What Do You Call Edward Snowden? By Peter Hart

16 August 2013 — FAIR Blog

cbsen-snowdenOn CBS Evening News (8/13/13), anchor Scott Pelley gave viewers a brief–and very misleading–update on Edward Snowden: 

In an interview today, Edward Snowden appears to describe himself as a spy. Snowden is the National Security Agency computer specialist who spilled some of America’s top surveillance secrets. The New York Times asked Snowden about his collaboration with a reporter and Snowden replied, “As one might imagine, normally spies allergically avoid contact with reporters or media.” Snowden, wanted by the United States, is being harbored by Russia.

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Video: Jailed Journalist Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years For Reporting on Hacked Private Intelligence Firms

11 July 2013 — Democracy Now!

Journalist Barrett Brown spent his 300th day behind bars this week on a range of charges filed after he used information obtained by the hacker group Anonymous to report on the operations of private intelligence firms. Brown faces 17 charges ranging from threatening an FBI agent to credit card fraud for posting a link online to a document that contained stolen credit card data. But according to his supporters, Brown is being unfairly targeted for daring to investigate the highly secretive world of private intelligence and military contractors. Continue reading

NEW ASBO LAWS POSE GRAVE THREAT TO PUBLIC FREEDOM

30 June 2013 — Banned in London

The Manifesto Club’s Banned in London map showed the worrying extent of public space regulation, with hundreds of banned zones within which ordinary rights are suspended.

The new anti-social behaviour legislation announced in the Queen’s speech makes all this look very mild. Every draconian power has been replaced with something far worse.

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Dead Journalists and the Newseum Scandal By Peter Hart

14 May 2013 — FAIR Blog

newseum-memorialA memorial  for journalists who died while reporting the news wouldn’t seem to be the kind of thing that would attract controversy, but that’s exactly what’s happened with an exhibit at the Newseum.

On May 10, the Huffington Post‘s Michael Calderone reported that the museum was being criticized by “conservative outlets and a pro-Israel think tank” over the inclusion in its Journalists Memorial of two reporters from Al-Aqsa TV, which is run by Hamas.

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The Anti-Empire Report #116 By William Blum: Boston Marathon, this thing called terrorism, and the United States

3 May, 2013 — Anti-Empire Report

Boston Marathon, this thing called terrorism, and the United States

What is it that makes young men, reasonably well educated, in good health and nice looking, with long lives ahead of them, use powerful explosives to murder complete strangers because of political beliefs?

I’m speaking about American military personnel of course, on the ground, in the air, or directing drones from an office in Nevada.

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The Anti-Empire Report #114 By William Blum: Hugo Chavez…and others

11 March, 2013 — Anti-Empire Report

Hugo Chávez

I once wrote about Chilean president Salvador Allende:

Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but genuine independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume – a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that “communists” can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power – an elected Marxist in power.

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Wikileaks/Bradley Manning Newslinks 10 January 2013

10 January 2013 williambowles.info

 

WikiLeaks case likened to Civil War espionage

NavyTimes.com

FORT MEADE, Md. — Prosecutors are using a Civil War court-martial to advance their case that an Army private charged with sending hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks aided al-Qaida. Lawyers for Pfc.

http://www.navytimes.com/news/2013/01/ap-wikileaks-manning-judge-pushes-trial-june-010913/

 

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The Anti-Empire Report #112 8 January 2013 By William Blum: A Jihadist by any other name

8 January 2013 — www.killinghope.org

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

“France no longer recognizes its children,” lamented Guillaume Roquette in an editorial in the Figaro weekly magazine in Paris. “How can the country of Victor Hugo, secularism and family reunions produce jihadists capable of attacking a kosher grocery store?” 1

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NATO’s Rebel Forces By Luis Rumbaut

24 August 2011 — MRZine

At its peak, the 26 of July Movement had some 300 fighters, ill fed and poorly armed, bitten by mosquitoes and accompanied by the rain.  Against them, Gen. Fulgencio Batista mobilized an army, a navy, an air force, a coast guard, and the Rural Guard, aside from a network of spies and irregular bands of enforcers at his command.

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Why are we banking on banks to a promote economic recovery? By Danny Schecter

24 May 2011 — Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com

HBO’s “too big to fail” should have been about banksters “too big to jail”

This week the financial crisis finally went prime time in the form of a big budget HBO docudrama called “Too Big To Fail.”

It was a well-acted docudrama focused on the BIG Men and some women in the banks and in government who tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again up on that wall to prevent a total economic collapse when panic dried up credit and financial institutions faced failure.

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In Haiti, Reliving Duvalier, Waiting for Aristide By Laura Flynn

24 January, 2011 — Huffington Post

Laura Flynn is a writer, activist, and board member of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy

In the 1980s, when the armed forces of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime set about exterminating “Haiti’s Creole pigs”, they would come to Haiti’s rural villages, seize all of the “pigs”, pile them up, one on top of the other, in large pits and set fire to them, burning them alive.

A Haitian friend recounted this story to me this week. It was an image that she could not get out of her head since Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti. Because that’s what it was like for her, to watch Duvalier be greeted like a dignitary at the Port-au-Prince airport, and then escorted to his hotel by UN military forces — like being burned alive.

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9/11 Mind Swell By Joel S. Hirschhorn

911-07As we approach the eighth anniversary of 9/11 consider this paradox. In the post 9-11 years the scientific evidence for disbelieving the official government story has mounted incredibly. And the number of highly respected and credentialed professionals challenging the official story has similarly expanded. Yet, to the considerable disappointment of the international 9/11 truth movement, the objective fact is that there are no widespread, loud demands for a new government-backed 9/11 investigation. The 9/11 truth movement is the epitome of a marginalized movement, one that never goes away despite not achieving truly meaningful results, which in this case means replacing official lies with official truth. What has gone wrong?

Akin to the definition of insanity, the hallmark of entrenched but marginalized movements is that they continue to pursue exactly the same strategy and tactics that have failed to produce solid results. They indulge themselves with self-delusion, defensive thinking and acting as if the world at large must surely and finally wake up, see the light and embrace the Truth. Years and, potentially, decades go by, but this quixotic status quo remains embedded, as if set in intellectual concrete. There is no brain tumor to blame. Nor any mass hypnosis of true believers to prove. There is just monumental disinterest among the dominant culture, political establishment and the broad public that is far more engaged with other issues, problems and movements.

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William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 63

Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life

October 30, 2008
www.killinghope.org

Don’t tell my mother I work at the White House. She thinks I play the piano in a whore house.

The Republican presidential campaign has tried to make a big issue of Barack Obama at one time associating with Bill Ayers, a member of the 1960s Weathermen who engaged in political bombings. Governor Palin has accused Obama of ‘palling around with terrorists’, although Ayers’ association with the Weathermen during their period of carrying out anti-Vietnam War bombings in the United States took place when Obama was around 8-years-old. Contrast this with who President Ronald Reagan, so beloved by the Republican candidates, associated with. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how they spent their time when they were not screaming ‘Death to America‘. CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar ‘scary,’ ‘vicious,’ ‘a fascist,’ ‘definite dictatorship material’.[1] None of this prevented the Reagan administration from inviting the man to the White House to meet with Reagan, and showering him with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan.

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