Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Fri Aug 01, 2008 at 11:04:07 AM EDT

The operation is being directed by members of the International Solidarity Movement and the Israeli Commission against House Demolitions. A Web site, FreeGaza, has been set up to collect donations and update the public.

The group - which numbers some 40 activists - has purchased two boats, one called SS Free Gaza and the other SS Liberty, named after the USS Liberty that was mistakenly bombed by the Israel Air Force during the Six Day War. Thirty-four American sailors were killed in the bombing." http://www.jpost.com/servlet/S...

-- >The US media, including the NY Times, has completely avoided this story. We must go to an Israeli paper, the Jerusalem Post, for an accurate reporting on this dramatic attempt by international activist to break the Gaza blockade.
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The headline atop Saturday's op-ed page was a hallowed standby for the New York Times: "Americans Move to the Middle." Assembled by Times "visual columnist" Charles Blow, the text of the column was dwarfed by 15 graphs tracking recent movement in American public opinion, based on Gallup polls. There was one problem: the headline totally distorted the data.

An accurate headline would have been "American Opinion Moves Leftward" - but accuracy was apparently trumped by centrist ideology....

Examples:
- "The Iraq war has made the U.S. less safe from terrorism." 37% in 2003 and 49% four years later.

- "The government is spending too much for national defense and military purposes." 19% in Feb. 2001 and 44% in Feb. 2008.

- "Organized religion should have less influence in this nation." 22% in Jan. 2001 and 34% in Jan. 2008.

"The reality is that longterm trends in American opinion are generally leftward on issues, as documented in well-researched studies.

It's a reality that troubles those Beltway pundits who constantly goad Barack Obama toward "the center" on issues like Iraq and NAFTA - when they mean, move away from the center of mass opinion and upwards toward the center of elite opinion." http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

-- >Article by Jeff Cohen, director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College. He founded the media watch group FAIR in 1986.
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"The United States security coordinator for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, retired general James Jones, is preparing an extremely critical report of Israel's policies in the territories and its attitude toward the Palestinian Authority's security services.

A few copies of the report's executive summary (or, according to some sources, a draft of it) have been given to senior Bush Administration officials, and it is reportedly arousing considerable discomfort. In recent weeks, the administration has been debating whether to allow Jones to publish his full report, or whether to tell him to shelve it and make do with the summary, given the approaching end of President George Bush's term...

According to both Israeli and American sources, the envoy's conclusions about Israel are scathing. Israelis who met with Jones on his most recent visit here a few weeks ago, including Israel Defense Forces officers, said their impression was that the report would be "very harsh, and make Israel look very bad." http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/s...

-- >This story about US Israeli relations is similarly missing from our mainstream media, including the NY Times. This story, printed in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, fills us in on what our own government is doing. The NY Times cares more about protecting Israel's reputation than most news media in Israel itself. Or maybe Israel values freedom of the press more than this country does.
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"The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation's democracy by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

As Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the committee, made clear more than once during the six-hour session, this was "not an impeachment hearing, however much many in the audience might wish it to be." He might well have added that he himself was not the fierce defender of the Constitution and of the authority of Congress that he once was before gaining control of the Judiciary Committee, however much his constituents, his wife, and Americans across the country might wish him to be...." by Dave Lindorff http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

-- >True to form, the NY Times refuses to print anything about impeachment. Like the rest of the US media, impeachment is "off the table." And this assessment of impeachment's importance trumps US citizens' right to know.

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Fri Jul 25, 2008 at 11:55:29 AM EDT

News fashioned by the people in charge, the corporations and your government. Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine.

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"As historians ponder George W. Bush's disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal's "lost chapter," a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan's administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter - which we are publishing here for the first time - was "lost" because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter's key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship."
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

---> A "lost chapter" indicating CIA and private investment in feeding propaganda to the US people? Since the NY Times is tied up feeding propaganda about Iran to the public, it was too busy to cover this story.

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"Civil Liberties Groups Sue for Info on Cell Phone Lojacking...The complaint brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation seeks to compel the release of "all records pertaining to [the government's] policies, procedures and practices followed to obtain mobile phone location information for law enforcement purposes," especially when that information is sought without a warrant...

Cell providers are required to be able to pinpoint a phone's location under "Enhanced 911? rules originally intended to aid police and paramedics when a mobile user called 911."
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

--->So, are you being tracked by your cell phone? Without a search warrant? You would think that story would be interesting to readers of the NY Times. But many of the government's invasions of privacy are kept hidden by the country's media, including the NY Times, which didn't cover this Civil Liberties suit.

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"In just the last month, a number of major newspapers have announced they are cutting their news staffs:

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will cut 1,300 full-time employees;
The Tampa Tribune is laying off 21 newsroom employees;
The Daytona Beach News-Journal, up for sale, will slash 99 positions; and
The Los Angeles Times will cut 250 jobs, including 150 newsroom employees. And, the paper said, it will "trim story length."

In all, more than 900 newspaper jobs slashed in just 30 days."
http://www.commondreams.org/do...

--->The NY Times reported a story about less news coverage, based on a survey of top editors at 259 newspapers. The story attributed the diminished coverage to financial pressures, but made no reference to the massive cuts in newsroom staff. Another NY Times story did mention 150 newsroom employees being cut from the LA Times.

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Thu Jul 17, 2008 at 22:11:01 PM EDT

ACLU director Anthony Romero on Tuesday accused the Bush administration of "obstruction of justice" by delaying approval of the license, which the government argues is required under U.S. law because the beneficiaries of the lawyers' services are foreign terrorists.

"Now the government is stonewalling again by not allowing Americans' private dollars to be paid to American lawyers to defend civil liberties," Romero said. http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

--- >Although the NY Times has published stories about Guantanamo, this example of US attempting to subvert justice must have seemed to anti- American. The NY Times did not publish the story.
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"Madlala-Routledge thinks that the struggle against the occupation is not succeeding (in the West Bank) because of U.S. support for Israel - not the case with apartheid, which international sanctions helped destroy. Here, the racist ideology is also reinforced by religion, which was not the case in South Africa. "Talk about the 'promised land' and the 'chosen people' adds a religious dimension to racism which we did not have."

Equally harsh are the remarks of the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times of South Africa, Mondli Makhanya, 38. "When you observe from afar you know that things are bad, but you do not know how bad. Nothing can prepare you for the evil we have seen here. In a certain sense, it is worse, worse, worse than everything we endured. The level of the apartheid, the racism and the brutality are worse than the worst period of apartheid.

"The apartheid regime viewed the blacks as inferior; I do not think the Israelis see the Palestinians as human beings at all. How can a human brain engineer this total separation, the separate roads, the checkpoints? What we went through was terrible, terrible, terrible - and yet there is no comparison. Here it is more terrible. We also knew that it would end one day; here there is no end in sight. The end of the tunnel is blacker than black. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/s...

--- >The NY Times hardly prints any news critical of human rights abuses by Israel. A story like this would never get by the pro-Israeli censors. True to form, this visit to the West Bank by black South Africans was never covered.
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"A US air strike killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, as they were traveling to a wedding in Afghanistan, an official inquiry found today. The bride was among the dead.

Another nine people were wounded in Sunday's attack, the head of the Afghan government investigation, Burhanullah Shinwari, said.

Fighter aircraft attacked a group of militants near the village of Kacu in the eastern Nuristan province, but one missile went off course and hit the wedding party, said the provincial police chief spokesman, Ghafor Khan.

"We found that 47 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in the air strikes and another nine were wounded," said Shinwari, who is also the deputy speaker of Afghanistan's senate. "They were all civilians and had no links with the Taliban or al-Qaida." http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl...

--- >The NY Times covers this story slightly differently. Instead of the head of the Afghan government's investigation (and member of the Afghan senate) being quoted, it is "local officials." Maybe that is why the NY Times reported 27 civilians killed rather than 47.

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Fri Jul 11, 2008 at 09:48:47 AM EDT

The United States will spend 99 times more on defense than Iran in the upcoming fiscal year. U.S. fighter aircraft outnumber Iranian aircraft 12.4 to 1, and American planes like the F-22 Raptor are far superior to aging Iranian aircraft.

"It is dangerous to allow speculation about what Iran might be able to do in the future to permeate debates about the threat posed by Iran today," said Carah Ong, Iran Policy Analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "Conflating future and present threats creates an artificial sense of urgency about what the United States must do to protect itself."
http://www.commondreams.org/ne...

--->Such rational talk, however, is missing from the NY Times. It didn't cover this story at all, although it published 58 stories in the last month about Iran and nuclear weapons.

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In recent weeks we've again seen an escalation of US/Israeli threats to attack Iran. Among many other examples, the House of Representatives is currently considering a resolution promoted by AIPAC that would effectively demand a blockade against Iran. This resolution has over 200 co-sponsors (including our own supposedly antiwar Rep. Kirstin Gillibrand), although a surge of opposition has prevented it from being passed so far. The resolution is H. Con. Res. 362.

Here's what those promoting military attacks and blockades on Iran don't want Americans to know: there's an offer on the table that could resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program and allow both sides to claim victory.

The former US Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering has made a case for talks with Iran without pre-conditions on multilateral uranium enrichment in Iran. It is even on Youtube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=kGZ...

--->But such stories don't sit well with the NY Times as this country eases into war with Iran. It didn't cover Pickering's statement. Nor has it covered House Res. 362 in the last month. The only "362" found in pages of the NY Times since early June is a story about a Mets and the Phillies game (the batting average of baseball player Damion Easley).

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The highly regarded American journalist Seymour Hersh just confirmed that the U.S. Congress authorized a $400-million plan to overthrow Iran's government and incite ethnic unrest. This column reported a year ago that U.S. and British special forces were operating in Iran, preparing for a massive air campaign. Israel's destruction of an alleged Syrian reactor last fall was a warning to Iran.

This week a Pentagon official claimed an Israeli attack on Iran was coming before year end.

Other Pentagon and CIA sources say a U.S. attack on Iran is imminent, with or without Israel. The Bush administration is even considering using small tactical nuclear weapons against deeply buried Iranian targets. http://www.torontosun.com/News... 2008/07/05/6077376-sun.php

--->The NY Times reports the story as "Mixed Reactions to Report on U.S. Moves Against Iran," although the only quotes used were those questioning Hersh's research and motives.

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Thu Jun 26, 2008 at 23:47:13 PM EDT

CBS News no longer stations a single full-time correspondent in Iraq, where some 150,000 United States troops are deployed.

Journalists at all three American television networks with evening newscasts expressed worries that their news organizations would withdraw from the Iraqi capital after the November presidential election. They spoke only on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid offending their employers.

--->This was a story from the NY Times, which does not hesitate to criticize TV news coverage. For the average person in the United States, the war has just gone away. Except for the patriotic advertising from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the Army Advantage Fund. Why have the news any different than the advertising anyway?

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The UN children's fund UNICEF has severed ties with an Israeli billionaire and financial backer due to his suspected involvement in building settlements in the West Bank, UNICEF said on Friday.

Lev Leviev, a real estate and diamond mogul who is one of the richest men in Israel, has supported UNICEF with direct contributions and indirectly by sponsoring at least one UNICEF fund-raiser.

UNICEF decided to review its relationship with Leviev after a campaign ... found "at least a reasonable grounds for suspecting" that Leviev companies were building settlements in Palestinian territory, a UNICEF official said.

--->The NY Times publishes only positive stories about Lev Leviev, an important diamond merchant and real estate developer in New York. It didn't cover this story, although the Israeli paper, Haaretz did.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/p...

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WASHINGTON - A Cambridge-based human rights organization said it has found medical evidence supporting the claims of 11 former detainees who were allegedly tortured while in American custody between 2001 and 2004, in what a former top US military investigator said amounts to evidence of war crimes.

Medical evaluations of the former inmates found injuries consistent with the alleged abuse, including the psychological effects of sensory deprivation and forced nudity as well as signs of "severe physical and sexual assault," Physicians for Human Rights said in a report scheduled for release today.

The report also alleges that in four of the cases, American health professionals appeared to have been complicit by denying the detainees medical care and observing the abuse but making no effort to stop it - charges that, if true, represent gross violations of medical ethics.

--->Few media outlets in this country covered this story. The NY Times didn't, although the Boston Globe did. Perhaps the story is too anti-American for the general public to read.

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A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

--->The NY Times prefers a lighter touch on such stories. Instead of accusing the Pentagon of torture, the Times presents them as unsure of the right direction. The NY Times story is entitled: "Notes Show Confusion on Interrogation Methods."

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--->The NY Times gets this week's award for the most effective propaganda images. In a recent story about the truce between Israel and Hamas, there are two pictures, one for each side. The Palestinians are in black hoods carrying rocket launchers. And the Israeli soldiers? They are playing volleyball. Masterful pro-Israeli propaganda. Something Isabel Kershner, the NY Times reporter with Zionist ties, is very good at.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06...

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Thu Jun 19, 2008 at 22:27:42 PM EDT

Some 3500 assembled to participate in panels and hear a range of speakers that included my colleague Bill Moyers, Senator Byron Dorgan, Center for Internet and Society founder Lawrence Lessig, Naomi Klein, Louise Erdrich and Dan Rather. Participants grappled with mobilizing grass roots movements around such hot button issues as continuing, big media consolidation and net neutrality - two words perhaps more elegantly phrased as "Internet freedom" keeping cyberspace open and accessible to all, regardless of income.

--->That story is from Common Dreams. The major sources of US media didn't even cover this story of emerging media reform in America. There was nothing on it in the NY Times.
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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Former Democratic presidential contender, Dennis Kucinich, has called for the impeachment of George W Bush claiming that the president set out to deceive the nation, and violated his oath of office with the Iraq war.

The Ohio representative yesterday introduced 35 articles of impeachment against Bush on the floor of the US House of Representatives. Kucinich unveiled a list of alleged illegal and improper acts by Bush, including war crimes.
He accused Bush of executing a "calculated and wide-ranging strategy" to deceive citizens and Congress into believing that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States.

He went on to say that Bush and Cheney lied to Congress and the American public about the reasons for invading Iraq in 2003 and abused their offices in order to conduct the "War on Terror" following the 9/11 attacks.

--->The NY Times, like most of the Democratic Party, remains uninterested in impeachment. America's newspaper of record didn't cover this story, although it gave wide coverage to Bill Clinton's impeachment for conducting a sex act in the White House. That was sex. This is the preservation of our Constitution, just not as important a story.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co...

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FALLUJAH - Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after "special weaponry" was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

Many doctors believe DU to be the cause of a severe increase in the incidence of cancer in Iraq, as well as among U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War and through the current occupation.

--->The NY Times has had one piece on depleted uranium in Iraq since 2005, and that was in a letter to the editor. With determined investigative reporting like that, who needs media reform?
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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By now, billions have evidently gone into single massive mega-bases like the U.S. air base at Balad, about 60 miles north of Baghdad. It's a "16-square-mile fortress," housing perhaps 40,000 U.S. troops, contractors, special ops types, and Defense Department employees. As the Washington Post's Tom Ricks, who visited Balad back in 2006, pointed out - in a rare piece on one of our mega-bases - it's essentially "a small American town smack in the middle of the most hostile part of Iraq." Back then, air traffic at the base was already being compared to Chicago's O'Hare International or London's Heathrow - and keep in mind that Balad has been steadily upgraded ever since to support an "air surge" that, unlike the President's 2007 "surge" of 30,000 ground troops, has yet to end.

--->The American permanent occupation of Iraq is the big story that always gets left out of our media. Occupation is the forbidden subject, be it in Gaza, the West Bank or Iraq. There is no freedom of the press in America when it comes to reporting on the empire.
http://www.americanempireproje...

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Fri Jun 13, 2008 at 14:41:37 PM EDT

Tutu was in Gaza on a three-day mission, sent by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the deaths of 18 Palestinians from a single family, who were killed by a wave of Israeli artillery shells in Beit Hanoun in November 2006. Tutu said he was in a "state of shock" after seeing Gaza and taking detailed witness testimony from survivors of the incident.

"We saw a forlorn, deserted, desolate and eerie place," he said. "The entire situation is abominable. We believe that ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade, this siege, if they knew what it really meant to ordinary people like themselves." The international community was also at fault, he said, for its "silence and complicity".

-This story from The Guardian. The NY Times, of course, is part of of the silence and complicity. It didn't carry this story at all, although other statements by Desmond Tutu about violence in South Africa were covered.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl...

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FORMER US president Jimmy Carter today claimed Europe should be "embarrassed" by the way it had allowed Israel to treat Palestine. Mr Carter used a visit to Wales to spell out how he thinks Britain can help bring peace to the Middle East.

Speaking on a visit to the Hay Festival, the Democrat, who led Americans from 1977 to 1981, said: "They should be encouraging the formation of a unity government that includes (Palestinian political parties) Hamas and Fatah.

"They should be encouraging Hamas to have a ceasefire in Gaza alone as a first step, with Israel as it has announced in the past it wanted to."

He added: "It's a horrible punishment of them and to see Europe go along with this, I think is embarrassing. It should be embarrassing. There's no reason to treat people this way."

-This story is from IC Wales in the UK. Carter's statements about Gaza are completely ignored by the NY Times. Two references to Carter were made recently in the NY Times, but both refer to the history of Camp David. The Israeli lobby works hand in hand with America's premier newspaper, making sure you don't hear about Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk...

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GENEVA - As the 61st annual World Health Assembly gathers in Geneva this week, a major issue that the world's governments are struggling with is patents on medicines, and whether the option to digress from a strict patent system should be endorsed by the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO).

The United States is the sole country obstructing the ability of the WHO to push for a more flexible intellectual property system, according to several sources. This issue is being negotiated at the WHO's Intergovernmental Working Group on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (IGWG).

According to the WHO's website, "developing countries remain largely excluded from the benefits of modern science." IGWG's mandate is "to prepare a global strategy and plan of action on essential health research to address conditions affecting developing countries disproportionately."

-The NY Times, a staunch defender of US pharmaceutical companies, didn't carry  this story.
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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This week the Guardian broke the news that an upcoming report from Reprieve (human rights organization) documents the use of as many as 17 American warships as floating prisons to hold detainees in the "war on terror". The report apparently documents not only descriptions of detentions at sea from released Guantánamo detainees, most of whom presumably were held in the early days of the "war on terror", but also more recent detentions on US warships, particularly in the Horn of Africa, a current hot spot for disappearances carried out by the US military and intelligence agencies.

The report also claims that in the last two years there have been several hundred renditions - another practice thought to have ceased after President Bush declared an end to it in 2006.

-When this story finally breaks in the US, it will not be because of the NY Times, which has refused to run this story.
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Thu May 29, 2008 at 20:17:24 PM EDT

But peace today is a nearly impossible challenge for the United States. The U.S. is far and away the most militarized country in the world and the most aggressive.

The U.S. spends over $600 billion annually on our military, more than the rest of the world combined. China, our nearest competitor, spends about one-tenth of what we spend. The U.S. also sells more weapons to other countries than any other nation in the world.

The U.S. has about 700 military bases in 130 countries world-wide and another 6000 bases in the US and our territories.

And why is this a little hard to believe for some of you out there? Our media and our politicians never talk about the empire. It is off the agenda, even though it is probably the largest issue confronting our nation. http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers...

Regardless of one's choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions in delivering water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees. Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the encapsulated area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children.

Whose voice is this? Not one heard in US media, which has pretty much eliminated anything the former president Jimmy Carter has had to say after his visit to occupied Palestine. The article is from the Times of India, where the Israeli lobby can't censor it. Here, the Israeli lobby dictates what you and I read about Palestine. http://timesofindia.indiatimes...

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WASHINGTON - A senior U.S. official said Wednesday that a proposed treaty banning cluster bombs would hurt world security and endanger U.S. military cooperation on humanitarian work with countries that sign the accord.

Stephen Mull, an assistant secretary of state, briefed reporters at the State Department to explain why the United States was not attending a gathering in Ireland of representatives of more than 100 nations working on a treaty to ban the bombs blamed for killing or maiming civilians as their mini-bombs explode months or years after they are dropped.

Cluster bombs are fired by cannon or dropped from aircraft and release hundreds of smaller explosives in the air that are supposed to explode upon impact. In Israel's 2006 war against the Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, the bomblets' failure rate was around 30 to 40 percent, and the United Nations said up to a million unexploded bomblets were left after hostilities ceased.

So there we have it. The US opposes limits on cluster bombs for "humanitarian reasons," a delicious irony waiting for any American media to expose. But the NY Times didn't see any irony at all. In fact, for the last two months it has refused to cover the issue at all. Perhaps the story is too anti-American for the nation's most prestigious propaganda machine. http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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Should the news media be patriotic? When a journalist uncovers a government secret, which comes first-national security or the public's right to know? In the United States, reporters consider themselves Americans first, journalists second. That means consulting the government before going public with a state secret. "When I was at ABC," James Bamford told Time in 2006, "we always checked with the Administration in power when we thought we had something of concern, and there was usually some way to work it out."

In a new book about the Bush Administration's efforts to expand the president's powers at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches, the assumption that the press shouldn't publish security-sensitive stories is so hard-wired that New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau accepts it as a given. But it's a very American concept, and one that relies on the presumption that the U.S. government may make mistakes, but is largely a force for good. In other countries, the relationship between rulers and the press is strictly adversarial.

Lichtblau's book is about the NY Times decision to delay for a year the story of the government's illegal wiretapping of its own citizens. With a media like that, who needs censorship? http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Wed May 14, 2008 at 21:52:54 PM EDT

Despite this, the truly extraordinary blackout by the major television and cable news networks - which were complicit in this program - continues. Howard Kurtz of CNN and The Washington Post previously called this blackout "pathetic", and yesterday, The Politico published a relatively impressive article further documenting the "deafening silence" from the networks at the center of this story.

As the article noted:
While bloggers have kept the story simmering, Democratic congressional leaders also are speaking out, calling for investigations that could provoke the networks to finally cover the Times story - and, in effect, themselves.

Here is an interesting story of government wrongdoing that the NY Times and Washington Post covered, but no the major TV networks. Of course, the Pentagon's planting of stories makes TV reporting look bad, not newspaper reporting. This from an article by Salon:
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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Amid all the talk about the U.S. military "surge" in Iraq, little has been said about the accompanying "surge" of Iraqi prisoners, whose numbers rose to nearly 51,000 at the end of 2007. Four years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, occupation forces are holding far more Iraqis than ever before and thousands more languish in horrendous Iraqi-run prisons.

Detainees are held by the U.S. command in two main locations - Camp Bucca, a 100-acre prison camp and Camp Cropper, inside a massive U.S. base near the Baghdad airport. The number of Iraqis held in these facilities has steadily risen since the early days of the occupation. In 2007, the inmate count rose 70% - from 14,500 to 24,700.

Camp Bucca, with about 20,000 inmates, is perhaps the world's largest extrajudicial internment camp. The facility is organized into "compounds" of 800 detainees each, surrounded by fences and watch towers. Most detainees live in large communal tents, subject to collapse in the area's frequent sandstorms. Water has at times been in short supply, while temperatures in the desert conditions can be scorching hot in the day and bone-chilling at night.
In October 2007, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a contract to expand Camp Bucca's capacity from 20,000 to 30,000. While easing notorious crowding, the contract suggests Washington is preparing for even more detentions in the future.

Camp Cropper consists of more traditional cellblock buildings. Among its roughly 4,000 inmates are hundreds of juveniles. Cropper is a site of ongoing interrogation and it holds many long-term detainees who complain that they never see the light of day. Though recently expanded, the facility suffers from overcrowding, poor medical attention and miserable conditions.

This article by the Institute for Policy Studies was never printed in the NY Times.  Perhaps it is too revealing of the continued human rights abuses America is committing in Iraq.
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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I fail to see that the envious and bitter attacks of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright should have created the crisis in Sen. Barack Obama's campaign when the remarks of Pastor John Hagee have not created a similar crisis in Sen. John McCain's campaign. Why is McCain somehow not responsible for Hagee while Obama is responsible for Wright? I suggest the difference is that the senator from Illinois is a Kenyan American and the senator from Arizona a white American.

A second question is why the elite national media fix on Wright and ignore Hagee. Wright, you will say, is much better media copy than Hagee. Yet the latter explains Hurricane Katrina as God's wrath on gays and lesbians and describes the Catholic Church as the "whore of Babylon."

As the watchdog group Media Matters points out in a recent report, two elite papers - The New York Times and the Washington Post - have paid 12 times as much attention to Obama's clergy as to to McCain's.

Since McCain accepted Hagee's endorsement on Feb. 27, the Times has published 46 articles about Obama and Wright and five articles about McCain and Hagee. The Post's score is 53-3. The Times has produced 22 editorials and op-eds that mention Obama and Wright and two about McCain and Hagee, and the Post scores 40-2. In the words of Karl Frisch of Media Matters, "It is time for the major media outlets to ask themselves if they've been covering the candidates for president with equally critical eyes. . . . If they are honest, they'll admit they have not."

One must wonder why not. Obama is the front-runner and hence his destruction is raw meat even for the top journals in the country. Surely both papers understand that many Americans are looking for a reason not to vote for a Kenyan American and that this gaffe will feed their hunger.
http://www.commondreams.org/ar...

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Amnesty International has called for the role of the United States in Somalia to be investigated, following publication of a report accusing its allies of committing war crimes.

According to the report, based on the testimonies of refugees who have fled Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, in recent weeks, Ethiopian troops have killed civilians by slitting their throats. Ethiopian and Somali forces were also accused of gang-raping women and attacking children.

But the NY Times is fixated on the Olympic Torch (a windfall for US propaganda). The only Amnesty International story it carried was about torch protesters in Hong Kong.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

Fantasyland Media

by: fnagel

Thu May 08, 2008 at 00:51:01 AM EDT

This is a wonderful example of just how distorted the NY Times coverage of Israel is. In fact, it is pure propaganda. Let's look at some of the article's assumptions:

-That Israel built the wall to stop suicide bombers. There is no mention that the wall is almost completely on Palestinian territory.

-That the wall has provided "enough quiet for Israel to resume peace talks," as if Israel was actually seeking peace rather than an appropriation of more territory.

-That Israel was interested in the economic success of Gaza rather than the strangulation of its population: "After Israel unilaterally pulled out its troops and Jewish settlers in 2005, some hoped that with Western support, the tiny coastal strip might become a model for a future Palestinian state." No mention of the blockade, of course, that has led to extreme shortages in food and medicines.

This story has no news in it. Nor does it have any other point of view (like a Palestinian voice). It is simply an example of how poorly the NY Times does when it comes to Israel. This front page article is nothing but one sided opinion presenting itself as news. It could have been written by the Israeli lobby. And probably was.

The writer, Ms. Kershner, is married to Hirsh Goodman, an Israeli who served as a Strategic Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an influential think tank dedicated to  promoting the Israeli agenda in the US.