William Bowles – Essays
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Haiti: Confusion in the Ranks By William Bowles
The only ‘evidence’ that supports the DV’s assertion that he fled is what the US government have said. So for example, Aristide’s ‘resignation’ letter was written on US government (embassy) stationary [1]. It was my understanding that Aristide phoned Randall Robinson, not the other way as the author states. How he got hold of a… Continue reading
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Haiti: Gangster (F)RAP(H) By William Bowles
No matter that the corporate media have done their best to cover up the outrage that has been committed against the people of Haiti, things have a way of working their way out into the light of day. The telephone conversation between Randall Robinson of the TransAfrica Forum and Jean Bertrand Aristide has blown the… Continue reading
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HAITI: ‘Textbook’ Imperialism By William Bowles
The tragedy that is Haiti unfolds once more in this, the 35th? coup since the world’s first black republic was founded in 1804 and once more the US role in the removal of Jean Bertrand Aristide is patently obvious to anyone who cares to dig deeper than the headlines that have flooded out of ‘propaganda… Continue reading
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Blair: Out-Gunned and then brought up Short By William Bowles
On Thursday 26 February, ‘lose cannon’ Ms Clare Short, former member of the Labour Cabinet went one step further and accused the Blair government of bugging Kofi Annan’s telephone conversations as well. Blair, understandably pissed off about Ms Short’s revelations attempted to make out that not only were Ms Short’s allegations untrue but in a… Continue reading
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HAITI: Rhetoric Versus Reality By William Bowles
So what else has changed in the following 179 years? Not very much and predictably, the media is doing a hatchet job on Haiti’s Aristide. A piece by Andrew Gumbel in Saturday’s Independent (21/02/04 p. 21) is pretty typical. Headed “The little priest who became a bloody dictator like the one he once despised” is… Continue reading
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National Endowment for Democracy: At It Again in Haiti! By William Bowles
The National Endowment for Democracy that ‘celebrated’ its 20th anniversary this year has a long and less than illustrious past. It’s dead hand has descended on a number of countries over the past two decades including Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela (currently also on-going) and of course Haiti. Continue reading
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Media Dumps on Aristide By William Bowles
Haiti, yet another US foreign policy disaster area, Western press coverage has been predictably less than forthcoming over the deteriorating situation. Indeed, trying to find out anything meaningful at all about the current situation has proved to be extremely difficult. Aside that is from what has become a de facto methodology of reportage of events… Continue reading
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WHY? By William Bowles
Is it credible that after a dozen years of sanctions, investigations, overflights, hundreds of bombing raids on virtually every military target of any significance in the country, spying via human and electronic means, that Iraq, probably the most ‘watched’ country on the planet, managed to ‘fool’ the most sophisticated countries on the planet? Continue reading
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Wriggling, Squirming and Sliding into Sleaze By William Bowles
As predicted, Blair has done his best to reset the agenda re the ‘dictionary’ definition of WMD but then what other choice does he have? Blair’s capos Reid, Straw, Hain, Hoon et al have been working overtime trying to do damage control but it’s the performance of Margaret Beckett’s that took the cake this week,… Continue reading
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Damn! What a Week (and it’s only Wednesday) By William Bowles
Hard to know where to begin what with Blair desperately seeking solutions. Kay, Jones, Powell and co, all spilling the beans (not, I add of the ricin kind) and jumping ship in what now looks remarkably like a total rout for the imperium. Blair protests in Parliament that Saddam’s ‘plans’ are pretty much the same… Continue reading
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Mea (Ex)culpa By William Bowles
Aish! Well I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised but in an op-ed piece in today’s Independent(03/02/04) by Mary Dejevsky headed “Let’s be honest: journalists failed as well”, we are told that: “We journalists failed to ask pertinent questions that could have at least cast doubt on the information the government supplied…. How could so congenitally… Continue reading
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It’s the spies wot gets the blame By William Bowles
“I saw evidence that was categoric on Saddam possessing chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Now I saw the evidence, so did the Prime Minister, so did other cabinet ministers. That informed our decision to go topple him. I think we were right in doing so, but let’s wait and see what the jury… Continue reading
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Coitus Interruptus By William Bowles
“US officials knew in May Iraq possessed no WMD”. So goes the headline in the Observer(01/02/04) but the reality is that the US government knew in 1991 that Iraq possessed no WMD as did the UK government. So what’s the argument all about? Why is it so important that a ‘battle royale’ is being conducted… Continue reading
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Shit Happens! By William Bowles
Not since the Suez Crisis of 1956 has the capitalist state in Britain been in such disarray, with every attempt to justify its actions backfiring in the most spectacular fashion. And when one looks back to the beginning of the propaganda campaign in 2002, a common thread has been one cock-up after another, with Blair… Continue reading
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Franchising the news or how to whitewash a whitewash By William Bowles
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… Continue reading
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Some Old White Guy Does The Whitewash By William Bowles
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… Continue reading
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Throwing the book at our leaders By William Bowles
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… Continue reading
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Dictatorship With a Digital Face: Blair and Bush Build the Corporate Security State By William Bowles
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?… Continue reading
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How the Dominant Culture Dominates By William Bowles
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. What is striking about that event… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 