31 January 2004
Lord who? So it seems that in spite of all the inquiries, denials, resignations and bellicose statements from the pirates, the entire programme to deceive the populace has come unstuck, unglued, unhinged and undone. People in increasing numbers want to know what uncounted thousands of Iraqi citizens and hundreds of ‘coalition’ soldiers died for?
30 January 2004
In 2002 when I first returned to the UK after many years abroad and started my long period of readjustment to this malignant society, a major part of the process was getting a handle on the media here. I read many of the leading ‘papers, listened to the news and of course watched it on tv. I tried to immerse myself in the gallons of turgid prose that gurgled out of ‘news central’, for that’s what it is, a factory for the manufacturing of ‘news’ for passive consumption, designed it would appear for an audience with the attention span of a gnat.
January 2004 — Information Clearing House
Index January 21-30 2004 Part 4
Date: 30 Jan 2004
271 DAYS … AND STILL NO WMD FOUND IN IRAQ.
Bush Declines to Back Call for Intel Probe:
President Bush said Friday “I want to know the facts” about any intelligence failures concerning Saddam Hussein’s alleged cache of forbidden weapons but he declined to endorse calls for an independent investigation.
story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040130/ap_on_re_us/iraq_weapons_investigation
29 January 2004
Do politicians lie? Do fish swim and birds fly? It’s difficult to know where to start with this ‘inquiry’ except to say that Hutton has transformed what was meant to be an investigation into the events surrounding the alleged suicide of Dr David Kelly and his being ‘outed’ by the government into a total whitewash of Blair’s rationale for going to war. Everybody involved in the entire disgusting and illegal invasion has been absolved of any wrongdoing, except the BBC, but more on this later.
26 January 2004
Lie (noun): falsehood, fabrication, prevarication, fib, untruth, falsification, invention, mendacity, canard.
Ah woe is me, what’s got into the world when those who claim to be fearless in pursuit of the truth – the great and glorious media, schooled, we are told in the art of assembling the dissembled – are afraid to utter the word lie. LIE! There, I’ve said it twice but I don’t feel any better. Perhaps if I contextualise it, I’ll feel less unclean, less soiled by our mendacious government headed by a gang of canards, who with the complicity of a cowardly media, falsify reality and prevaricate when challenged, fabricate inventions and tell us untruths about their reasons for going to war.
26 January 2004
Sunday (25/01/04) saw the launch of a new political party of the left in the UK, the Unity Coalition. The inaugural meeting held in the Friends Meeting House on Euston Road in London, was packed, with around 1200 people crowded into the main hall and represented a good cross-section of what’s left of left political activists, from the Socialist Workers Party, The Communist Party GB, the Socialist Alliance through to a number of Labour Party members but who understandably kept their heads down.
23 January 2004
Blair and Bush Build the Corporate Security State
We live in strange and unknown times. All the old paradigms as they say, have disappeared. The world most of us have grown up in has vanished, at least that’s the appearance of things. But have they, or is it that we have merely forgotten our history, that we have been down this route before? Perhaps it’s time to put the present in the context of the past.
January 2004 — Information Clearing House
Part 3 January 15-20 2004
Date: 20 Jan 2004
261 DAYS … AND STILL NO WMD FOUND IN IRAQ.
===
Israeli planes bomb south Lebanon
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3414431.stm
19 January 2004
In 1848 the Chartist Uprising petrified the ruling classes of England. The uprising, triggered initially by opposition to English colonial policies in Ireland swept across the length and breadth of the country. Strikes, marches and occupations and insurrections occurred in every major town and city in England and Wales. The rebellion has been documented in novel form by the historical writer Jack Lindsay in his book “1848 — Year of Revolutions” and well worth reading if you can find a copy.
January 2004 — Information Clearing House
[From the Archives. I’ve been archiving ICH digests since 2003. Unfortunately, an unknown number of the links are now dead, so I can’t guarantee that the link will take you where you want to go. WB]
Index January 9 – 14 2004
Date: 14 Jan 2004
Danish Tests Show Arms Found in Iraq Not Chemical :
The Danish Army said on Wednesday initial tests showed a cache of mortar rounds found buried in Iraq on January 9 did not contain any chemical substances as originally suspected.
www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4127077
12 January 2004
The latest reports to come out of Iraq reveal an ever growing level of resistance to US plans to create a puppet government for the country, not that you’d know it from Western news coverage aside that is from the (predictable) coverage of the Shi’ia statement by Ali Sistani, the leader of the Shi’ia Muslim community opposed to the July date for an interim ‘government’.
11 January 2004
The latest reports to come out of Iraq reveal an ever growing level of resistance not only to US plans to create a puppet government for the country but to the occupation as a whole, not that you’d know it from Western news coverage aside that is from the (predictable) coverage of the statement by Ali Sistani, the leader of the Shi’ia Muslim community opposed to the July date for an interim ‘government’ and the massive rally in Basra, the supposedly ‘stable’ area of the country, ruled by the British.
11 January 2004
At the close of 2003, 506 US soldiers had died in Iraq, the deadliest year for the US Army since 1972 when the US lost 640 dead in Vietnam. In the week following the capture of Saddam Hussein the death rate actually to rose to 19 (the average being nine).
9 January 2004
On the 14th of May last year I wrote a piece called “Remember to remind me”.[1] In small part it was about my confusion over two quotes, one by James Baldwin:
“If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own…. For if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”
January 2004 — Information Clearing House
[From the Archives. I’ve been archiving ICH digests since 2003. Unfortunately, an unknown number of the links are now dead, so I can’t guarantee that the link will take you where you want to go. WB]
Index January 2004 Part 1
Date: 8 Jan 2004
Corrected URL from 01/07/04 newsletter
Detained, Bludgeoned and Electrocuted into a Coma:
Even if the worst case scenario was true: that Mr. Abrahim was an active member of the resistance and/or a high ranking Ba‚ath Party member, does this justify being tortured by electrical shock and being bludgeoned into a coma?
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5482.htm
7 January 2004
What’s wrong with the Independent’s lead story on 6/1/04 that opened with the assertion?
“Air travel turmoil as terror threat grows”
Terror threat grows? Three loaded words for which there is not a shred of evidence that supports either the existence of terror or that there is a ‘threat’ or that it’s ‘growing’. Why this choice of words? For not only are they irresponsible as they have no basis in reality, they set the ‘tone’ for the entire front page article. The article then compounds its unsupported allegations when it says in the second paragraph:
6 January 2004
In a ten-day period, there were over 70 individual violent actions against Palestinians by Israeli Occupation Forces resulting in deaths and woundings of innocent civilians, destruction of property, confiscations and deportations. Where was the coverage in the Western Media?
How much do you think a Palestinian’s life is worth? Well if you were to judge it by Western press coverage of the occupation of Palestine, as near to zero as is possible. A survey of ten days of the Independent’s news coverage (supposedly sympathetic to the Palestinians) of the Palestine/Israel conflict (27/12/03 – 06/01/04) is extremely revealing:
5 January 2004
I suppose one can be forgiven for feeling depressed about the current state of affairs, after all the measure of the speed at which things change (for better or for worse) are not those of the average lifetime unless like all of us alive right now, we happen to be around when things really do change and unfortunately right now, not for the better.
4 January 2004
Our real task… is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity [U.S. military- economic supremacy]… To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming… We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization… we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” – George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning. U.S. State Department. 1948
“These men — in the most uncertain of times, amidst often noisy acrimony — made decisions that bore fruit only decades later. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, my colleagues and I were lucky enough to reap the harvest that they had sown.” – Condoleeza Rice on George Kennan
3 January 2004
Update:
“In another indication of the turmoil resulting from the increased security measures, an American official said that the cancellation of the British Airways flights was not in response to United States safety concerns, but rather was prompted by the refusal of British pilots to fly with armed marshals on board. The United States put other nations on notice earlier this week that it would not allow certain suspicious flights into its airspace without armed marshals on board.” [My emph. WB] – NYT, January 3, 2004 By ERIC LICHTBLAU
So why no coverage of this in the British media? One must assume that the story has some basis in truth for what reason could the US official quoted have for lying? The fundamental issue however, is why this was kept from the British public by the media who we are told, are purveyors of the facts?
The New Dark Age 