devices in their storm drains, because they can't afford the "whopping" million-dollar cost:

Cities have begun installing storm drain trash-capture devices, but the price tag stretches into the millions, and there are no long-term state or federal funds set aside to assist them.

"It's not that we disagree with the requirements, it's just to help us with the fact that we don't have the funding for it," said Matt Fabry, program coordinator for the San Mateo Countywide Water Pollution Prevention Program.

San Jose officials estimate they've spent more than $2 million installing trash-capture devices since 2008, enough to account for trash produced by 895 acres of commercial and retail stores within city limits.

$2 million in three years for one city (to get a start on the problem; obviously the total needed is more). The same amount we pay for a few minutes (or maybe even a few seconds, you do the math) of the unwanted wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen.

More covering for imperialism

2011-06-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

More civilians "protected" into the grave in Libya. BBC started with a headline (no longer online) reading:

Two die in 'Nato strike' in Libya

Right. "NATO strike" in quotes because there are so many different forces flying airplanes over Tripoli and dropping bombs. Why, it could be anybody!

Today BBC has changed its headline to a more typical one:

Nato raid kills five civilians, Libyan officials say

This even though the BBC reporter actually saw dead bodies being pulled from the rubble of the apartment building that was bombed, but, despite that, BBC still attributes the claims of deaths to "Libyan officials." And the last time you saw a headline reading, "25 militants killed, NATO officials say"? Never.

But the prize, the taker of the cake, today goes to the Los Angeles Times, whose headline and subhead read:

NATO, accused in airstrike on Libyan civilians, will investigate

A Tripoli apartment building near a school is destroyed, killing 9 people and injuring 18 others. Libya blames NATO, which confirms that planes were operating above the city at the time of the alleged attack.

Note how the main headline actually attempts to make NATO look good. Why, they're investigating! (or, so they say) The actual news, the blowing up of an apartment building and the death of nine people (so far)? Only worthy of the smaller subhead, and even then, only worthy of being a "claim" attributed to Libya. NATO's admission that its planes were indeed bombing Tripoli at the time, and the obvious corollary that no one else was, evidently isn't enough proof for the Times or any of the other corporate, imperialist-propping-up media.

The Washington Post draws the wrong lesson

2011-06-13T18:04:00.000-07:00

A headline in today's Washington Post gives the establishment lesson:

‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ displays ease of fudging authenticity online

Really? Haven't we all known that from blogs, dating sites, etc. for years? The fact that authenticity can be simulated online is neither news, nor of significance.

The real lesson of the "gay girl in Damascus" is the one the Post ignores - the rapidly vanishing journalistic standards of the corporate media, as well as the longer-standing tendency of the corporate media to lower their verification standards when it comes to any story which serves the interests of imperialism (and, conversely, to raise their verification standards for any story which runs contrary to those interests).

Media standard of evidence

2011-06-13T11:21:00.000-07:00

A "gay girl in Syria," whose blog posts were designed to discredit the Syrian government, has now been revealed to be an American man in Scotland. Notwithstanding the lack of any evidence that "her" posts were fact rather than crude propaganda, "her" story was featured in such corporate outlets as CNN and the New York Times.

Not only circulating in the corporate media as they play their role of demonizing imperialism's enemies, another story, the "mass rape with Viagra by Libyan soldiers," has made it as far as an International Criminal Court investigation (along with major press coverage). And the basis for this accusation? It borders on the preposterous (actually I take that back, it's nowhere near the border). A "woman" (who is unidentified, and for all we know is also an American man based in Scotland) claims to have sent out 70,000 questionnaires (in Libya. In the midst of a civil war) and received...wait for it...60,000 (!!!) responses reporting a total of 259 rapes by Libyan government soldiers. And this is the basis on which the ICC is making public accusations. And the basis, probably unknown to many of them, on which corporate media hacks propagate the story, all in the service of imperialism.

A question about the latest Prop. 8 issue

2011-06-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

If Judge Walker should be disqualified from ruling on Prop. 8 due to conflict of interest because he's gay, shouldn't 95% of the Congress be disqualified from voting for tax cuts for millionaires?

Sex and lies

2011-06-13T07:52:00.000-07:00

Anthony Weiner lied about sexting. Gen. David Petraeus lied (by a factor of five!) about the number of "Taliban" captured in Afghanistan. Which one got more media coverage? Oh please, you know you don't have to ask, and the difference in coverage was a lot more than a factor of five! Oh, and which of the two cases of lying has prolonged U.S. involvement in a war, costing hundreds of billions more dollars and hundreds more lives? Obviously you don't have to ask that either.

Training Afghan troops

2011-06-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

We're told that a major (or perhaps the major) focus of American involvement in Afghanistan right now is training Afghan troops to take the place of American troops who can then leave. Today, however, AP reveals how that's going, at least how it was going in late 2009:

As one of the deadliest battles of the war in Afghanistan raged, Afghan soldiers ran, hid and even stole personal items from the American troops fighting and dying at a remote outpost.

In interviews conducted after the attack, the Latvians told the U.S. investigators that the Afghan soldiers lacked "discipline, motivation and initiative."

But "the U.S. has spent billions of dollars since 2001 training and equipping the Afghan army and police" to produce those soldiers lacking "discipline, motivation and initiative." And who were they fighting, the opposition who killed 8 and wounded 22 American soldiers? Why, simply another group of Afghans on whom quite likely no money at all had been spent on training, and yet who were clearly filled with "discipline, motivation and initiative."

Why? Because those Afghans were fighting for something they believe in - expelling foreign occupying forces from their country, as opposed to the Afghan soldiers fighting (or not fighting) with the foreign occupiers, who were there because they were being paid, and probably in spite of their opposition to foreign occupation.

Further evidence of the same "problem" (problem for American forces) can be found in today's New York Times, where we learn that "Taliban infiltration in the Afghan National Security Forces." At least, that's what the U.S. government wants us to believe. The real story, however, is further down in the article:

But while the Taliban often takes credit for these attacks, NATO officials say the majority of the episodes stem from disagreements and arguments that escalate into violence.

“These incidents are exacerbated by austere battlefield conditions, combat stress, fatigue and cultural misunderstandings,” Colonel Simons said.

What the U.S. government doesn't want us to understand is that, while they use the term "Taliban" as a catch-all phrase to describe forces fighting the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, and simultaneously try to make it synonymous in the minds of Americans with "Al Qaeda," not only are the Taliban and Al Qaeda not the same thing, but many and probably most of those fighting the Americans are not really "Taliban" at all, but simply Afghans opposed to the foreign occupation of their country. "Colonel Simons" admission suggests that the majority of such "fragging" deaths have nothing to do with "infiltration" at all, much less "Taliban," but simply come from Afghans who were induced by money to join the government forces but came to realize that they hated the occupation more than they loved the money, and were willing to commit what are almost universally suicide missions to express that opposition. A far cry from the "trained" forces who could be seen "curled up in a fetal position" during the Keating attack.

The conclusion could not be simpler: U.S. out of Afghanistan!

"Protecting" civilians in Libya

2011-06-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton says:

"We reaffirmed that there is only one way forward for Libya. Attacks against civilians must stop. Gadhafi must go, and the Libyan people deserve to determine their own future. The United States views the Transitional National Council as the legitimate interlocutor for the Libyan people during this interim period."

So the Libyan people are "determining their own future," except in reality it's NATO bombs that are doing that, and the U.S. views the "Transitional National Council" as "legitimate" even though the Libyan people had nothing to do with its creation.

But back to the central point, civilians. As far as I can tell, there have been no credible reports (or any reports at all) of attacks by Libyan government forces on civilians in many weeks. Of course, the "attack against civilians" which was used to justify the NATO assault in the first place was an entirely hypothetical attack that was allegedly going to happen. Indeed, the only civilians being killed in Libya right now are the ones being killed on a daily basis by the NATO bombing of Tripoli (not to mention civilians in Afghanistan and, no doubt, Yemen as well).

As one example of Libyan government actions, yesterday they launched a major offensive on the city of Misrata. And who was killed? 22 rebels. Even the corporate media couldn't find anyone who they could claim was a civilian, and it's a safe bet that if they could have they would have.

Who's killing civilians in Libya and "has to go"? NATO, that's who.

Profits first

2011-06-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

An amusing lead to a San Jose Mercury News article on PG&E, with emphasis added:

In the most extensive independent analysis of PG&E since the Sept. 9 San Bruno catastrophe, an expert panel's report Thursday scathingly criticized the utility, finding "multiple weaknesses" in its natural gas-line operations and accusing the company of putting profits ahead of public safety.

Putting profits first, imagine that! In truth, the only reason public safety is in their equation at all (or its equivalent, consumer safety, in the equation of any company) is the potential financial impact of being sued for neglecting it. If there were no such things as lawsuits, or loss of customers (which wouldn't worry PG&E or other public utilities with their captive markets), safety wouldn't figure in at all.

And, as a reminder, this is actually a legal requirement for most companies (publicly-regulated utilities may be somewhat different, I'm not sure). That is, they are required by law to maximize shareholder profits, which is the reason they exist. Capitalism at its "finest."

Another day, another attack on a television station

2011-06-07T17:36:00.000-07:00

Libya joins a long list of nations in which television stations have been specifically targeted by the U.S. and NATO. We'll wait in vain for any American journalists of any prominence to voice objection to this latest outrageous example of the "protection of civilians."

Understated headlines

2011-06-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

Voice of America headline: "Israeli Troops Fire at Protesters at Golan Heights Border." But in the second sentence of the article will learn: "Syrian state media report at least 20 people were killed." Not worthy of the headline, though.

"Clashes"? Or murder?

2011-06-05T06:41:00.001-07:00

More peaceful Palestinian protesters have been shot and killed by Israeli forces in the Golan Heights. MSNBC actually reported on the deaths this morning, to my surprise (after leading their news with some "bounce houses" being blown by the wind, the all-important Casey Anthony murder trial, and other items of similar earth-shattering significance), but referred to the deaths as having occurred in "clashes" at the border.

No, MSNBC, firing on peaceful protesters does not amount to "clashes." It amounts to murder.

Update: CNN also reports on "clashes," although their coverage does not include even an allegation that Palestinians were so much as throwing stones.

War or terrorism?

2011-06-03T16:11:00.000-07:00

The U.S. government claims it isn't at war in Libya. But U.S. bombs have killed hundreds of Libyans. If the U.S. isn't at war, wouldn't that qualify as "terrorism"? [In reality, of course, it's both - war and terrorism.]

Another step for war without end?

2011-05-31T14:20:00.001-07:00

Remember how the U.S. government "proved" that Osama bin Laden (and, by extension, apparently, the entire nation of Afghanistan) was responsible for 9/11? No, you don't, since at least before the invasion of Afghanistan happened, there was little if any actual proof. But at least it was, in some way at least, a provable event.

Then there was the invasion of Iraq. Here, the proof was a combination of faked and imaginary, but again, the alleged reason for the invasion was, at least, in some way provable.

But now we have the latest declaration: the Pentagon says that cyber attacks on the U.S. will be met with physical counterattacks. Aside from the minor Constitutional issue ("If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," an unnamed military official told the Journal, which kind of skips the "Congress authorizes wars and the President orders them" step), we are now really in the realm of the unprovable, not to mention the spoofable. How can we not imagine the possibility that hackers in country A could "shut down our power grid" and make it look to all the world as if the attack came from country B? Or how can we not imagine, to be even more paranoid but not that much less realistic, that the U.S., wanting to attack Iran, could have one part of its cyber-war apparatus shut down the power grid and make it look to another part of the apparatus that the attack came from Iran? Or perhaps the evidence, which none but the tiniest handful of people would ever see anyway, will be inconclusive (just like the evidence of the Lockerbie bombing, to name but one of many examples), but the U.S. will announce (and who will be able to disprove them?) that it was conclusive and go ahead and attack whoever they want to?

It's a scary development.

The "final warning"

2011-05-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, Afghan "President" Karzai issued a "final warning" to NATO about killing civilians. The next day, NATO "protected" 38 more into the next life. So I guess that's it then, Karzai is going to expel NATO from Afghanistan, right? Right?

How the media covers for NATO, in even the smallest ways

2011-05-29T16:26:00.001-07:00

In the latest example of "protecting" civilians, this time in Afghanistan, the U.S./NATO forces killed 14 civilians. Then why do the opening words of the Reuters article read: "An air strike by NATO-led troops in southern Afghanistan killed at least nine civilians"? Well, because "The commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in southwestern Afghanistan apologized for the deaths of nine civilians." If he had apologized for the deaths of two civilians, apparently the article would have lead with that. And what is the basis for the commander's figures? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Contrast that to the detail provided by the Afghan governor, who reports two women, seven boys, and five girls killed (and has the bodies to prove it). Ah, but who needs facts when NATO has put out its "story" and that story must be reported, regardless of the lack of supporting evidence.

Of course it's a small matter. In a war in which thousands of civilians have been killed by U.S./NATO bombs, whether nine or 14 more were killed yesterday has little significance. The significance is rather proof yet again that every day, in every way, the corporate media strives to put the best possible face on the world's biggest terrorists, so that they may continue their "work."

Laugh of the day: "That's not who we are"

2011-05-04T15:09:00.000-07:00

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the U.S. government won't release bin Laden's photo (I saw more gruesome stuff on TV on "Body of Proof" last night, by the way) because "That's not who we are." We'll kill thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Libyans, etc., but releasing the photo of one dead man is "not who we are"? Really?

Government lies, media covers for them

2011-05-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

You all know the story by now. On day one, Osama bin Laden was killed after using a woman as a human shield, and resisted capture by firing back. On day two, there was no human shield, and he was unarmed (but still "resisted" capture, as if a bunch of heavily armed, well-muscled Navy SEALs couldn't capture an unarmed old man with a bad kidney without killing him and without endangering themselves).

This much is SOP - standard operating procedure. And, unfortunately, the media response is also SOP. Listening to tonight's news, I heard two different media outlets (NBC and BBC) give exactly the same excuse - "this kind of thing always happens, the information gets 'refined' as time goes on." No, media, the information did not get "refined." In reality, it's just like asking your kid who broke the lamp. First answer: "not me." Second answer: "not me." Third answer: "I tripped and fell into it accidentally." Final answer: "I was playing football in the living room and the ball hit the lamp."

With the military, it's virtually the same. The "refining the details" always goes from the initial "we did nothing wrong" (e.g., everyone we killed were terrorists) to "well, maybe we did" (e.g., yes, some civilians were killed in the crossfire) and eventually to "yeah, we did" (e.g., yes, they were all women and small children). The administration could have said "we're still learning details" on the first day, but no, the truth (if indeed the truth on day one was that they really were still learning the details) is not how they roll. No, they start with the spin, and eventually, the truth comes out. The only surprising thing here is how fast it did.

Or, should I say, how fast the initial lie has begun to break down; it's doubtful we still have the truth. The military is still sticking to the story that a helicopter "stalled" and couldn't take off so they blew it up. Really? Is quality control on U.S. military helicopters that bad that one out of four couldn't complete its flight plan? C'mon, it "stalled" because it was damaged by fire from bin Laden's guards. But admitting that would give some kind of "credit" to them and make "our boys" look less than superhuman, and it just isn't acceptable to do that.

Will we eventually learn that some of the attackers were in fact injured or even killed, contrary to the current story? I doubt it, since this was an extremely secretive unit of the types of people who would never let that kind of fact out, and the families of any dead will be given a suitable cover story about how and where their family member died.

As for the death of bin Laden itself, I'm willing to believe he is dead, but honestly, is the Administration trying to maximize the number of people in the world who don't believe it? It sure seems so. And as far as the "proof"? A member of Congress (Finestein I think) was telling the media that the DNA was conclusive. Really? What's the chain of evidence? For all we know, if this test was conducted (and I assume it was), they could have been comparing the DNA of one of bin Laden's siblings with the DNA of another one of his siblings. No, I don't actually think so, but whatever "evidence" the U.S. puts forward, it's hardly likely to be any more credible than the claims that bin Laden was armed or that he used a woman as a human shield. That is to say, lacking all credibility whatsoever.

Command and control center destroyed by NATO

2011-05-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

Not sure just what was being commanded or controlled, though:

Saturday's strike reduced most of the Gadhafi family compound, which takes up an entire block in the residential Garghour neighborhood, to rubble.

The complex targeted Saturday contained three one-story buildings and a large yard with lawns, geranium flower beds, a woodshed, a swing and a table soccer game. A dead deer and a twisted bathtub lay on the debris-strewn grass.

Cooking pots with food, including stuffed peppers, noodles and a stew, had been left on the stove, covered with aluminum foil.

In one of the living rooms, a pile of video games, including FIFA 10, were scattered on a sofa. In what looked like a children's bedroom, half an apple and a glass container of Nutella chocolate spread stood on a night stand.

And, of course, there are those civilians that NATO is supposed to be protecting:

In an attack officials said killed the leader's second-youngest son and three grandchildren.

I do hope that the "White House" realizes that targeting the residence of the leader of a country on the grounds that it is a "command and control center" makes it clear that, from their point of view at least, the White House is a legitimate military target. Heck, the White House even has a "War Room."

And then in another attack:

Shattered glass litters the carpet at the Libyan Down's Syndrome Society, and dust covers pictures of grinning children that adorn the hallway, thrown into darkness by a NATO strike early on Saturday.

The missile completely destroyed an adjoining office in the compound that houses the government's commission for children.

Shades of Yugoslavia (and elsewhere)

2011-04-25T17:11:00.000-07:00

The latest news from Libya:

"A separate airstrike elsewhere in Tripoli targeted Libyan TV and temporarily knocked it off the air."

Will we hear a single American newsperson condemning this attack on the press? As in Yugoslavia, and as in U.S. attacks against Al Jazeera in Afghanistan and Iraq, I very much doubt it.

And as far as bombing a library and reception hall in Tripoli to "protect civilians," will we hear a peep from the U.N. about the outrageous violation of their sacred resolution? Will we hear a single U.S. politician outside of perhaps Ron or Rand Paul and Dennis Kucinich condemning the attack? I very much doubt it.

Let's talk cluster bombs

2011-04-23T16:38:00.001-07:00

I continue to hear references to Libyan government use of cluster bombs, despite the fact that A) there haven't been any new alleged instances since the first; and B) there hasn't been any significant proof of even that first use. I continue to hear the phrase "banned by most countries in the world" without the following phrase "not including the United States."

And just what does the U.S. do with their cluster bombs, which are orders of magnitude more deadly than the ones allegedly used in Libya (which had 20 sub-munitions)? Read this account by Jeremy Scahill of their use in a 2009 attack in Yemen:

"The operation kicked off at dawn, as a Tomahawk cruise missile was fired from a submarine positioned in the waters off the coast of Yemen...

"Among those found at the scene were BLU 97 A/B cluster bomblets, which explode into some 200 sharp steel fragments that can spray more than 400 feet away. In essence, they are flying land mines capable of shredding human beings into small pieces. The bomblets were equipped with an incendiary material, burning zirconium, to set fire to flammable objects in the target area. The missile used in the attack, a BGM-109D Tomahawk, can carry more than 160 cluster bombs."

Notwithstanding such incidents, you'll continue to hear how it's radical Muslims and their beheadings that epitomize brutality. Not even close. Not even close.

And by the way:

"The investigation determined that the strike had killed forty-one members of two families, including seventeen women and twenty-one children. Some of the dead were sleeping when the missiles hit. Rimi was not among the dead, and survivors said they had no connection to Al Qaeda."

Not even close.

Cluster bomb hypocrisy

2011-04-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

I've been hearing and reading a drumbeat of stories about Libyan forces using cluster bombs against Libyan rebels, and it may well be true, although the Libyan government denies it. But let's consider. TV reports and many press reports have only talked of "cluster bombs" being used. But in a handful of print sources, we find that the total number claimed to be used so far is...four (with 21 submunitions each, for a total of 84 submunitions). Not exactly a major development. Furthermore, while many of the news items I've heard and read talk about how cluster bombs are banned in many countries, only one (I can't remember where I read it) actually named the countries that have not renounced their use, countries which include not only Libya, but the United States and Israel. I guess using cluster bombs wouldn't sound so bad if the reports mentioned that they aren't even prohibited from use by the good old U.S. of A.

And the coverage itself is interesting. Needless to say, there hasn't been one word reminding viewers and readers that the U.S. and U.K. used 1400 cluster bombs in Yugoslavia in 1999, with at least 100 civilians dying post-"war" after coming in contact with the unexploded bombs. Nor has there been one word about the massive use of cluster bombs by Israel in Lebanon in 2006, with an estimated 4.6 million "bomblets" which have killed over 200 people since the assault ended. 90% of those munitions were fired in the last three days of the war, in an act which can only be regarded as one of the most massive war crimes ever committed.

Here's something else to note. While Israel was regularly firing cluster bombs during their assault on Lebanon, and while the phenomenon of the unexploded bombs and their consequences was covered by the U.S. corporate media after the war ended, while the war was going on a paper like the Washington Post ran not a single story mentioning cluster bombs. Contrast that to what's happening in Libya today where, on the sketchiest of evidence, and on the basis of alleged use of cluster bombs which is quite literally dwarfed by the number used by Israel against Lebanon and the U.S./U.K. against Yugoslavia, the media is already filled with such stories.

False pretenses to start a war

2011-04-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, you're shocked, I know. After all, the Obama administration said the U.S. (only in partnership, of course) just had to intervene to prevent a genocide, a slaughter of civilians. Guess what? It was a lie, as data from Human Rights Watch shows. And it was a deliberate lie, as Obama misquoted Gaddafi by claiming that Gaddafi was planning to show "no mercy" to the citizens of Benghazi, when in fact it was the armed rebels to whom he was planning to show no mercy.

The author, like so many others, still holds on to illusions in the U.S. government:

"It is hard to know whether the White House was duped by the rebels or conspired with them to pursue regime-change on bogus humanitarian grounds."

No, it isn't. Obama was no more "duped" by the rebels than Bush was "duped" by "Curveball." In both cases, they deliberately used bogus claims to justify their planned actions.

You just can't get good help these days

2011-04-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

For the second day in a row, NATO airstrikes have killed significant numbers of Libyan rebels.

Be careful what you ask for, especially when you ask it of people who attack from thousands of feet away and to whom all dark-skinned people look alike.

Humanitarian intervention

2011-04-05T08:04:00.000-07:00

A little over a year ago there was a very real humanitarian crisis in Haiti (a crisis which continues to this day). Amount the U.S. government thought was appropriate to help solve this crisis? $219 million.

A little over two weeks ago, there were predictions of an impending humanitarian crisis in Libya, allegations that there would be widespread slaughter of civilians. Not an actual crisis, just a predicted (and definitely arguable, though you didn't find any such argumentation in the corporate media) one. How much money has the U.S. spent on that alleged impending humanitarian crisis? It was $550 million as of a week ago plus $4 million/day, adding up to $575 million and counting.

Is the U.S. really doing what it's doing in response to a humanitarian crisis? The numbers tell the story.

"Deliberate indifference"...on the part of the Supreme Court

2011-03-30T10:00:00.001-07:00

A New Orleans man spent 14 years on death row and was within weeks of execution before someone discovered that his blood type didn't match the killer (a fact known to the prosecution at the time) and he was set free. Now the Supreme Court has ruled that he's not entitled to $14 million in damages that a jury awarded him because the actions of the prosecutor didn't amount to "deliberate indifference."

And actually, the Court is quite right on that point. It wasn't "indifference" that convicted this man, but a very deliberate act of concealing exculpatory (to put it mildly, "exonerating" would be a better word) evidence, something that is all too common in the U.S. "justice" system. No, "deliberate indifference" is what the Supreme Court is guilty of - indifference to the plight of the thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of victims of the U.S. "justice" system, the system that really delivers good results only for "just us", "us" being the ruling class of the U.S.

The "Obama doctrine" is really the "Bush doctrine"

2011-03-30T09:17:00.001-07:00

Obama justifies the attack on Libya by the U.S. and friends on the grounds of hypothetical future actions. This is precisely the "Bush doctrine", spelled out in the National Security Strategy document, and enunciated most clearly by Bush in a June 1, 2002 speech (emphasis added):

We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.

By the way, if a supposed impending massacre of civilians in Bengazi was a threat to our "interests and values" (note, not even our "national security," just our "interests and values"), how much more so is the just as hypothetical development of nuclear weapons by Iran? If the "~~Obama~~ Bush Doctrine" can justify a massive attack on Libya, surely it can justify an equally massive attack on Iran.

Just sayin'.

In fond rememberance of WMD

2011-03-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

When George Bush wanted to invade Iraq, we were given the story that Iraq was amassing Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was a complete and deliberate lie, of course, but it least it was a provable lie. With the benefit of history we could know that Bush was either wrong or lying (with the vast preponderance of evidence coming down on "lying").

Now we've come to Barack Obama, and his war on Libya. There, we attacked, says Obama (and Gates and Clinton and etc.), to prevent a future slaughter. We know there would have been thousands of civilians slaughtered, probably tens of thousands (Clinton's number). It was a certainty. So now the U.S. is empowered to attack not only on alleged intelligence about the present, but about the wildest possible speculation about the future, speculation which can never be disproved. Really, that pretty much opens the door to anything, doesn't it?

By the way, there have been dozens of completely unarmed civilians slaughtered in Bahrain (how many unarmed civilians, as opposed to armed rebels, have actually been killed in Libya, is an open question). Today listening to the news I heard two different people (former U.S. Ambassadors and folks like that) talking about Bahrain. One managed to avoid mentioning the dead at all, with the clear implication that there were none, while the other downplayed them as insignificant and of a completely different character. Actually, as the first sentence of this paragraph indicates, I'd probably agree with him, but from the opposite point of view.

Incident at DCA

2011-03-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

In the news today, several planes had to land at Washington's National Airport without benefit of an air traffic controller because the control tower was "unresponsive." There are claims that the controller on duty was asleep, although this appears to be not confirmed. Pilots talking to each other in planes approaching the airport were actually heard speculating that the controller was "locked out" of the tower (!), and that it had happened before (!!).

The air traffic control system started downhill when Ronald Reagan broke PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, in 1981. And now we see where the continuing cutbacks in social services have gotten us to. Yes, perhaps this guy did fall asleep (or perhaps not). But why is there just one person doing such a critical job? What if he had a heart attack and died? What if he simply had to go to the bathroom and couldn't wait eight hours until the end of his shift? The idea that there would only be one person in an air traffic control tower is unacceptable. But it's the logical result of the direction this country has been going in for many years, starting (in some ways, anyway) with that notorious strike and union breaking in 1981, under the sainted Ronald Reagan (whose name I refuse to associate with the airport in question, even though in this particular case it's probably quite appropriate).

Today's studies in media bias

2011-03-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

In Libya, there were funerals for 33 victims of "coalition" air attacks. Excuse me, alleged victims. So the CNN headline informs me, backed up by the text of the article which informs me "CNN could not independently verify the circumstances of the deaths or who the victims were." And to emphasize the doubt in the reader's mind, we have the unchallenged blanket denials of the U.S. military:

Coalition leaders have reported no civilian casualties so far and said that Western jets have dropped precision bombs on military targets.

"It is not likely that civilians were a part of any airstrike today," said Joint Task Force Operation Odyssey Dawn Lt. Cmdr. Jim Hoeft.

No "CNN could not independently verify the preposterous claims of the historically untrustworthy U.S. military" accompanies that statement, as it should.

The rest of the article is filled with claims of victims of the Gaddafi regime. You'll search in vain for the word "alleged" in that part of the story, or for any disclaimers about how "CNN could not independently verify..." Instead, you'll simply find each claim attributed to someone: "a witness," "a resident," etc.

In Israel and Gaza, it's a different story. There, the key word used by AP is "retaliation," and, you won't be surprised, it applies only to Israeli actions. Even though there has been a clear "cycle of violence" even in the short-term, and both sides have clearly described their actions as in response to actions of the other side, AP (as essentially all Western corporate media) only considers Israeli actions as "reprisals" or "retaliation," never those of the Palestinians. Making matters worse, we hear another common (and thoroughly racist) phrase: "Two years of relative calm have been unraveling in recent weeks with acts of violence against Israelis." Palestinians, of course, have had no "relative calm," and have had continuous acts of violence against them, day after day, week after week, month after month. The AP reporter does have a good excuse, though, since virtually none of that violence has been reported in the corporate media.

Obama, you've been served

2011-03-23T14:09:00.001-07:00

Fidel Castro calls out Obama for showing up in Chile and talking about the peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy, without talking about the U.S. role in the not-so-peaceful transition from democracy to dictatorship.

Fidel doesn't cover it in this column, but the next day, Obama was in El Salvador praising Archbishop Romero, without mentioning how he met his death at the hands of U.S.-backed right-wing thugs.

Protecting civilians

2011-03-22T13:57:00.000-07:00

In Libya, a U.S. jet crashed. To save the pilots, the U.S. bombed one group of people on the ground (casualties unknown), and shot six more (who, by the way, were "rebels," the people the U.S. is supposedly protecting).

Meanwhile, massive bombing continues in Tripoli, including at Gaddafi's headquarters and in the port. Considering that this mission is supposedly about "protecting civilians" who are in the eastern part of the country, and establishing a "no-fly" zone to prevent harm to them, why is bombing needed in Tripoli? Was Gaddafi planning to bomb Tripoli so that the U.S. needs to establish a no-fly zone over that city? Do anti-aircraft guns in Tripoli reach as far as Benghazi? (Yes, these are rhetorical questions).

Meanwhile, eight more civilians were killed by another government, civilians who don't have the protection of a no-fly zone, or U.N. Security Council resolutions, or ICC indictments being issued against the perpetrators of their murders. Of course these eight were Palestinians in Gaza.

By the way, another question about Libya. For years we've been hearing from right-wingers about how the U.S. is surrendering its sovereignty to the "one-world government" of the U.N. Now the U.S. has gone to war, not in response to a Congressional declaration, but in response to a U.N. Security Council resolution. With the exception of a tiny handful of people (e.g., Rand Paul), where are all the right-wingers ranting about the U.N. now? (By the way, I don't really think the U.S. surrendered its sovereignty to the U.N. on this issue, it's actually the other way around as it has been for decades - the U.N. Security Council is actually a tool of the interests of the U.S. and its allies).

The U.S. gets its war

2011-03-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

The U.N. vote has now taken place, and, as I wrote earlier, not just for a "no-fly zone" but for active bombing of ground forces, indeed, "all necessary measures." What does that tell us? Russia and China were reputed to be planning vetoes. The fact that they didn't tells us (tells me, anyway) that the U.S. exerted tremendous pressure on them not to do so (while allowing Britain and France to play the role of figureheads in the debate, but neither Britain nor France can exert the pressure on countries like China or Russia like the U.S. can).

The U.S. has got its war.

I wonder what the liberals and leftists who have endorsed the "no-fly zone" as an antiseptic-sounding (if not in reality) "cure" will have to say now, now that "protecting civilians" has moved to a different level entirely. After all, the West still has that same "humanitarian" motive in their actions, don't they?

Quality education costs money

2011-03-17T14:20:00.000-07:00

Well whaddya know? An international study shows that if you want children to get a good education, you actually need to pay decent salaries to teachers, and even let them form strong unions.

And, by the way, that does not mean "merit pay" for individual teachers, which another study has shown to be ineffective or even counter-productive.

No-fly zone? That was yesterday's plan.

2011-03-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Today, the U.S. is trying to get U.N. approval for bombing Libyan ground forces. Imperialism never takes an inch when it can take a mile.

Afghan=Insurgent

2011-03-15T22:07:00.000-07:00

How much credibility do U.S. claims of killing "insurgents" have? This news pretty clearly answers the question. The U.S. claim:

"Last night we observed two suspected insurgents placing an IED (improvised explosive device) in the road. After we positively identified them, we called an air weapons team in, killing one and injuring another," the spokesman added.

The truth:

"Last night, two children who were irrigating their land were hit by a coalition air strike and both were killed," Abdul Marjan, the district chief of Sawkai in Kunar, told AFP. One local resident said the dead were two boys, aged nine and 15.

The character of the opposition in Libya

2011-03-14T21:18:00.000-07:00

Most people on the left (and, it goes without saying, most of the rest of the American and "Western" public) take it as a matter of faith that what is happening in Libya is a "revolution." Personally I have an open mind on the subject; my only clear conviction is a firm opposition to outside intervention. But I must say that some facts that are now coming out do shed some light on the subject. The man who has just been revealed as the military commander of the rebellion? Libya's just-resigned Interior Minister. And the rest of the Transitional Council? A collection of other former ministers in the government, and a number of other seemingly very bourgeois figures. A lot of things that indicate that what is happening is an internal struggle for power, and not much to indicate that what is happening is any kind of "revolution."

Against and for (!) (and against again) Obama

2011-03-12T08:38:00.000-08:00

Two Obama items in the news this morning. On the one hand, the utterly disgusting news that Obama has come out foursquare in support of the military's treatment of the unconvicted, unaccused Bradley Manning. "I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” says Obama. “They assure me that they are.” That would be these conditions, the ones which have been condemned by Amnesty International. Actually Obama's replay isn't that surprising from a "professor of Constitutional law" who believes that the U.S. has the right to simply lock people up and throw away the key without so much as a trial.

On the other hand, McClatchy writes today that "Likening Gadhafi's attacks to 1990s government attacks on people in the Balkans and in Rwanda, Obama said that the U.S. and the world have an obligation to protect innocent life." Actually, in his defense (again, !), that is not what he said, which was this [emphasis added]:

"I continue to believe that not only the United States but the international community has an obligation to do what it can to prevent a repeat of something like what occurred in the Balkans in the ‘90s, what occurred in Rwanda. And so part of, for example, maintaining 24-hour surveillance of the situation there is for us to have some sort of alert system if you start seeing defenseless civilians who are being massacred by Qaddafi’s forces."

So Obama did not "liken" the situation in Libya to anything else, and doesn't even concede in his remarks that "defenseless civilians" are being massacred by Gaddafi's forces. He doesn't even say that the U.S. has an obligation to prevent the deaths of all defenseless civilians, just deaths which occur in large numbers as was the case in Rwanda and (according to Obama, anyway) the Balkans.

Of course, the claim that the U.S. has any kind of "obligation" to safeguard defenseless civilians wouldn't ring quite so hollow if the U.S. weren't doing precisely that on a regular basis in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and hadn't done so in many orders of magnitude greater than anything happening in Libya when it invaded Iraq.

1000 Dead in Libya

2011-03-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

It's a curious number. Back on Feb. 23, near the beginning of current events in Libya, news reports told us that there were "1000" dead in Libya.

And now, two weeks later, with very heavy fighting going on daily? Why, we're told that there are "more than a thousand people dead." Just an observation on the credibility of news reports.

And, just so we're clear, that is not "a thousand civilians massacred from the air by bombing civilians" (as happened many times over when the U.S. attacked Iraq with its "shock and awe", or as happened when Israel attacked Gaza), but a thousand people killed in fighting between armed forces (albeit unequally armed, but isn't that almost always the case).

The cost of war

2011-03-07T15:14:00.000-08:00

I often call attention to the fact that, when it comes to launching wars (including no-fly zones), politicians and the media virtually never (and, in most cases, absolutely never) talk about the cost of their potential decision. They rarely talk about the legality or morality of it either, for that matter, it's mostly about effectiveness (e.g., "do the U.S. have enough aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean to enforce a no-fly zone?").

But there one exception in the mainstream media, my favorite newscaster, Shep Smith on Fox News. Shep was in fine form today, asking what we hope to accomplish in Afghanistan and Libya, talking about the cost of enforcing a no-fly zone, and sarcastically talking about the "billions of dollars we have just lying around" to finance such an effort. Not a leftist by any means, but a rare voice of sanity in the media nevertheless.

No-fly zone double-standard

2011-03-07T12:42:00.000-08:00

Gulf states (by which we mean, of course, the rulers of those states, not the actual people) have called for "no-fly zones" over Libya because, you know, it's unfair that there's a war in which one side has planes and bombs and the other doesn't, and it's important to protect "the people." I'll be waiting for the day that they extend that same sympathy, and concern for asymmetric resources, to the people of Gaza, being bombed almost daily by Israeli warplanes.

Strange (and telling) quote of the day

2011-03-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."
- Hillary Clinton, emphasis added

"You may not agree with it"? If it's "real news," Hillary, there's not a question of "agreeing with it" or not, it's simply the truth.

Of course, that's precisely what Clinton objects to (and that's the telling part). For example, Israel has been bombing Gaza almost every day for several weeks now. Every day, Al Jazeera will report on it, U.S. media outlets will not. And of course it's that that Clinton's referring to when she says "you may not agree with it." What she "agrees with" is the way U.S. media dutifully conforms to U.S. foreign policy, and reports precisely what the U.S. government wants it to report and not what it doesn't. Al Jazeera, by contrast, reports the "real news" - reality as it is, not as the U.S. government wants the American people to think it is.

I need not also point out the strange concept that Al Jazeera viewership is increasing in the U.S., since for 99% of the American public, Al Jazeera is available only on the Internet, and as a result, Al Jazeera viewership is undoubtedly considerably lower than the lowest-rated show on cable TV. Clinton might have said something about free speech, and about how she thinks U.S. cable companies should give their viewers the option to watch the "real news" of Al Jazeera. Of course she did no such thing, because, after all, even though it's "real news" she "doesn't agree with it."

Hypocrisy watch continues

2011-03-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

Pres. Obama says "those who perpetrate violence against the Libyan people will be held accountable." Really? When will he apply that standard to those who perpetrate violence against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Gaza?