Headlines of the day: With a song in our heart?

From The Independent:

‘Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ closer to number one spot as it reaches midweek top ten following Margaret Thatcher’s death

From RT America:

‘Irreparable’ safety issues: All US nuclear reactors should be replaced, ‘Band-Aids’ won’t help

From ENENews:

TV: Gas release from U.S. nuclear site covered up? — Continued for several days — “Spontaneous, not controlled”

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Obama’s drone war kills ‘others,’ not just al Qaida leaders

From CNN:

Syria rebel group’s dangerous tie to al Qaeda

From Greek Reporter:

Labor Cost in Greece Drops Dramatically

From Spiegel:

Brain Drain: 120,000 Professionals Leave Greece Amid Crisis

Chart of the day: The power of propaganda

From Gallup, proof that the one well-financed campaign of propaganda and intimidation is working quite well [except in some places]:

‘How Your Tax Dollars Are Actually Spent’

Via Orwellwasright, a dramatic Al Jazeera visualization of the real budget battle’s driving engine, that military/industrial/academic complex Ike warned us about 52 years ago.

We suspect the real number’s larger. Nor were real impacts on, for example, academia made clear. Berkeley, with it’s bandolier of National Laboratories spawned by the search for The Bomb and expanded into engines of imperialism, as in the genetically engineered cops designed to conquer land rights and demolish peasant sovereignty on behalf of private profit and the interests of the U.S. military and their CIA drone-firing gunslingers now busily setting up shop in Africa, along with AFRICOM, the new military command launched by an Air Force general who lead the air war of Afghanistan.

And it was that same general who devixsed the strategy for converting the air force in agrofueled fleet.

Africa was also the first destination of crews from Berkeley’s BP-funded, national lab participating $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute, who launched searches for suitable crops to be turned into fuels using genetically engineered microbial refineries. If all those oil countries rebelled, at least there’d be fuel plantations, operating under the watchful missile-armed eyes droning overhead.

And that’s just one on many avenues in which the single largest burner of money shapes the landscape of possibilities. . .

Unclear Holocaust: From the Anti-Banality Union

From the Anti-Banality Union [ABU]:

UNCLEAR HOLOCAUST (2011)
Detourned by The Anti-Banality Union. 65 mins. U.SS.A.
Amerikan with some Arabic.

Unclear Holocaust is a feature-length autopsy of Hollywood’s New York-destruction fantasy, gleaned from over fifty major studio event-movies and detourned into one relentless orgy of representational genocide. It is the unrivaled assembly of the greatest amount of capital and private property heretofore captured in one frame, that, with unfathomable narrative efficacy, suicides itself in an annihilatory flux of fire, water, and aeronautics.

“A Terrorist film collective hijacks the U.S. propaganda apparatus and detonates it over New York. Everything is obliterated and the world celebrates. Through fifty studio event-movies abstracted of all demokratic variation, we see the Cinema as it really is; an unequivocal annihilation, the auto-genocidal mass fantasy of a megalomaniacally depressed First World. Every screen is lifted and bares the obscene underside of all these images. Movements of character and narrative burst into pure and mechanically perfect propulsions of a psychotic camera from which all this violence emanates. The Mise-En-Scene becomes an inventory of the dominant visual-auditory arsenal, enumerating and measuring the power of every weapon available to the Spectacle. Utilizing them all with paradigmatic rigor, the Hollywood-Military complex launches an endless pre-emptive attack on its own shadow, the Terrorist. And, as in all encounters between doubles, the former ends up joyously suiciding itself.” -A.B.U. Communique #1

“When I first heard of Unclear Holocaust, the debut project of nebulous situationist art collective The Anti-Banality Union, my initial impression was that these impious troublemakers would fully deserve the inevitable fatwa that will be vexed upon them. However, after viewing part of the work, which reconstitutes scenes from over 50 Hollywood New York City disaster porn films into a more or less coherent narrative, I am pleased to report it is a rather damning yet thoughtful–and dare I say hilarious and enjoyable?–reminder of how bad Hollywood had pushed this scenario. (In cinematic terms, what is 9/11, after all, other than all three* Die Hard movies–exploding tower, exploding airplane, exploding New York City–rolled into one?) “The Spectacle of Terrorism forces the Terrorism of Spectacle upon us…” the ABU wrote me in this mysterious, Frankfurt School-inspired communique. I’m reminded of the remarks Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw shared on 9/11 the other day:

‘Perhaps the whole point of 9/11 was that it could never be represented on the cinema screen. The diabolic, situationist genius of the kamikaze attacks was that they were themselves a kind of counter-cinema, a spectacle very possibly inspired by the art-form, but rendering obsolete any comparable fictions it had to offer. The 9/11 attacks smashed Hollywood’s monopoly on myth-making and image production, and inspiring as they did only horror and revenge, aimed a devastating blow at imagination, and maybe for a while enfeebled the reputation of cinema and all the arts.’

Thankfully for the ABU, Hollywood pulled its shit together and made Nicolas Cage apocalypse thriller Knowing, providing Unclear Holocaust about half its runtime.” -ScreenSlate.com

-?!

p.s. Expect ‘Police Mortality’.

‘James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq’

A stunning documentary from The Guardian about the secret presence behind reigns of violence in Latin America and Iraq:

The program notes:

A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.

Chart of the day: Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

Seizing oil, suppressing those who violently resist, and towing the Israeli line on nukes — that’s not just the American foreign policy line. It’s also the sentiment of most Americans, with that oft-cited “building democracy abroad” bit getting the short shrift.

The latest sad numbers from Gallup:

Quote of the day: Barry O, imperial president

Philadelphia Daily News scribe Will Bunch, writing at his blog, Attytood:

Obama’s expanded, top-secret drone war has allowed the U.S. to kill high-level members of al-Qaeda without the risks that ground troops have faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been fighting more than 11 years.

But in doing so, a president who promised “the most open and transparent administration in history” has gone to Nixonian lengths to hide its actions from the American people and from Congress. He’s ordered missile attacks on countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with which the nation is not at war – drone strikes that in addition to its targets have killed as many as 1,000 innocent civilians, including women and children.

And according to a White House white paper obtained by NBC News, Obama has claimed a power never even envisioned during the waterboarding-drenched years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – the ability to order the assassination of an American citizen believed to be engaged with al-Qaeda at a high level, even if that citizen is not currently plotting against the U.S.

Headline of the day: Israelis again ape Nazis

From The Independent, a headline recalling this:

Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent

Quote of the day: Heeding his master’s voice

Former Berlin Al Jazeera correspondent Aktham Suliman denouncing his former employer’s submission to monarchical control in a Deutsche Welle interview:

In the case of Syria, Al Jazeera barely reported about the rebellion in the first few weeks. Some of my colleagues and I protested, pointing out that there was stuff happening in Syria and we needed to report on it, regardless of our personal opinions. Back then, however, the ruler of Qatar was trying to change the Syrian president’s mind and encourage him to take certain steps toward political reform.

When Assad didn’t respond, Al Jazeera then said: Now get to work on Syria! It’s not a good feeling when you have the impression that you’re no longer a journalist, you’re basically just a guard dog responding to your owner’s whistle when he tells you to go after this state or that government. It was really quite extreme: this long silence at the beginning, then the frantic involvement afterwards – and with the Qatari ruler always the one calling the tune.

Quote of the day: The ‘genius’ of neoconservatism

From Harvard international relations professor Stephen M. Walt, writing in Foreign Policy:

Neoconservatism’s final strand of twisted genius is its imperviousness to contrary evidence. Because most of their prescriptions are so extreme, they can explain away failure by claiming that the country just didn’t follow their advice with sufficient enthusiasm. If we lost in Iraq, that’s because Bush didn’t attack Iran and Syria too, or it’s because Obama decided to withdraw before the job was really done. (Such claims are mostly nonsense, of course, but who cares?) If Afghanistan turned into a costly quagmire on Bush’s watch, it’s because Clinton and Bush refused to ramp up defense spending as much as the neocons wanted. If we now headed for the exit with little show for our effort, it’s because we didn’t send a big enough Afghan surge in 2009-2010. For neocons, policy failure can always be explained by saying that feckless politicians just didn’t go as far as the neocons demanded, which means their advice can never be fully discredited.

To be sure, neoconservatives are not the only people who employ the latter tactic. Liberal economist Paul Krugman famously argues that Obama’s stimulus package failed to produce the desired results because wasn’t big or bold enough; the difference between Krugman and most neocons is that Krugman may well be right. By contrast, there’s hardly any evidence to suggest that the United States would be better off if it had done all of the things that neoconservatives advised; all we can say with confidence is that the country would now be poorer, less popular around the world, and more American soldiers would now be dead or grievously wounded.

In this sense, neoconservatives are like someone who is constantly telling you to jump off a twenty story building, and promising that if you do, you’ll fly. If you decide to be prudent and jump from the 10th floor instead, and find yourself plummeting toward earth, they’ll just say you failed because you didn’t follow their advice to the letter.

Read the rest.

Two remarkable videos on a crucial issue

The presidential foreign policy debate was dominated by one single issue: Whether Mitt Romney or Barack Obama would do the most for Israel.

As Stephen Colbert commented the next day, “I was playing a drinking game last night where I took a shot of Manischevitz every time someone said Israel, and by the end of the debate I was totally diabetic.”

So today we offer videos offering alternative views on that most contentious of issues.

How We Can Solve The Palestinian Israeli Problem

Sami Moukaddem, a writer and musician born in Lebanon and trained in psychology at Trinity College Dublin, writes that “In 2009 I bought a video camera with no training in film making and embarked upon making a documentary on the Palestinian/Israel problem.”

From the film’s website:

This film is about equality, which makes me on everybody’s side. It’s my belief that oppression harms the humanity of the oppressed as well as the humanity of the oppressor. While this happens in different ways, ultimately, I believe we’re all in this together.

While emotionally I resonate more with the oppressed, my aim is to find ways to empower the oppressed, and also inspire both societies of the oppressor and colluding societies, so that all are moving towards equality.

Among the interviewees are Denis J. Halliday [former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq], British journalist Jonathan Cooke, Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, Israeli economist Shir Hever, Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire, Noam Chomsky, former British intelligence [MI6] officer Alastair Crooke, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, and Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer [who draws some ominous historical parallels].

It’s a warm, poignant, and ultimately hopeful story, and well worth your time.

H/T to Moussequetaire.

America’s Secretary of State, Benjamin Netanyahu?

A remarkable video featuring University of Chicago political scientist and international relations expert John J. Mearsheimer examining the sad subservience of Barack Obama to the agenda set by the Israeli prime minister.

The talk was delivered earlier this month at Koç University in Istanbul.

It’s a stunning and informative talk, revealing the extent of a foreign power’s control over the American foreign policy agenda, and the abject surrender of the national political establishment.

H/T to Pulse.

Mearsheimer also delivered a second address at the university, “Realism and the Rise of China,” which can be viewed here.

And a bonus video. . .

Here’s a White House video from May, 2011, of Obama and Netayahu illustrating Mearsheimer’s remarks. Pay close attention to the body language, both postures and gestures.

Killing innocents, making enemies, breaking laws

Living Under Drones, a just-released and stunning report on America’s drone wars from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law, offers a scathing debunking of the “death from above” strategy of “targeted killings” so eagerly embraced by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

First, a video featuring interviews with researchers and survivors from Brave New Foundation:

Rather than describe the report, here’s the first part of the Executive Summary and Recommendations, featuring a sharp, critical debunking of the rationale embraced by both administrations:

In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.

This narrative is false.

Following nine months of intensive research—including two investigations in Pakistan, more than 130 interviews with victims, witnesses, and experts, and review of thousands of pages of documentation and media reporting—this report presents evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of current US drone strike policies. Based on extensive interviews with Pakistanis living in the regions directly affected, as well as humanitarian and medical workers, this report provides new and firsthand testimony about the negative impacts US policies are having on the civilians living under drones.

Real threats to US security and to Pakistani civilians exist in the Pakistani border areas now targeted by drones. It is crucial that the US be able to protect itself from terrorist threats, and that the great harm caused by terrorists to Pakistani civilians be addressed. However, in light of significant evidence of harmful impacts to Pakistani civilians and to US interests, current policies to address terrorism through targeted killings and drone strikes must be carefully re-evaluated.

It is essential that public debate about US policies take the negative effects of current policies into account.

First, while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians. In public statements, the US states that there have been “no” or “single digit” civilian casualties.” It is difficult to obtain data on strike casualties because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability, compounded by the obstacles to independent investigation of strikes in North Waziristan. The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228-1,362 individuals. Where media accounts do report civilian casualties, rarely is any information provided about the victims or the communities they leave behind. This report includes the harrowing narratives of many survivors, witnesses, and family members who provided evidence of civilian injuries and deaths in drone strikes to our research team. It also presents detailed accounts of three separate strikes, for which there is evidence of civilian deaths and injuries, including a March 2011 strike on a meeting of tribal elders that killed some 40 individuals.

Second, US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may

Ex-NYT reporter blasts paper’s propagandizing

An important report from former Berkeley Community Access journalist Abby Martin on her new RT series, Breaking the Set, featuring a former New York Times foreign correspondent on the paper’s relentless pushing of the Washington line in its Middle East coverage.

As a veteran of 47 years covering the news, we can say Martin’s exactly right when she called his former post “a dream job.”

A foreign correspondent traditionally had far greater freedom in covering stories in the full breadth, knowing that there was little risk in stepping on advertiser toes of those of the publisher’s club buddies [always a hazard when writing about things closer to home].

Another former Times foreign correspondent lost his job over Mideast issue, but Chris Hedges was sidelined for participating in a demonstration against America’s Mideast military adventurism — and participating in any kind of demonstration would get most reporters fired from most American newspapers, since the ethics of American journalism require a reporter conceal her honest opinions.

But Daniel Simpson quit his job, and as any honest journalist will tell you these days, finding new jobs is a hard thing to do in the days of rampant downsizing and newspaper revenue collapse. [We also quit a job at a well-known paper for similar reasons, the suppression of this story.]

When he joined the paper in 2002 — when the Times was publishing “fake intelligence information to promote the war in Iraq” — he was stationed in the Balkans where, he said, he was supposed to be reporting on another fake war created by false intelligence against manufactured enemies [Serbs].

In the paper’s “fixed narrative line,” the U.S. was “portrayed as the good guys who had gone in to fix a problem.

At one point, he says, fellow Times reporter Judith Miller — the conduit for all those false spook-and-White-House-spun stories about Iraqi WMDs — tried to get him to report that Serbs were trying to sell Iraq WMD delivery systems [actually, spare parts for planes].

Senior staff at the Times, he says, thinks exactly the same way as the people in power, the very sources they’re told to cultivate.

For more on Simpson see this Counterpunch interview. He’s also written a book about his experiences, A Rough Guide to the Dark Side.

RT’s program notes:

Abby Martin discusses the ongoing narrative of sweeping generalizations resounding in the establishment following the wave of protests spreading across the Muslim world. BTS then interviews former New York Times journalist, Daniel Simpson, about his choice to leave the famous newspaper after citing war propaganda in its publications. Abby wraps up the show with a look at the United States’ notorious international military training facility ‘the School of the Americas’, with interviews from peace activist Father Roy Bourgeois, and takes a closer look at US foreign Policy in Latin America with a discussion with RT Producer, Rachel Kurzius.

Deep politics, history, and the Afghan War

A superb interview by RT’s Marina Portnaya of veteran New York Times and CBS journalist Jere Van Dyke on the Taliban, the Afghan War, and the deeper political and cultural context of a war the U.S. can never win — in part because the war is being fought against forces the U.S. itself created.

Van Dyke, a graduate of the University of Oregon and a military veteran, was held captive by the Taliban for 45 days, then released without explanation.

The takeaway: The war against the Taliban is something very different than is portrayed so glibly by American politicians, and one that could never be won, as so many other empires found at great cost.

We’re also very impressed with Portnaya, a young  journalist whose sharp skills are growing ever-keener.

Her first question, asking Van Dyk what the war on terror looks like through the eyes of the Taliban, drew this response: “No one has ever asked me that. Very, very good question, very interesting question.” Coming from a journalist with Van Dyk’s credentials, that’s high praise indeed.

Headline of the day: But we forget the question

And, damn, we’ve got the munchies.

From Al Akhbar:

Lebanon Agriculture: Hashish Remains the Answer

Innocence of Muslims: Sects, lies, and videotape

“Sam Baceli,” the man who directed the hate-filled Innocence of Muslims that’s inflamed the Middle East and inspired the violence that led to the death of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, has been unmasked.

And while he claimed he was Jewish and held Israeli citizenship, he’s a really a Coptic Christian from El Cerrito with a criminal record for fraud and backed by another Southern Californian with a lengthy record of connections with right wing militias.

From Gillian Flaccus and Stephen Brau of the Associated Press:

The self-proclaimed director of “Innocence of Muslims” initially claimed a Jewish and Israeli background. But others involved in the film said his statements were contrived as evidence mounted that the film’s key player was a southern Californian Coptic Christian with a checkered past.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, told The Associated Press in an interview outside Los Angeles Wednesday that he managed logistics for the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocked Muslims and the prophet Muhammad.

The movie has been blamed for inflaming mobs that attacked U.S. missions in Egypt and Libya this week as well as U.S. Embassy in Yemen on Thursday.

Nakoula denied he had directed the film, though he said he knew the self-described filmmaker, Sam Bacile. But the cellphone number that the AP contacted Tuesday to reach the filmmaker who identified himself as Bacile traced to the same address near Los Angeles where Nakoula was located.

Read the rest.

But the U.S. Justice Department disagrees, telling the Associated Press today that “Nakoula is filmmaker of anti-Muslim movie blamed for violence.”

And then there’s that criminal record

Wired’s Danger Room blog got the goods on Nagoula, specifically, documents from his federal criminal record.

Noah Shachtman reports:

He went by many names, the man who helped produce “The Innocence of Muslims,” the inflammatory video now roiling the Middle East: Matthew Nekola; Ahmed Hamdy; Amal Nada; Daniel K. Caresman; Kritbag Difrat; Sobhi Bushra; Robert Bacily; Nicola Bacily; Thomas J. Tanas; Erwin Salameh; Mark Basseley Youssef; Yousseff M. Basseley; Malid Ahlawi; even P.J. Tobacco.

But his real name — the one he used when he was sent to prison for bank fraud —  was Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. His habit of adopting other identities earned him a 21-month sentence in federal prison. During 2008 and 2009, court documents [PDF] reviewed by Danger Room. . .show that Nakoula again and again opened bank accounts with fake names and stolen social security numbers. Then Nakoula would deposit bogus checks into the new accounts and withdraw money before the checks bounced. The scheme worked for more than a year, until he was indicted in June of 2009. Eventually, he was ordered to stay off of the internet unless he got his probation officer’s permission, and pay a $794,700 fine.

Yet Nakoula’s fakery apparently continued. Actors hired to perform in “Innocence” say they had no idea the movie they were making would be so deliberately offensive to Muslims; in fact, many of the most provocative lines were overdubbed after the fact. Basseley swears he’s not “Sam Bacile,” the director and writer of the movie; he just happens to have a similar name, and coincidentally was found at the address tied to the cellphone of “Bacile.”

Read the rest.

The producer who sells insurance

Sam Klein, identified as a producer of the film, is another character with a checkered past.

From Adam Nagourney of the New York Times:

The history of the film — who financed it; how it was made; and perhaps most important, how it was translated into Arabic and posted on YouTube to Muslim viewers — was shrouded Wednesday in tales of a secret Hollywood screening; a director who may or may not exist, and used a false name if he did; and actors who appeared, thanks to computer technology, to be traipsing through Middle Eastern cities. One of its main producers, Steve Klein, a Vietnam veteran whose son was severely wounded in Iraq, is notorious across California for his involvement with anti-Muslim actions, from the courts to schoolyards to a weekly show broadcast on Christian radio in the Middle East.

Yet as much of the world was denouncing the violence that had spread across the Middle East, Mr. Klein — an insurance salesman in Hemet, Calif., a small town two hours east of here — proclaimed the video a success at portraying what he has long argued was the infamy of the Muslim world, even as he chuckled at the film’s amateur production values.

“We have reached the people that we want to reach,” he said in an interview. “And I’m sure that out of the emotion that comes out of this, a small fraction of those people will come to understand just how violent Muhammad was, and also for the people who didn’t know that much about Islam. If you merely say anything that’s derogatory about Islam, then they immediately go to violence, which I’ve experienced.”

Read the rest.

So who is Klein?

Well, there’s this, from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Over the years, Klein has worked with a variety of far-right groups, including the Church at Kaweah, which the SPLC lists as a hate group. The Church of Kaweah is a secretive cohort of militant Christian fundamentalists in California who are preparing for war and who believe that churches should avoid government regulation and answer only to God. Kaweah has its own militia, headed by David “Dutch” Johnson (aka Dutch Joens), a longtime antigovernment veteran of the militia movement. Johnson looks forward to the battle that will begin when “Dictator Obongo” institutes martial law. He has called Mexicans savages “who can’t run their own government” and recommended sending guns to drug cartels to “decrease the excess population in Mexico so they don’t come north.”

Klein also conducts drills with the Christian Guardians, a San Francisco-based group headed by Andrew Saqib James, an American-born Pakistani Christian who calls Islam “a giant crime syndicate” and hopes his group will become “the most feared militia in the world.” The Church of Kaweah’s website has advertised joint trainings with the Guardians, describing them as a “unique system of learning how to survive the Muslim Brotherhood as we teach the Christian Morality of Biblical Warfare.”

Read the rest.

A story about lies and overdubs

Another set of revelations concerns the role of the actors who starred in the film.

Turns out they thought they were shooting a low-budget sword-and-sand saga, and many of the words they appear to speak on the screen were actually dubbed in after the shooting was done.

The Gawker’s Adrian Chen reports:

Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.

The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.

“It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn’t anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything.”

In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product, now called Muslim Innocence. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George,” Garcia said. The word “Muhammed” was dubbed

Quote of the day: The silence of the [media] hams

From William Greider, writing in The Nation:

Israel’s prime minister is provoking another political dust storm over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but US news stories once again fail to mention awkward facts that are the true linchpin for this threatening crisis. Israel itself already has the Bomb. It developed its own nuclear weapons several decades ago, but has never officially admitted as much. And unlike other nuclear powers, Israel has never signed anti-proliferation treaties, nor has it submitted its nuclear arsenal to regular inspections by international authorities.

Everyone knows this, at least the government officials on all sides do. Yet there seems to be a media taboo against sharing the information with the American public. Americans have a huge and dangerous stake in the matter. If things go wrong and Israel launches a pre-emptive unilateral strike against Iran, it would probably provoke retaliatory war-making by Iran. Like it or not, the United States could be pulled into yet another war in the Middle East to defend our ally. Shouldn’t people hear the whole story before the shooting starts?

Sam Bacile: Hate-provoking filmmaker and. . .

The death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens in a Benghazi rocket attack today resulted from rage against a cheesy film trailer [Google it; we’re not posting it].

The fellow who says he made the film calls himself “Sam Bacile,” and he claims to be an American who holds Israeli citizenship who makes his living either as a filmmaker or a real estate developer.

Problem is, there’s no evidence he’s made any films beyond Innocence of Muslims, which seems to be precisely designed to produce the kind of outrage it’s generated.

He’s not listed on the Internet Movie Data Base, and his name doesn’t appear in the data base of ZABA Search [a comprehensive database] either in California or anywhere else in the U.S. And a Google search for his name reveals no hits before the release of the film trailer.

Having covered both the film industry [and even having worked in it], we can say that if there’s one thing filmmakers want, it’s recognition. And real estate developers are widely reported on.

Given the bizarre lack of any prior web presence who a man who claims two high-profile vocations, we’re amazed at the credulity or the mainstream media in swallowing claims made over the phone to two reporters.

The Wall Street Journal’s Matt Bradley and Dion Nissenbaum identify him as a “52-year-old writer, director and producer,” while the AP reported he was 56.

Bacile claimed his film was financed by Jewish donors.

From AP’s Shaya Tayefe Mohajer:

“This is a political movie,” Bacile told the AP. “The U.S. lost a lot of money and a lot of people in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re fighting with ideas.”

Bacile said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world.

“Islam is a cancer, period,” he said repeatedly, his solemn voice thickly accented.

The two-hour movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” cost $5 million to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors, said Bacile, who wrote and directed it.

Read the rest.

And then there’s this, from AP reporter Esam Mohamed [emphasis added]:

Though Bacile was apologetic about the American who was killed as a result of the outrage over his film, he blamed lax embassy security and the perpetrators of the violence.

“I feel the security system [at the embassies] is no good,” said Bacile. “America should do something to change it.”

A consultant on the film, Steve Klein, said the filmmaker is concerned for family members who live in Egypt. Bacile declined to confirm.

>snip<

He told the AP he was an Israeli Jew and an American citizen. But Israeli officials said they had not heard of Bacile and there was no record of him being a citizen. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to share personal information with the media.

Read the rest.

Adding yet another layer of complexity to an already-murky tale, the film was heavily promoted by an Egyptian-American of the Coptic Christian faith.

So, we have a movie the looks like it was made by a high school student yet clearly designed to inflame outrage among Muslims, and it’s endorsed by Terry Jones, the Koran-burning Florida Fundie pastor.

And it comes just as Israel is beating the war drums and searching for a provocation to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and the Middle East and North Africa are aboil with tensions stirred up by an Arab Spring heavily promoted by Washington.

A U.S. ambassador is dead, the U.S. embassy grounds in Egypt were stormed and a flag burned, and millions of Muslims are outraged by a tawdry piece of trash designed to incite anger by a man who didn’t seem to exist before his trailer hit You Tube.

Forgive us for thinking something deep is afoot within that infamous wilderness of mirrors.

DARPA’s killer robot sets a new speed record

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency proudly released a video of it’s latest record-breaking achievement Thursday, a robot that can outrun the world’s fastest human.

DARPA explains on its You Tube post:

DARPA’s Cheetah robot—already the fastest legged robot in history—just broke its own land speed record of 18 miles per hour (mph). In the process, Cheetah also surpassed another very fast mover: Usain Bolt. According to the International Association of Athletics Federations, Bolt set the world speed record for a human in 2009 when he reached a peak speed of 27.78 mph for a 20-meter split during the 100-meter sprint. Cheetah was recently clocked at 28.3 mph for a 20-meter split. The Cheetah had a slight advantage over Bolt as it ran on a treadmill, the equivalent of a 28.3 mph tail wind, but most of the power Cheetah used was to swing its legs fast enough, not to propel itself forward.

Cheetah is being developed and tested under DARPA’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program by Boston Dynamics. The increase in speed since results were last reported in March 2012 is due to improved control algorithms and a more powerful pump.

DARPA’s intent with the Cheetah bot and its other robotics programs is to attempt to understand and engineer into robots certain core capabilities that living organisms have refined over millennia of evolution: efficient locomotion, manipulation of objects and adaptability to environments. By drawing inspiration from nature, DARPA gains technological building blocks that create possibilities for a whole range of robots suited to future Department of Defense missions.

DARPA’s website adds this quote:

“Modeling the robot after a cheetah is evocative and inspiring, but our goal is not to copy nature. What DARPA is doing with its robotics programs is attempting to understand and engineer into robots certain core capabilities that living organisms have refined over millennia of evolution: efficient locomotion, manipulation of objects and adaptability to environments,” said Gill Pratt, DARPA program manager. “Cheetahs happen to be beautiful examples of how natural engineering has created speed and agility across rough terrain. Our Cheetah bot borrows ideas from nature’s design to inform stride patterns, flexing and unflexing of parts like the back, placement of limbs and stability. What we gain through Cheetah and related research efforts are technological building blocks that create possibilities for a whole range of robots suited to future Department of Defense missions.”

“Department of Defense missions”? Hmmm. Wonder what that could mean.

Fortunately, the BBC asked the right question:

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has mixed feelings about the development.

“It’s an incredible technical achievement, but it’s unfortunate that it’s going to be used to kill people,” he suggested.

“It’s going to be used for chasing people across the desert, I would imagine. I can’t think of many civilian applications – maybe for hunting, or farming, for rounding up sheep.

“But of course if it’s used for combat, it would be killing civilians as well as it’s not going to be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers.”

Read the rest.

Ah, yes. That old “collateral damage.”

Democratic ‘democracy’ in action

In which Los Angeles Mayor and Democratic Convention chair Antonio Villaraigosa demonstrates that he has truly remarkable ears when it comes to hearing the things he wants to hear about God and Israel.

UPDATE: And by all means go to L.A. Observed for a Daily Show clip that perfectly captures the absurdity, including a very salient screen capture of the teleprompter the mayor was reading from, followed by a telling Jon Stewart zinger.