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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of December, 2005.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 508.
- Linked by Leo Strauss - Close advisors schooled in 'the noble lie' and "regime change" - Iraqis have asked Saddam Hussein's defence team to mull the possibility of fielding the ousted dictator as a candidate for future elections, according to one of his lawyers. . - Bulgaria and Ukraine will begin withdrawing their combined 1,250 troops by mid-December. If Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland and South Korea reduce or recall their personnel, more than half of the non-American forces in Iraq could be gone by next summer. - A leading human rights monitor published the names of 26 "ghost detainees" that it accused the United States of holding and possibly torturing in secret overseas locations. - The U.S. has looked at the media it can't control as the "enemy." - Voting Company Apparently Just Kidding About Pulling Out of State! Former Diebold Rep, Now on NC Election Advisory Board Certifies Diebold, Despite Apparent Failure to Comply with State Law Requiring Source Code Escrow! - Dan Nelson says he's not sure exactly what piece 9/11 evidence he uncovered triggered the government assaults, but says once he tried to go public, "all hell broke loose." - A report issued by the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) reveals that its former chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, violated federal laws in his efforts to refashion public radio and television as propaganda organs for the Republican right and the Bush administration. The report suggests that the entire CPB board was to one degree or another complicit in Tomlinson’s actions. - ...California Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham steered $500 million in defense contracts in less than a decade, according to the company’s own website, to a start-up San Diego software firm which—and here’s the beauty part—doubled as a lobbying firm. - Venezuela is once again at odds with other Latin American governments. This time, it’s with Bolivia, because of the general elections coming on December 18. Once again, the Latin American right is reacting with "rage" to a president who wins elections and has the support of his people. And in the middle are the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party, a Venezuelan official, and a bunch of idiots burning a Venezuelan flag in front of that country’s embassy in La Paz. Let’s take a look at the gossip... - The mystery about the installation of a United States military base in Paraguay begins to clear: The purpose is to drive a wedge into the Mercosur trade bloc and to control the region, objectives that contrast with the passivity of governments that should have reacted long ago. - Iraq has the second-largest oil deposits in the world, but Iraqis are forced to sit in excruciatingly long lines, waiting for a meager amount of petrol. - "This starts a slow motion commercialization of the national park system...What will be allowed stops just short of licensing ads for "The Official Beer of Yosemite" or "Old Faithful, Brought to You by Viagara.’" - Should historic inquiry cease, because the UN and the courts of Austria and Germany have stated their position on the Holocaust? That is no way to suppress fascism. It is fascism. - We must stop accepting that low-wage, low-benefit, part-time jobs are the best our children can do. We need to ensure a livable wage for all. - Fake and heavily spun news has emanated from the corporate media since (and before) the CIA launched Operation Mockingbird in the late 40s. ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc., ad nauseam, have worked hand-in-glove with spooks and government overlords for decades... - "If the United States government designed and implemented the policies according to human rights standards much of the problem of poverty could be resolved..." - Salvadorans Mobilize Against Gold Mining
- National Guard leaders visited Israel last week to forge a new relationship with that country’s Home Front Command ... - Founded by a Masonic cult and firmly affixed to the federal teat, the BYU administration has posted a nastygram to the tenured professor ... - ...if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press--particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press--upon which that country was founded. - America is meant to lose the war in Iraq. America is meant to lose the war on terror. America is meant to descend into anarchy at home. - Within the past two days Leading Democrats have all stated their support for the war in Iraq, once again highlighting how we must see beyond the false left / right paradigm and make it known to others that the Republicans and the Democrats are left and right arms used for the same agenda by the elite policy makers. - ...the British people have but two choices—either they surrender their civil liberties or fall victim to evil terrorists. It’s so simple—and very Manichean. Never mind that the alleged "mastermind" behind the London bombings, Haroon Rashid Aswat, is a British intelligence asset. - Private Israeli security firms have sent experts to Iraq's northern Kurdish region to give covert training to Kurdish security forces, an Israeli newspaper reported on Thursday. - While the United States spends billions on troop support in Iraq, the people serving the meals, scooping the ice cream, and washing the dishes make as little as 50 cents an hour. - This looks like an ominous pattern to me. - Despite C-SPAN’s stated goals, Extra!’s study found Washington Journal skewing rightward, favoring Republican and right-of-center interview subjects by considerable margins over Democratic and left-of-center guests. The study also found that women, people of color and public interest viewpoints were substantially underrepresented. - Its central aim is not to combat terrorism, but to hand the government and its security agencies unprecedented powers to silence political dissent. The sedition measures make this clear, allowing for organisations to be outlawed and individuals jailed for "urging disaffection" with the government or expressing sympathy for resistance to Australian military interventions, such as the one currently underway in Iraq. - by Dr. David Ray Griffin- The 9/11 Commission understood that its mandate, as we have seen, was to provide "the fullest possible account" of the "facts and circumstances" surrounding 9/11. Included in those facts and circumstances are ones that, according to some critics of the official account of 9/11, provide evidence that the Bush administration intentionally allowed the attacks of 9/11. Some critics have even suggested that the Bush administration actively helped the attacks succeed. - A U.S. Army officer who served with the U.S. governing administration in Iraq was arrested on charges involving bribery, money laundering and a fraud scheme... - ... it is the secrecy and immunity provisions of the legislation that have alarmed patient rights and open government advocates. The agency would be exempt from the Freedom of Information and Federal Advisory Committee acts, both considered crucial for monitoring government accountability. - ...Neil is taking part in a family tradition. Barbara and George H.W. Bush have long attended Moon's lucrative and stately peace festivities... - ...what if the truth is even more sinister? What if this murderous chaos is not the fruit of rank incompetence but instead the desired product of carefully crafted, efficiently managed White House policy? - If Michael Ignatieff is anything, it's connected, and I do not mean just to the relatively small establishment of Canada, I mean connected to the shadowy godfathers of world empire. Ignatieff has a rich career in America where truly loyal service, whether by natural or adopted sons, is always handsomely rewarded. - The State Department has been using political litmus tests to screen private American citizens before they can be sent overseas to represent the United States, weeding out critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy...In one recent case, a leading expert on conflict resolution who's a former senior State Department adviser was scheduled to participate in a U.S. Embassy-sponsored videoconference in Jerusalem last month, but at the last minute he was told that his participation no longer was required. - Recently, news reports in US and European newspapers have suggested that Washington and London are considering a major reduction in their forces in Iraq...most of these reports don't bother to state that if the troops are pulled back from the front and brought home, the Pentagon plans to replace their combat capability with air power.
- ...union leaders and workers sympathetic to the drive were targeted by undercover security guards. One former guard said he patrolled the store in civilian clothes, watching employees. Another said the store's surveillance cameras were used to follow certain employees. - Scandals Confront Military Security Industry - Not only was this 9/11 suicide shocking and difficult to understand, but the alleged victim's husband, Pendyala Vamsikrishna of India, was never even listed on the original Flight 11 manifest, only appearing later as a passenger on a couple of conflicting unofficial lists. - You'd think it impossible for US policymakers to be so foolish and cavalier about a key region, until you look at the mother of all Bush failures, Iraq, and see that similar ignorance and arrogance created that debacle. - "The lawsuit will charge that CIA officials at the highest level violated US and universal human rights laws when they authorised agents to abduct an innocent man, detain him incommunicado, beat him, drug and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan," the ACLU said in a news release. The release identified the jail as the "Salt Pit". - The Bush administration's covert plan to help energy companies steal Iraq's oil could be just weeks away from fruition, and the implications are staggering: continued price-gouging by Big Oil, increased subjugation of the Iraqi people, more US troops in Iraq, and a greater likelihood for a US invasion of Iran. That's just for starters. - For the past two decades, some of the poorest people on earth have been struggling against two of the world's biggest and richest corporations. - To allow the state the absolute power over life and death is to elevate its significance above those it is created to serve. Capital punishment is a form state worship; elevating the authority of government above the principles that legitimize its existence. - A Norwegian company begins drilling in the north without approval from Baghdad. - The big corporate interests that pumped money into Tom DeLay's scheme to control the Texas legislature and break precedent by rewriting an established congressional redistricting plan in mid-decade, knew full well what they bought in Texas. They bought our government. - Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church. - Capitalism is alive and well in Iraq. With a 70% unemployment rate, soaring housing costs, and late or non-existent government rations driving up the prices of food staples and energy necessities, the Iraqi people are ‘just lovin it’. Yes, capitalism is alive and well. - "Pacified" Fallujah looks like a dead six year-old child in that city, shot by a US sniper in the Al-Dubbat neighborhood on December 1st, according to Al-Sharqiyah. - Recent Canadian policy in Haiti has been remarkably successful, having achieved most of its objectives. This is the case in much the same way that US policies in places such as El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s were smashing successes – quite literally. - War Crimes—It's Not Just Torture - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Thursday Israel and other countries couldn't accept an Iran with a nuclear bomb, adding Tehran's program could be stopped by military means. - The most prominent editorial voices of corporate America, from the ultra-right Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, the leading voice of upper-class liberalism, despite disputes over tactics and methods, agree that there is no alternative to using whatever level of violence is required for the United States to remain in control of the oil-rich Mideast country. - Researchers who work for the U.S. Congress say the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) skewed its analysis of air pollution legislation to favour President George W. Bush's plan. - "Another conspiracy is being acted out against Venezuela, and I am not going to blame the dogs but the masters, the government of the United States," said Chávez. - The war on terror is a fabrication so large and all-encompassing that it includes both political parties, the Pentagon, the main-body of corporate and financial elites, and virtually the entire western media. It is the underlying myth that animates the American war-machine and breathes life into the coercive apparatus of state terror. - The United States knew well in advance of and explicitly approved Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975, which led to a brutal 24-year occupation of the former Portuguese colony, according to newly declassified documents.
- New legislation not designed to foster pleasant or productive weather, but planned as tool of weaponized weather control, already well tested and in use since 1976. Amateur and hostile weather-makers alike likely to lose their technology to the military. - The call for militarism qua militarism is buttressed by treacherous charges of cowardice. It relies on Mafia-like appeals to credibility in the threat to use violence and on chilling calls to "honor the dead" with more dead. - Advertising claims serve the same function as body blows in boxing, which soften up the fighter before the uppercut to the head puts him out. Television lies train people so that in the end, they will accept almost any kind of propaganda from our incompetent and ill-intentioned government. - Debt-fueled growth is qualitatively different from economic growth that results from an increase in high value-added jobs. - ...the message was sent—the CIA posse got their man, never mind independent confirmation (or for that matter a body to show off), the corporate media faithfully repeats the Bushcon line (we will "smoke ‘em out”), and the American people will have at least a momentary glimmer of hope that we are making headway in the “war on terror” promised to last a couple generations, at least a hundred years, to the glee of Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, and of course the Israeli and Pentagon Zionists who want the Muslim and Arab Middle East sliced up into bite-sized pieces. - Interesting how it is a crime to reveal a war crime (or potential war crime), deemed a "damaging disclosure," and Keogh and O’Connor may actually go to prison while Bush and Blair will be free to become "elder statesmen" advising others on how best to kill innocent civilians and journalists. - Iraqis, rather than foreign fighters, now form the vast majority of the insurgents who are waging a ferocious guerrilla war against United States forces in Sunni western Iraq, American commanders have revealed. - "These Rules of Engagement allow for a structured escalation of force to include opening fire on civilian vehicles under certain circumstances. All incidents of the use of such escalation of force which includes the use of firearms are logged and investigated to ensure that there has been strict adherence to the Rules of Engagement. " - European ministers have agreed on plans that will force telecommunications companies to retain phone and email logs for at least six months, to help investigations into terrorism and other serious crimes. - Miami Police have announced plans to conduct what they are calling "high profile ID sweeps" where they intend to check the identification of everyone entering a public building. - DHS hotline a hotbed of weak tips. - Whoever is responsible for the assassination of academics must also have access to sophisticated intelligence techniques that allow for the widespread targeting of a particular grouping of civilians. - Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation mishandled a Florida terror investigation, falsified documents in the case in an effort to cover repeated missteps and retaliated against an agent who first complained about the problems... - CIA agents have broken ranks to reveal the 'cruel and inhuman' interrogation techniques they are ordered to use at secret prisons around the world, including freezing and near-drowning. - Allawi is promoted by the U.S. and British government for the upcoming December elections, because he fits Western image of the "educated technocrat" who serves Western interests at the expense of the Iraqi people. Allawi provides the best Arab façade of acting on behalf of his masters. Like his relative, Ahmed Chalabi, Allawi is a conman, committed crimes against the Iraqi state and the Iraqi people, and should be held accountable for his crimes. - If it befuddles Avila - one of the top tropical cyclone forecasters in the world - it has got to be strange. - Break out those champagne wishes and caviar dreams. The donor class is getting what it paid for.
Pages for December, 2005
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