Quote of the day: High praise for Assange

Stefan Lindskog, chair of the Sweden’s Supreme Court, told an Australian audience Wednesday that Julian Assange is, quite simply, a benefactor of humanity, as Al Jazeera reports:

“He’ll be thought of as a person who made public some pieces of classified information to the benefit of mankind,” he said.

“It should never be a crime to make known [a] crime of a state.”

Frankie the First: The austerian pope

Pay close attention to this Oscar Leon report from The Real News Network on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian Cardinal transformed into Pope Francis I — signifying his homage to St. Francis of Assisi, that most austere-living of saints.

Indeed, watch the headlines displayed in the video, and their invocation of papal austerity as sign of the new pope’s conspicuous frugality.

Watching the video, we had a perverse thought.

Frankie’s no liberation theologian, out to redistribute wealth. No, he’s here to preach the religious benefits accruing from the embrace of austerity. The poor accrue virtue by acceptance of their status, nay, by embracing their status.

Looking back at the recent history of the Catholic church, we see an easy acceptance of fascism in preference to communism, the provision of escape lines for Nazi war criminals in the wake of Nazi defeat, and the ongoing cooperation and funding of radical right underground groups during the Soviet era.

Who better to sell the austerian message to the peoples of, say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, that a Latin American pope who names himself after a hippie saint?

And he’s proven himself quite accommodating to oligarchical imposers of austerian measures, and now runs a city state with its own bank-with-a-troubled history, laundering both mafia and spook money.

Anyway, just a thought.

Pope Francis accused by family and friends of tortured priests

A full transcript of the segment is posted here.

UPDATE: Donning our Madison Avenue thinking caps, we came up with a slogan for the Vatican to use to sell folks on latter-day indentured servitude:

Poverty: Not just a necessity,
It’s a divine virtue!

Jorge and Jorge: Why are these men smiling?

One, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, nominally a fisher of men, and the other, Argentina military junta jefe Jorge Rafael Videla, a baby-stealing, “Dirty War-making, feeder of men to the fishes, snapped back when Jorge II ruled the political roost and Jorge I, now reincarnated as Pope Frankie the First, was the country’s top Catholic.

Photo from Indignados Lisboa  via (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography:

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.

A video excursion: The Wobblies

A 1979 documentary directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer features a remarkable series of interviews with veterans of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World — a remarkable and brutally suppressed effort to create a new form of union.

What’s especially delightful is the youthful, enduring spirit that shines through the aging faces and resonates through their voices as they recall their participation in a movement that had given them a vision of a brighter, more harmonious future:.

And note also that the movement was destroyed in an early 20th Century version of the war on terror in which the activists were portrayed as slaves of an alien ideology deserving of the application of extrajudicial military force and none of the constitutional rights that would apply did crisis not prevail.

The full DVD is available here.

And the IWW’s still here.

From Wikipedia.

Breaking the Set: Indefinite detention challenged

Another solid Breaking the Set episode from RT’s Abby Martin:

From RT:

EPISODE BREAKDOWN: On this episode of Breaking the Set, Abby Martin takes an in depth look at the lawsuit against the National Defense Authorization Act’s indefinite detention clause, starting with a short look at just how many people actually know about it. Abby then talks to one of the plaintiffs spearheading the lawsuit, Tangerine Bolen, about how the suit came to be, and why the corporate media has not picked up the story, Abby also talks to former whistleblower, Jesselyn Radack, about the extent and reach of the NDAA as it applies to journalists, activists and whistleblowers. BTS wraps up the show with an interview with journalist, author and lead plaintiff in the case against indefinite detention, Chris Hedges, about the historical precedent the NDAA lawsuit sets, and why every American should care.

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.

Juxtapositionalism: First a fact, then a question

Sometimes two items just seem to go together, especially for a blog that’s devoted some attention to AFRICOM and its links to Pentagon plans to exercise military suzerainty over resources in times to crisis.

First, consider the latest move to bolster AFRICOM, the  command spawned by a general who’s since become a private sector agrofuel and security consultant.

From Eric Schmitt of the New York Times:

The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

>snip<

A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.

Read the rest.

In light of the above, consider this question from Stephen M. Walt, Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard, in a blog post headlined “Top ten tough questions for Hillary Clinton”:

U.S. military forces are now organized in various regional combatant commands, each under a designated regional “commander-in-chief” or CINC. These regional CINCs have a vast array of military, intelligence, and other assets at their disposal, and the resources they can bring to bear far exceed those of the State Department. For this reason, foreign governments often pay as much or more attention to the CINCs as they do to the U.S. ambassador, for the simple reason that the CinCs can do more for or against them. Here’s my question: if you were an ambitious young person who wanted to make a mark on U.S. foreign policy, why go to a nice four-year college and then join the Foreign Service? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to West Point, Annapolis, or Colorado Springs and try to become a senior military leader instead?

Headline of the day: Will he use drones to do it?

“Executive action“? Really?

From The Guardian:

Joe Biden: Obama prepared to use executive action on gun control

Vice-president promises swift action from administration at inaugural meeting of national task force on gun control

Spy Tech: Here’s looking at you, kid!

Abby Martin of RT’s Breaking the Set and her producer, Manuel Rapalo, discuss the Top 5 creepiest big brother surveillance toys of 2012.

We’re not sure which is creepier, the cellular snitchery software or the Peeping Tom personnikins [if gendered terms are un-PC, why haven't we seen this one before we neologized it?].

And given that these are all commercially available, one has to wonder what else i out there in the hands of a government with the power to declare patents national security secrets. . .

A Christmas address from Julian Assange

Speaking from the balcony of the Ecuadorean embassy in London, Assange focuses on the plight of 232 journalists now behind bars and those like Bradley Manning now facing long prison sentences for exposing the secrets of those in power. He has few kind words for the mainstream press.

And then there’s his announcement that 2013 will see a million new documents posted on WikiLeaks.

From RT:

Drone Wars: Rise of the Machines – USA

From Journeyman Pictures [You Tube channel here] for Australia’s ABC television network, a disturbing look at the increasingly ubiquitous drones that threaten to to end what little privacy we have left:

From Journeyman Pictures:

Most people see drones as a controversial weapon prowling over foreign battlegrounds. But as America’s military campaigns wind down, these machines are coming home and set to change civilian lives forever.

“This is a powerful technology. No amount of hand-wringing is going to stop it”, says drone expert, Peter Singer. Whether it’s a floating TV station streaming live to the web, the prying lens of the paparazzi, the police chasing a criminal or a government agency spying, small domestic drones are experiencing an exponential growth. At the world’s largest drone convention in Las Vegas a salesman tells the crowd, “this can be used in law enforcement, disaster relief and industrial applications. It’s also very good at dusting floors. Every home owner should have one”. And as the technology advances at a frightening speed, anyone with a few hundred dollars can buy one over the counter. These hobby drones can fly for miles and provide sharp video feedback to the pilot. “I wouldn’t cheat on your wife!”, laughs columnist Charles Krauthammer. But jokes aside, there are real fears over the “political, legal and ethical issues that play out with this”, argues Singer. In 3 years time an order from the US congress will see tens of thousands of drones legally occupy an already crowded sky, raising numerous questions about basic safety, terrorism and civil liberty. As companies rush to cash in on this new billion dollar industry, experts warn, “we’re not ready for this”.

Terrorism ‘fusion centers’ suppress free speech

Today’s America has become a surveillance state on a scale never before seen, with local law enforcement effectively merged with super-secret federal agencies in an unprecedented effort to sniff out the slightest scent of dissent.

One result, as we’ve seen in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been the merger of law enforcement efforts through federally created “fusion centers”  and programs which bring local law enforcement officers [including the University of California campus cops] together with the notoriously brutal Israeli border police to learn how to beat protesters into submission.

Hell, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is even getting its own drone, though presumably not equipped with Hellfire missiles.

In that light, consider this report from the American Civil Liberties Union’s Blog of Rights:

When Boston Police Spy on Free Speech, Democracy Suffers

By Nancy Murray, Education Director, ACLU of Massachusetts at 9:51am

Psst! Check out this super-secret Boston Police “intelligence report”:

Local activists have been trying to get ‘celebrity guest speakers’ (Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon) for the March 24th demonstration, but at this time it appears that they have been unable to book any of these speakers for their event.

But some well-known speakers will be there. According to this intelligence report,” compiled by the Boston police under the heading “Criminal Act–Groups-Extremists,” among them will be Cindy Sheehan and a “BU professor emeritus/activist” whose name is redacted–it was the late Howard Zinn.

These excerpts come from one of several documents and videotapes obtained through a lawsuit brought against the Boston Police Department by the ACLU of Massachusetts and Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. We are making these criminal “intelligence” reports public today, along with a report analyzing its significance–and avideo of some of the peace activists who have been targeted.

We now have proof of what peace groups and activists have long suspected: Boston Police officers have worked within the local fusion spying center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), to monitor the lawful political activity of local peace groups and track their movements and beliefs. This information has been retained in searchable electronic “intelligence” reports bearing labels such as “Groups – Civil Disturbance,” “Groups–Extremists,” “HomeSec-Domestic” under the heading “Criminal Act.”

Under what interpretation of the US and Massachusetts Constitutions can the non-violent First Amendment activity of groups like Veterans for Peace and United for Justice with Peace be routinely classified as a criminal act?

If you have glanced at the US Senate subcommittee report on fusion centers that came out earlier this month, you may not be surprised to hear that Boston’s fusion center has been collecting dubious “intelligence” and violating civil liberties in the process.

Fusion centers were set up in the aftermath of 9/11 to facilitate the sharing of “terrorism-related” information among local, state, and federal law enforcement and private entities. But the Senate subcommittee report finds that the nation’s 70 or so fusion centers (the exact number is in dispute–DHS, which contributed the seed funding for the centers, doesn’t know how many exist today) have not uncovered a single terrorist plot.

Indeed, the spying centers have produced “nothing of value,” and instead needlessly duplicate the “more efficient information-sharing process already in place between local police and the FBI-led Terrorist Screening Center.”

Their output is often, in the words of one government official, “a bunch of crap.”

Much of it is also “potentially illegal,” according to the US Senate report, because it falls foul of federal privacy regulations and Department of Homeland Security guidelines that forbid the routine monitoring of groups and individuals unless there is reason to suspect them of criminal activity.

The BRIC’s own guidelines say the same thing.

And yet we now know that the BRIC, local and state police and the FBI have worked together to monitor and create “intelligence reports” on groups and individuals where there is no demonstrated link to crime or terrorism. There are indications that these illegal reports have been shared around the country, just how widely we don’t know.

Given the secrecy surrounding the “information-sharing” surveillance systems that have been erected since 9/11 and the lack of any accountability mechanisms, we can’t determine exactly where reports generated by the BRIC end up. Inaccurate information could have found a permanent home in a myriad government–and even private–databases, with harm to lives that can never be repaired.

The documents we received in response to our lawsuit demonstrate that the BRIC cannot effectively police itself.

According to the BRIC’s guidelines, “intelligence reports” that do not reference criminal activity should be destroyed after 90 days. And yet we obtained reports that should never have been written in the first place and were still being retained after five years. Why should it take an ACLU/NLG lawsuit to highlight the BRIC’s failure to enforce its own rules?

We know the political surveillance revealed in these documents wastes scarce tax dollars and police resources that would be better focused on building community trust and solving actual crimes.

And we know that political spying is bad for democracy.

You can view this videotape to hear some of the peace activists who have been monitored by the police or questioned about their personal beliefs talk about the “chilling impact” such surveillance can have on such core American values as freedom of expression and assembly.

Today, we are calling on the Boston Police to cease the routine surveillance of peaceful protests and the monitoring of individuals who take part in them.

And we are asking you to join us in demanding that reforms are put in place to ensure that there will be no policing of dissent in Massachusetts.

Let’s work together to ensure that our Commonwealth–and all of America–remains a Constitutionally protected free speech zone.

And here’s the video from the ACLU:

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

Apple patent would let them kill your iCamera

Yep, it’s the ultimate Big Brother tool for police, politicians, banksters, corporateers, and other sundry malefactors.

All those folks salivating over the latest iPhone should be aware that the company has taken out a patent that will allow Big Brother to shut off your camera whenever someone you never see decides you shouldn’t be taking pictures — say of a protest, as police beating, or of a plutocratic politician saying arrogant and asinine things.

From Disinformation:

Using your mobile device to take pictures of or film police, or a protest, or corporate property (or Mitt Romney speaking in a private meeting to his campaign donors) may become a relic of the past. Apple has patented its “geofencing” technology — in which camera/video phone functions will be remotely disarmed in particular locations, PetaPixel reports: Using your mobile device to take pictures of or film police, or a protest, or corporate property (or Mitt Romney speaking in a private meeting to his campaign donors) may become a relic of the past. Apple has patented its “geofencing” technology — in which camera/video phone functions will be remotely disarmed in particular locations, PetaPixel reports:

In June of last year, we reported on an unsettling patent filed by Apple that would allow certain infrared signals to remotely disable the camera on iPhones. It showed the potential downsides of bringing cameras into the world of wireless connectivity, which appears to be the next big thing in the camera industry. Now, a newly published patent is rekindling the fears of those who don’t want “Big Brother” controlling their devices.

If this type of technology became widely adopted and baked into cameras, photography could be prevented by simply setting a “geofence” around a particular location, whether it’s a movie theater, celebrity hangout spot, protest site.

Read the rest.

Given that we’re effectively living under  martial law, we have no doubt that the technology will be deployed.

It’s enough to make a photographer long for a camera that uses film, except that Kodak no longer makes it.

But what’s more ominous is that the Apple patent is just the first step. We suspect the technology will soon be demanded for inclusion in other digital cameras, at least those with WiFi. And how long before folks from three-letter agencies are able to electronically reach inside your camera and erase images? Come on, you know they’d like to.

Heck, we can see a day in the not-too-far-distant future when the cloak-and-dagger set might be able to fabricate an image and implant it in your iPhone or camera.

Once again, you know they’d like to. . .

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.

Rap News 15: Big Brother is WWWatching You

From Rap News:

Juice Rap News: Episode 15 – Big Brother is WWWatching You.  September 2012 rocks around with some crucial developments in the ongoing struggle over the future of the internet. Will it remain the one open frequency where humanity can bypass filters and barriers; or become the greatest spying machine ever imagined? The future is being decided as we type. Across Oceania, States have been erecting and installing measures to legalise the watching, tracking and storage of data of party-members and proles alike. If they proceed, will this place ever be the same? Join our plucky host Robert Foster as he conducts an incisive analysis of the situation at hand. Joining him are newly appointed Thought Police General at the Pentopticon, Darth O’Brien Baxter, and a surprisingly lucid Terence Winston Moonseed. Once again, in the midst of this Grand Human Experiment, we are forced to ask tough questions about our future. Will it involve a free internet which will continue to revolutionise the way the world communicates with itself? Or is our picture of the future a Boot stamping on this Human InterFace forever?

Written & created by Giordano Nanni & Hugo Farrant – on Wurundjeri Land in Melbourne, Australia.

The New York Times: From watchdog to lapdog

The latest sad example of the demise of a once-great American newspaper.

First, a video report from RT:

From RT:

New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti allegedly forwarded an advance copy of a column penned by colleague Maureen Dowd to a CIA spokesperson. The piece was about the film “Zero Dark Thirty” which is about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Dowd’s column criticized the White House for giving Hollywood inside information while leaving the public in the dark about the operation – this all coming to light thanks to documents disclosed by the transparency group Judicial Watch. Jeff Cohen, media critic and journalism professor at Ithaca College, joins RT’s Liz Wahl to talk more about subjective journalism.

But there’s no “allegedly” involved, as Glenn Greenwald notes in The Guardian, where he reproduces the actual emails:

The CIA had evidently heard that Maureen Dowd was planning to write a column on the CIA’s role in pumping the film-makers with information about the Bin Laden raid in order to boost Obama’s re-election chances, and was apparently worried about how Dowd’s column would reflect on them. On 5 August 2011 (a Friday night), Harf wrote an email to Mazzetti with the subject line: “Any word??”, suggesting, obviously, that she and Mazzetti had already discussed Dowd’s impending column and she was expecting an update from the NYT reporter.

A mere two minutes after the CIA spokeswoman sent this Friday night inquiry, Mazzetti responded. He promised her that he was “going to see a version before it gets filed”, and assured her that there was likely nothing to worry about:

“My sense is there a very brief mention at bottom of column about CIA ceremony, but that [screenwriter Mark] Boal also got high level access at Pentagon.”

She then replied with this instruction to Mazzetti: “keep me posted”, adding that she “really appreciate[d] it”.

>snip<

Moments later, Mazzetti forwarded the draft of Dowd’s unpublished column to the CIA spokeswoman (it was published the following night online by the Times, and two days later in the print edition). At the top of that email, Mazzetti wrote: “this didn’t come from me … and please delete after you read.” He then proudly told her that his assurances turned out to be true:

“See, nothing to worry about.”

Read the rest.

As Greenwald notes:

Here we have a New York Times reporter who covers the CIA colluding with its spokesperson to plan for the fallout from the reporting by his own newspaper (“nothing to worry about”). Beyond this, that a New York Times journalist – ostensibly devoted to bringing transparency to government institutions – is pleading with the CIA spokesperson, of all people, to conceal his actions and to delete the evidence of collusion is so richly symbolic.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The Times sunk into into present slough of despond starting with Judith Miller, the reporter who did so much to boost the Bush administration’s case for invading Iran with all those stories about nonp-existent stocks of uranium.

The Times, as with all American newspapers, has been devastated by the Internet economy, downsizing its newsroom a reducing overseas bureaus — nad in the process becoming all too reliant on the goodwill of governments.

This latest scandal is merely symptomatic of the decline of American journalism.

Here in California, we’ve seen wave after wave of municipal government corruption, greatly facilitated by the devastation of the state’s newspapers, which once played a vigilant watchdog role in policing the actions of governments and elected officials.

Three of the five newspapers we worked for in the Golden State are gone, the cities they covered no longer regularly covered by full-time experienced journalists and the financial resources needed to support their work. That, in turn, creates an environment where corruption can thrive.

That the New York Times has fallen so low is a tragedy; one we mourn. But we save our tears for the thousands of communities left with either no newspapers or with decaying husks of once thriving institutions.

We’d say we expect more scandals, but who’s left to expose them?

The Program, the secret omnipresent panopticon

From documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras for the New York Times, a short and chilling documentary on the National Security Agency’s massive Stellar Wind surveillance system and its growing ability to capture and keep all electronic communications and automatically create profiles of the actions of every American. And they are building the capacity to capture a century’s worth of the full electronic spectrum of all our phone calls, emails, texts, and other communications.

The video features NSA whistleblower William Binney, who worked for the agency for 32 years and has revealed the existence of Stellar Wind, the ultimate Big Brotherish domestic surveillance program that uses technology Binney developed during the Cold War for spying on the Soviet Union.

Poitras, a New York documentarian, isn’t afraid of controversial subjects, and this documentary was created for incorporation into a trio of films she’s making about post-9/11 America.

Her choice of material has provoked considerable interest from the government, as she writes in the Times op-ed accompanying the film:

To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

Read the rest.