Truth For A Change
11.16.2005
On the line: the internet's future
More than 40 world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, are set to attend, and the ownership of the World Wide Web itself is at stake. What the delegates won't discuss is the creeping spectre of censorship.
What began as a military research project at the Pentagon has exploded into the most powerful network in the world and an entity upon which the global economy increasingly relies. Its future character is now in question. . .
follow the link for the full article.
11.09.2005
Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Help Save Public Access TV!
Your Community Cable Channels (Public, Educational, Governmental) are
under threat by pending legislation in the House and Senate. Take Action!
Go to Link to send e-mails -- URGENT!!!
¶ 7:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
Help Save Public Access TV!
Your Community Cable Channels (Public, Educational, Governmental) are
under threat by pending legislation in the House and Senate. Take Action!
Go to Link to send e-mails -- URGENT!!!
¶ 7:03 PM 0 comments links to this post
11.07.2005
Fallujah. La strage nascosta [Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre] will be shown on RAI News November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT BIRDTM statellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 [5 pm] and over the next two days.
¶ 11:36 PM 0 comments
links to this post
The Concealed Massacre
Il fosforo bianco in azione
RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow November 8th on RAI-3 and will contain not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact, relates Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident. ¶ 11:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Il fosforo bianco in azione
RAI News 24's investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow November 8th on RAI-3 and will contain not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to those multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact, relates Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident. ¶ 11:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Dahr Jamail
What really happened in Fallujah and Ramadi?
During the November, 2004 siege of Fallujah, 60% of the city was completely destroyed. Most of the rest of it had moderate to severe damage done as well. Iraqi NGO's and medical workers in and around Fallujah estimate over 4000 dead, mostly civilians. To this day, over 50,000 residents of Fallujah remain displaced.
The US military used cluster bombs, depleted uranium munitions, and white phosphorous (a new form of napalm) during the siege, and appear to have used forms of chemical weapons as well.
I have described Fallujah as a modern day Guernica, and prefer to call it a massacre rather than a siege. Fallujah is the model of Bush Administration foreign policy. There has been next to no reconstruction completed inside the city, as was promised by occupation authorities.
What really happened in Fallujah and Ramadi?
Frankenstein in the room.
Cheney's career has been one power grab after another, of which Iraq is his magnum opus. And he has bred a culture of revenge, which led to the treason of Rove and Libby in the outing of Plame to the media. But now, people are starting to realize that they have a Frankenstein in the room.
¶ 11:01 PM 8 comments links to this post
¶ 11:01 PM 8 comments links to this post
Deconstructing Cheney
Boston.com
The Boston Globe
JAMES CARROLL
Deconstructing Cheney
By James Carroll | November 7, 2005
THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.
When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama.
As Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the nonviolent dismantling of the Soviet Union, Cheney warned Bush not to trust it. When the justification for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.
Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over diplomacy. The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks. The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.
With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as vice president) showed itself for a moment.
The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.
At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company ¶ 10:58 PM 0 comments links to this post
The Boston Globe
JAMES CARROLL
Deconstructing Cheney
By James Carroll | November 7, 2005
THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.
When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama.
As Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the nonviolent dismantling of the Soviet Union, Cheney warned Bush not to trust it. When the justification for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler.
Against Cheney's own uniformed advisers (notably including Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell), he forged Washington's choice of violence over diplomacy. The first Gulf War, remembered by Americans as justified, was in fact an unnecessary affirmation of military might as the ground of international order, just as an historic alternative was opening up. US responses in that period, mainly shaped by Cheney, stand in stark contrast to Gorbachev's, who, refusing to call on military might even to save the Soviet Union, was ordering his soldiers back to their barracks. The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda.
With all of this as prelude, it seems as tragic as it was inevitable that Cheney was behind the wheel again when the next fork in the road appeared before the nation. When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. The true nature of their relationship (Cheney, not Bush, having shaped the national security team; Cheney, not Bush, having appointed himself as vice president) showed itself for a moment.
The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it.
At world-shaping moments across a generation, Cheney reacted with an instinctive, This is war! He helped turn the War on Poverty into a war on the poor. He helped keep the Cold War going longer than it had to, and when it ended (because of initiatives taken by the other side), Cheney refused to believe it. To keep the US war machine up and running, he found a new justification just in time. With Gulf War I, Cheney ignited Osama bin Laden's burning purpose. Responding to 9/11, Cheney fulfilled bin Laden's purpose by joining him in the war-of-civilizations. Iraq, therefore (including the prewar deceit for which Scooter Libby takes the fall), is simply the last link in the chain of disaster which is the public career of Richard Cheney.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company ¶ 10:58 PM 0 comments links to this post
11.06.2005
Bush Is the Most Hated Man in the History of the World?
South American Protests: Bush Is the Most Hated Man in the History of the World?
a Planetary Pariah of Bibilical Proportions
By Rob Kall
An earlier version of this article was published in May, 2004. The violent protests in South America inspired a re-write and reprinting.
There may be a collection of fifty or sixty million blue collar NASCAR dads, fascist Christians, neo-nazis, racists, greedy pig rich people who unpatriotically refuse to pay their fair share in taxes, and the corporate traitors to humanity and the planet... even to life itself, who prefer to support money over the environment, biodiversity and a world that supports humans. These toxic takers are the vast minority of the world-- the supporters of Bush. But the rest of the USA and certainly, the rest of the planet, outside of the corporatists and fascists in other nations, consider George Bush, his verminous minions and cretinous, despicable supporters to be pariahs.
The dictionary defines a pariah as an untouchable. To me, an untouchable by caste is a person who is unjustly treated as a person to be totally avoided and to be accorded contempt. The untouchables in India are born into their caste and it is not their fault.
George Bush has grown into untouchable Pariah-hood. He has taken on the mantle of a religious fraud, the rapist of a nation, the despoiler of nations, the waster of billions, nay hundreds of billions of dollars of resources and assets, the killer of tens of thousands. The destroyer of thousands of homes.
It is very likely, much because the population of the planet has grown so much since the 1940s, when there were just over 2 billion people on the planet, to now, when there are over 6.3 billion, that George Bush is the most hated, most reviled man in the history of the planet-- more hated than Hitler.
His fellow Christianists (if we call Muslims who are fundamentalist and unable to function cooperatively in the world, treating other faiths with disrespect Islamists, then let's call Christians who can't respect other faiths Christianists,) craving early death through the end-times when the anti-christ arrives, ushering in the return of the messiah, believe he is moving them towards their life-rejecting path. But it is just as arguable, perhaps even likely, if one chooses to dance with the "rapture" story, that the ultimate evil anti-christ would masquerade as the great leader who would take the faithful to their dreamed upon heavenly glory. The ultimate antichrist would seem to be the good guy.
So.... right now, about 40 or 50 million Americans think Bush is the good guy. Maybe another 100 million Brits, Germans, Italians, Poles, Australians, Italians, Kurds, Iranians, Saudi princes and Japanese, hey, maybe even 500 million more have enough financial or political interests to also support Bush. I don't think most of those 500 million see him as a good guy. They see him as a venal scoundrel who will sell out his country in ways that support their interests.
That leaves about 5.8 billion people on this planet. The world Muslim population is close to 1.5 billion. Assume 97% of them hate Bush. The sane citizens of the rest of the planet have to see Bush and his supporters as venal, dangerous predators and leeches, fanatic religious zealot fools or duped fools.
Even NY Times centrist pundit Thomas Friedman says, "I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving."
It is tragic that such a small majority of active American voters have been able to create such a vile, reprehensible untouchable who most certainly is the most hated, most loathed man in the history of the world.
I wonder how Hitler's supporters felt when he was the most hated man. Did they realize they were supporting a monster? Were they proud to be contributing to his power? What about after Hitler fell, or Mussolini, or Idi Amin? Did their supporters realize what they'd helped to create? Did they stay loyal to their monsters? Did they see the light and experience regret? George is not the first ugly, planetary monster to be created. We should learn from his predecessors. Like dinosaur researchers, paleontologists, who study dinosaur shit, we should be studying the destroyed industries, the fraudulently justified actions and causes, the ecological disasters and the lies built upon lies and more lies that enabled Bush and his malignant predecessors to attain power. That way, at least we can begin to understand what enables a tiny fraction of the people on this planet to insanely ejaculate such loathsome creatures into such positions of destructive power upon our planet.
Like the puss in a pimple or infected wound, Bush is fulminating and the putrescent flesh surrounding this noxious crud-- Bush's Republican cronies-- is beginning to reject the toxic "substance." If a putrid infection is not treated soon enough, it may become gangrenous, killing the tissue around it. Bush is a disease that is highly toxic.
We see riots in France. Violent demonstrations following the path of Bush. The criminals, liars and thugs who represent the Bush administration and its supporters in congress should be facing serious protests. The right wing hate talk radio commentators should be jailed for echoing the right wing fascist government's lies. The protesters in Argentina have made clear, they don't hate Americans. They hate Bush and the Administration.
They hate the right wing Republican Theofascist, corporatist, Christianist extremists. Most of the world does. It's ironic that we can get help from the rest of the world to help take back America. ¶ 12:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
a Planetary Pariah of Bibilical Proportions
By Rob Kall
An earlier version of this article was published in May, 2004. The violent protests in South America inspired a re-write and reprinting.
There may be a collection of fifty or sixty million blue collar NASCAR dads, fascist Christians, neo-nazis, racists, greedy pig rich people who unpatriotically refuse to pay their fair share in taxes, and the corporate traitors to humanity and the planet... even to life itself, who prefer to support money over the environment, biodiversity and a world that supports humans. These toxic takers are the vast minority of the world-- the supporters of Bush. But the rest of the USA and certainly, the rest of the planet, outside of the corporatists and fascists in other nations, consider George Bush, his verminous minions and cretinous, despicable supporters to be pariahs.
The dictionary defines a pariah as an untouchable. To me, an untouchable by caste is a person who is unjustly treated as a person to be totally avoided and to be accorded contempt. The untouchables in India are born into their caste and it is not their fault.
George Bush has grown into untouchable Pariah-hood. He has taken on the mantle of a religious fraud, the rapist of a nation, the despoiler of nations, the waster of billions, nay hundreds of billions of dollars of resources and assets, the killer of tens of thousands. The destroyer of thousands of homes.
It is very likely, much because the population of the planet has grown so much since the 1940s, when there were just over 2 billion people on the planet, to now, when there are over 6.3 billion, that George Bush is the most hated, most reviled man in the history of the planet-- more hated than Hitler.
His fellow Christianists (if we call Muslims who are fundamentalist and unable to function cooperatively in the world, treating other faiths with disrespect Islamists, then let's call Christians who can't respect other faiths Christianists,) craving early death through the end-times when the anti-christ arrives, ushering in the return of the messiah, believe he is moving them towards their life-rejecting path. But it is just as arguable, perhaps even likely, if one chooses to dance with the "rapture" story, that the ultimate evil anti-christ would masquerade as the great leader who would take the faithful to their dreamed upon heavenly glory. The ultimate antichrist would seem to be the good guy.
So.... right now, about 40 or 50 million Americans think Bush is the good guy. Maybe another 100 million Brits, Germans, Italians, Poles, Australians, Italians, Kurds, Iranians, Saudi princes and Japanese, hey, maybe even 500 million more have enough financial or political interests to also support Bush. I don't think most of those 500 million see him as a good guy. They see him as a venal scoundrel who will sell out his country in ways that support their interests.
That leaves about 5.8 billion people on this planet. The world Muslim population is close to 1.5 billion. Assume 97% of them hate Bush. The sane citizens of the rest of the planet have to see Bush and his supporters as venal, dangerous predators and leeches, fanatic religious zealot fools or duped fools.
Even NY Times centrist pundit Thomas Friedman says, "I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today. I was just in Japan, and even young Japanese dislike us. It's no wonder that so many Americans are obsessed with the finale of the sitcom "Friends" right now. They're the only friends we have, and even they're leaving."
It is tragic that such a small majority of active American voters have been able to create such a vile, reprehensible untouchable who most certainly is the most hated, most loathed man in the history of the world.
I wonder how Hitler's supporters felt when he was the most hated man. Did they realize they were supporting a monster? Were they proud to be contributing to his power? What about after Hitler fell, or Mussolini, or Idi Amin? Did their supporters realize what they'd helped to create? Did they stay loyal to their monsters? Did they see the light and experience regret? George is not the first ugly, planetary monster to be created. We should learn from his predecessors. Like dinosaur researchers, paleontologists, who study dinosaur shit, we should be studying the destroyed industries, the fraudulently justified actions and causes, the ecological disasters and the lies built upon lies and more lies that enabled Bush and his malignant predecessors to attain power. That way, at least we can begin to understand what enables a tiny fraction of the people on this planet to insanely ejaculate such loathsome creatures into such positions of destructive power upon our planet.
Like the puss in a pimple or infected wound, Bush is fulminating and the putrescent flesh surrounding this noxious crud-- Bush's Republican cronies-- is beginning to reject the toxic "substance." If a putrid infection is not treated soon enough, it may become gangrenous, killing the tissue around it. Bush is a disease that is highly toxic.
We see riots in France. Violent demonstrations following the path of Bush. The criminals, liars and thugs who represent the Bush administration and its supporters in congress should be facing serious protests. The right wing hate talk radio commentators should be jailed for echoing the right wing fascist government's lies. The protesters in Argentina have made clear, they don't hate Americans. They hate Bush and the Administration.
They hate the right wing Republican Theofascist, corporatist, Christianist extremists. Most of the world does. It's ironic that we can get help from the rest of the world to help take back America. ¶ 12:00 AM 0 comments links to this post
11.03.2005
Wal-Mart --"TWO THUMBS"
“Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” deals with a lot the usual Wal-Mart criticisms – affects on small business, workers, unions, the environment and health care – but does so in a uniquely engaging way. By talking directly to mom and pop shops put out of businesses and interviewing a number of current and former Wal-Mart managers and workers, director Robert Greenwald effectively personalizes the struggle against the world’s largest corporation. His video
“Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” is making Wal-Mart hot under the collar -- stay tuned for more! - ¶ 10:19 AM 0 comments links to this post
“Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” is making Wal-Mart hot under the collar -- stay tuned for more! - ¶ 10:19 AM 0 comments links to this post
11.02.2005
World Can't Wait / Drive Out the Bush Regime
Students walk out -- march
against the Bush Regime
¶ 9:34 PM 0 comments
links to this post
against the Bush Regime
¶ 9:34 PM 0 comments
links to this post
World Can't Wait
1) 3:21 Mp3 radio speech ¶ 9:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
Mumia Abu-Jamal's Radio Broadcasts
Higher Quality Audio files available info@prisonradio.org
Copyright 2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal/Prison Radio
"Speech World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime"
Rec. 10-30-05
1) 3:21 Mp3 radio speech ¶ 9:15 PM 0 comments links to this post
