Terrorism Defined

Terrorism Defined - by Stephen Lendman

Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than "terrorism" even though his administration wasn't the first to exploit this highly charged term. We use to explain what "they do to us" to justify what we "do to them," or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization Gandhi thought would be a good idea when asked once what he thought about it.

Ronald Reagan exploited it in the 1980s to declare "war on international terrorism" referring to it as the "scourge of terrorism" and "the plague of the modern age." It was clear he had in mind launching his planned Contra proxy war of terrorism against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua and FMLN opposition resistance to the US-backed El Salvador fascist regime the same way George Bush did it waging his wars of aggression post-9/11.

It's a simple scheme to pull off, and governments keep using it because it always works. Scare the public enough, and they'll go along with almost anything thinking it's to protect their safety when, in fact, waging wars of aggression and state-sponsored violence have the opposite effect. The current Bush wars united practically the entire world against us including an active resistance increasingly targeting anything American.

George Orwell knew about the power of language before the age of television and the internet enhanced it exponentially. He explained how easy "doublethink" and "newspeak" can convince us "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength." He also wrote "All war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from (chicken hawk) people who are not fighting (and) Big Brother is watching...." us to be sure we get the message and obey it.

In 1946, Orwell wrote about "Politics and the English Language" saying "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible" to hide what its user has in mind. So "defenseless villages are bombarded from the air (and) this is called 'pacification'." And the president declares a "war on terrorism" that's, in fact, a "war of terrorism" against designated targets, always defenseless against it, because with adversaries able to put up a good fight, bullies, like the US, opt for diplomacy or other political and economic means, short of open conflict.

The term "terrorism" has a long history, and reference to a "war on terrorism" goes back a 100 years or more. Noted historian Howard Zinn observed how the phrase is a contradiction in terms as "How can you make war on terrorism, if war is terrorism (and if) you respond to terrorism with (more) terrorism....you multiply (the amount of) terrorism in the world." Zinn explains that "Governments are terrorists on an enormously large scale," and when they wage war the damage caused infinitely exceeds anything individuals or groups can inflict.

It's also clear that individual or group "terrorist" acts are crimes, not declarations or acts of war. So a proper response to the 9/11 perpetrators was a police one, not an excuse for the Pentagon to attack other nations having nothing to do with it.

George Bush's "war on terrorism" began on that fateful September day when his administration didn't miss a beat stoking the flames of fear with a nation in shock ready to believe almost anything - true, false or in between. And he did it thanks to the hyped enormity of the 9/11 event manipulated for maximum political effect for the long-planned aggressive imperial adventurism his hard line administration had in mind only needing "a catastrophic and catalyzing (enough) event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to lauch. With plans drawn and ready, the president and key administration officials terrified the public with visions of terrorism branded and rebranded as needed from the war on it, to the global war on it (GLOT), to the long war on it, to a new name coming soon to re-ignite a flagging public interest in and growing disillusionment over two foreign wars gone sour and lost.

Many writers, past and present, have written on terrorism with their definitions and analyses of it. The views of four noted political and social critics are reviewed below, but first an official definition to frame what follows.

How the US Code Defines Terrorism

Under the US Code, "international terrorism" includes activities involving:

(A) "violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;"

(B) are intended to -

(i) "intimidate or coerce a civilian population;

(ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or

(iii) affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States...."

The US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37, 1984) shortens the above definition to be "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature....through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear."

Eqbal Ahmad On Terrorism

Before his untimely death, Indian activist and scholar Eqbal Ahmad spoke on the subject of terrorism in one of his last public talks at the University of Colorado in October, 1998. Seven Stories Press then published his presentation in one of its Open Media Series short books titled "Terrorism, Theirs and Ours." The talk when delivered was prophetic in light of the September 11 event making his comments especially relevant.

He began quoting a 1984 Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz speech calling terrorism "modern barbarism, a form of political violence, a threat to Western civilization, a menace to Western moral values" and more, all the while never defining it because that would "involve a commitment to analysis, comprehension and adherence to some norms of consistency" not consistent with how this country exploits it for political purposes. It would also expose Washington's long record of supporting the worst kinds of terrorist regimes worldwide in Indonesia, Iran under the Shah, Central America, the South American fascist generals, Marcos in the Philippines, Pol Pot and Saddam at their worst, the current Saudi and Egyptian regimes, Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and for the people of Greece, who paid an enormous price, the Greek colonels the US brought to power in the late 1960s for which people there now with long memories still haven't forgiven us.

Ahmad continued saying "What (then) is terrorism? Our first job is to define the damn thing, name it, give it a description of some kind, other than (the) "moral equivalent of (our) founding fathers (or) a moral outrage to Western civilization." He cited Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as a source saying "Terrorism is an intense, overpowering fear....the use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government." It's simple, to the point, fair, and Ahmad calls it a definition of "great virtue. It focuses on the use of coercive violence....that is used illegally, extra-constitutionally, to coerce" saying this is true because it's what terrorism is whether committed by governments, groups, or individuals. This definition omits what Ahmad feels doesn't apply - motivation, whether or not the cause is just or not because "motives differ (yet) make no difference."

Ahmad identifies the following types of terrorism:

-- State terrorism committed by nations against anyone - other states, groups or individuals, including state-sponsored assassination targets;

-- Religious terrorism like Christians and Muslims slaughtering each other during Papal crusades; many instances of Catholics killing Protestants and the reverse like in Northern Ireland; Christians and Jews butchering each other; Sunnis killing Shiites and the reverse; and any other kind of terror violence inspired or justified by religion carrying out God's will as in the Old Testament preaching it as an ethical code for a higher purpose;

-- Crime (organized or otherwise) terrorism as "all kinds of crime commit terror."

-- Pathology terrorism by those who are sick, may "want the attention of the world (and decide to do it by) kill(ing) a president" or anyone else.

-- Political terrorism by a private group Ahmad calls "oppositional terror" explaining further that at times these five types "converge on each other starting out in one form, then converging into one or more others.

Nation states, like the US, focus only on one kind of terrorism - political terrorism that's "the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property (with the highest cost type being) state terrorism." The current wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine underscore what Ahmad means. Never mentioned, though, is that political or retail terrorism is a natural response by oppressed or desperate groups when they're victims of far more grievous acts of state terrorism. Also unmentioned is how to prevent terrorist acts Noam Chomsky explains saying the way to get "them" to stop attacking "us" is stop attacking "them."

Ahmad responded to a question in the book version of his speech with more thoughts on the subject. Asked to define terrorism the way he did in an article he wrote a year earlier titled "Comprehending Terror," he called it "the illegal use of violence for the purposes of influencing somebody's behavior, inflicting punishment, or taking revenge (adding) it has been practiced on a larger scale, globally, both by governments and by private groups." When committed against a state, never asked is what produces it.

Further, official and even academic definitions of state terrorism exclude what Ahmad calls "illegal violence:" torture, burning of villages, destruction of entire peoples, (and) genocide." These definitions are biased against individuals and groups favoring governments committing terrorist acts. Our saying it's for self-defense, protecting the "national security," or "promoting democracy" is subterfuge baloney disguising our passion for state-sponsored violence practiced like it our national pastime.

Ahmad also observed that modern-day "third-world....fascist governments (in countries like) Indonesia (under Suharto), Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC), Iran (under the Shah), South Korea (under its generals), and elsewhere - were fully supported by one or the other of the superpowers," and for all the aforementioned ones and most others that was the US.

Further, Ahmad notes "religious zealotry has been a major source of terror" but nearly always associated in the West with Islamic groups. In fact, it's a global problem with "Jewish terrorists....terrorizing an entire people in the Middle East (the Palestinians, supported by) Israel which is supported by the government of the United States." Crimes against humanity in the name of religion are also carried out by radical Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and others, not just extremist Muslims that are the only ones reported in the West.

In August, 1998 in the Dawn English-language Pakistani newspaper, Ahmad wrote about the power of the US in a unipolar world saying: "Who will define the parameters of terrorism, or decide where terrorists lurk? Why, none other than the United States, which can from the rooftops of the world set out its claim to be sheriff, judge and hangman, all at one and the same time." So while publicly supporting justice, the US spurns international law to be the sole decider acting by the rules of what we say goes, and the law is what we say it is. Further, before the age of George Bush, Ahmad sounded a note of hope saying nothing is "historically permanent (and) I don't think American power is permanent. It itself is very temporary, and therefore its excesses have to be, by definition, impermanent."

In addition, he added, "America is a troubled country" for many reasons. It's "economic capabilities do not harmonize with its military (ones and) its ruling class' will to dominate is not quite shared by" what its people want. For now, however, the struggle will continue because the US "sowed in the Middle East (after the Gulf war but before George Bush became president) and South Asia (signaling Pakistan and Afghanistan) very poisonous seeds. Some have ripened and others are ripening. An examination of why they were sown, what has grown, and how they should be reaped is needed (but isn't being done). Missiles won't solve the problem" as is plain as day in mid-2007, with the Bush administration hanging on for dear life in the face of two calamitous wars the president can't acknowledge are hopeless and already lost.

Edward S. Herman On Terrorism

Herman wrote a lot on terrorism including his important 1982 book as relevant today as it was then, "The Real Terror Network." It's comprised of US-sponsored authoritarian states following what Herman calls a free market "development model" for corporate gain gotten through a reign of terror unleashed on any homegrown resistance against it and a corrupted dominant media championing it with language Orwell would love.

Back then, justification given was the need to protect the "free world" from the evils of communism and a supposedly worldwide threat it posed. It was classic "Red Scare" baloney, but it worked to traumatize the public enough to think the Russians would come unless we headed them off, never mind, in fact, the Russians had good reason to fear we'd come because "bombing them back to the stone age" was seriously considered, might have happened, and once almost did.

Herman reviews examples of "lesser and mythical terror networks" before discussing the real ones. First though, he defines the language beginning with how Orwell characterized political speech already explained above. He then gives a dictionary definition of terrorism as "a mode of governing, or of opposing government, by intimidation" but notes right off a problem for "western propaganda." Defining terrorism this way includes repressive regimes we support, so it's necessary finding "word adaptations (redefining them to) exclude (our) state terrorism (and only) capture the petty (retail) terror of small dissident groups or individuals" or the trumped up "evil empire" kind manufactured out of whole cloth but made to seem real and threatening.

Herman then explains how the CIA finessed terrorism by referring to "Patterns of International Terrorism" defining it as follows: "Terrorism conducted with the support of a foreign government or organization and/or directed against foreign nationals, institutions, or governments." By this definition, internal death squads killing thousands are excluded because they're not "international" unless a foreign government supports them. That's easy to hide, though, when we're the government and as easy to reveal or fake when it serves our purpose saying it was communist-inspired in the 1980s or "Islamofascist al Qaeda"-conducted or supported now. Saying it makes it so even when it isn't because the power of the message can make us believe Santa Claus is the grinch who stole Christmas.

Herman also explains how harsh terms like totalitarianism and authoritarianism only apply to adversary regimes while those as bad or worse allied to us are more benignly referred to with terms like "moderate autocrats" or some other corrupted manipulation of language able to make the most beastly tyrants look like enlightened tolerant leaders.

In fact, these brutes and their governments comprise the "real terror network," and what they did and still do, with considerable US help, contributed to the rise of the "National Security State" (NSS) post-WW II and the growth of terrorism worldwide supporting it. In a word, it rules by "intimidation and violence or the threat of violence." Does the name Augusto Pinochet ring a bell? What about the repressive Shah of Iran even a harsh theocratic state brought relief from?

Herman explained "the economics of the NSS" that's just as relevant today as then with some updating of events in the age of George Bush. He notes NSS leaders imposed a free market "development model" creating a "favorable investment climate (including) subsidies and tax concessions to business (while excluding) any largess to the non-propertied classes...." It means human welfare be damned, social benefits and democracy are incompatible with the needs of business, unions aren't allowed, a large "reserve army" of workers can easily replace present ones, and those complaining get their heads knocked off with terror tactics being the weapon of choice, and woe to those on the receiving end.

The Godfather in Washington makes it work with considerable help from the corrupted dominant media selling "free market" misery like it's paradise. Their message praises the dogma, turning a blind eye to the ill effects on real people and the terror needed to keep them in line when they resist characterized as protecting "national security" and "promoting democracy," as already explained. All the while, the US is portrayed as a benevolent innocent bystander, when, if fact, behind the scenes, we pull the strings and tinpot third-world despots dance to them. But don't expect to learn that from the pages of the New York Times always in the lead supporting the worst US-directed policies characterized only as the best and most enlightened.

At the end of his account, Herman offers solutions worlds apart from the way the Bush administration rules. They include opposing "martial law governments" and demanding the US end funding, arming and training repressive regimes. Also condemned are "harsh prison sentences, internments and killings," especially against labor leaders. Finally, he cites "the right to self-determination" for all countries free from foreign interference, that usually means Washington, that must be held to account and compelled to "stop bullying and manipulating....tiny states" and end the notion they must be client ones, or else.

Referring to the Reagan administration in the 1980s, Herman says what applies even more under George Bush. If allowed to get away with it, Washington "will continue to escalate the violence (anywhere in the world it chooses) to preserve military mafia/oligarch control" meaning we're boss, and what we say goes. Leaders not getting the message will be taught the hard way, meaning state-sponsored terrorism portrayed as benign intervention.

Herman revisited terrorism with co-author Gerry O'Sullivan in 1989 in their book "The Terrorism Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror." The authors focus on what kinds of victims are important ("worthy" ones) while others (the "unworthy") go unmentioned or are characterized as victimizers with the corrupted media playing their usual role trumpeting whatever policies serve the interests of power. The authors state "....the West's experts and media have engaged in a process of 'role reversal' in....handling....terrorism... focus(ing) on selected, relatively small-scale terrorists and rebels including....genuine national liberation movements" victimized by state-sponsored terror. Whenever they strike back in self-defense they're portrayed as victimizers. Examples, then and now, are legion, and the authors draw on them over that earlier period the book covers.

They also explain the main reason individuals and groups attack us is payback for our attacking or oppressing them far more grievously. As already noted, the very nature of wholesale state-directed terror is infinitely more harmful than the retail kind with the order of magnitude being something like comparing massive corporate fraud cheating shareholders and employees to a day's take by a local neighborhood pickpocket.

"The Terrorism Industry" shows the West needs enemies. Before 1991, the "evil empire" Soviet Union was the lead villain with others in supporting roles like Libya's Gaddafi, the PLO under Arafat (before the Oslo Accords co-opted him), the Sandinistas under Ortega laughably threatening Texas we were told, and other designees portrayed as arch enemies of freedom because they won't sell out their sovereignty to rules made in Washington. Spewing this baloney takes lots of chutzpah and manufactured demonizing generously served up by "state-sponsored propaganda campaigns" dutifully trumpeted by the dominant media stenographers for power. Their message is powerful enough to convince people western states and nuclear-powered Israel can't match ragtag marauding "terrorist" bands coming to neighborhoods near us unless we flatten countries they may be coming from. People believe it, and it's why state-sponsored terrorism can be portrayed as self-defense even though it's pure scare tactic baloney.

The authors stress the western politicization process decides who qualifies as targeted, and "The basic rule has been: if connected with leftists, violence may be called terrorist," but when it comes from rightist groups it's always self-defense. Again, it's classic Orwell who'd be smiling saying I told you so if he were still here. He also understood terrorism serves a "larger service." Overall, it's to get the public terrified enough to go along with any agenda governments have in mind like wars of aggression, huge increases in military spending at the expense of social services getting less, and the loss of civil liberties by repressive policies engineered on the phony pretext of increasing our safety, in fact, being harmed.

The authors also note different forms of "manufactured terrorism" such as inflating or inventing a menace out of whole cloth. It's also used in the private sector to weaken or destroy "union leaders, activists, and political enemies, sometimes in collusion with agents of the state."

The authors call all of the above "The Terrorism Industry of institutes and experts who formulate and channel analysis and information on terrorism in accordance with Western demands" often in cahoots with "Western governments, intelligence agencies, and corporate/conservative foundations and funders." It's a "closed system" designed to "reinforce state propaganda" to program the public mind to go along with any agenda the institutions of power have in mind, never beneficial to our own. Yet, their message is so potent they're able to convince us it is. It's an astonishing achievement going on every day able to make us believe almost anything, and the best way to beat it is don't listen.

Noam Chomsky On Terrorism

In his book "Perilous Power: The Middle East and US Foreign Policy," co-authored with Gilbert Achcar, Chomsky defines terrorism saying he's been writing about it since 1981 around the time Ronald Reagan first declared war on "international terrorism" to justify all he had in mind mentioned above. Chomsky explained "You don't declare a war on terrorism unless you're planning yourself to undertake massive international terrorism," and calling it self-defense is pure baloney.

Chomsky revisits the subject in many of his books, and in at least two earlier ones addressed terrorism or international terrorism as those volumes' core issue discussed further below. In "Perilous Power," it's the first issue discussed right out of the gate, and he starts off defining it. He does it using the official US Code definition given above calling it a commonsense one. But there's a problem in that by this definition the US qualifies as a terrorist state, and the Reagan administration in the 1980s practiced it, so it had to change it to avoid an obvious conflict.

Other problems arose as well when the UN passed resolutions on terrorism, the first major one being in December, 1987 condemning terrorism as a crime in the harshest terms. It passed in the General Assembly overwhelmingly but not unanimously, 153 - 2, with the two opposed being the US and Israel so although the US vote wasn't a veto it served as one twice over. When Washington disapproves, it's an actual veto in the Security Council or a de facto one in the General Assembly meaning it's blocked either way, and it's erased from history as well. Case closed.

Disguising what Martin Luther King called "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," referring to this country, a new definition had to be found excluding the terror we carry out against "them," including only what they do to "us." It's not easy, but, in practical terms, this is the definition we use - what you do to "us," while what we do to you is "benign humanitarian intervention." Repeated enough in the mainstream, the message sinks in even though it's baloney.

Chomsky then explains what other honest observers understand in a post-NAFTA world US planners knew would devastate ordinary people on the receiving end of so-called free trade policies designed to throttle them for corporate gain. He cites National Intelligence Council projections that globalization "will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide....Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation. They will foster political, ethnic, ideological, and religious extremism, along with the violence that often accompanies it."

Pentagon projections agree with plans set to savagely suppress expected retaliatory responses. How to stop the cycle of violence? End all types of exploitation including so-called one-way "free trade," adopting instead a fair trade model like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's government follows that's equitable to all trading partners and their people. The antidote to bad policy, brutal repression, wars and the terrorism they generate is equity and justice for all. However, the US won't adopt the one solution sure to work because it hurts profits that come ahead of people needs.

Chomsky wrote about terrorism at length much earlier as well in his 1988 book "The Culture of Terrorism." In it he cites "the Fifth Freedom" meaning "the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate society, to undertake any course of action to insure that existing privilege is protected and advanced." This "freedom" is incompatible with the other four Franklin Roosevelt once announced - freedom of speech, worship, want and fear all harmed by this interloper. To get the home population to go along with policies designed to hurt them, "the state must spin an elaborate web of illusion and deceit (to keep people) inert and limited in the capacity to develop independent modes of thought and perception." It's called "manufacturing consent" to keep the rabble in line, using hard line tactics when needed.

"The Cultural of Terrorism" covers the Reagan years in the 1980s and its agenda of state terror in the post-Vietnam climate of public resistance to direct intervention that didn't hamper Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. So unable to send in the Marines, Reagan resorted to state terror proxy wars with key battlegrounds being Central America and Afghanistan. The book focuses on the former, the scandals erupting from it, and damage control manipulation so this country can continue pursuing policies dedicated to rule by force whenever persuasion alone won't work.

A "new urgency" emerged in June, 1986 when the World Court condemned the US for attacking Nicaragua using the Contras in a proxy war of aggression against a democratically elected government unwilling to operate by rules made in Washington. In a post-Vietnam climate opposed to this sort of thing, policies then were made to work by making state terror look like humanitarian intervention with local proxies on the ground doing our killing for us and deceiving the public to go along by scaring it to death.

So with lots of dominant media help, Reagan pursued his terror wars in Central America with devastating results people at home heard little about if they read the New York Times or watched the evening news suppressing the toll Chomsky reveals as have others:

-- over 50,000 slaughtered in El Salvador,

-- over 100,000 corpses in Guatemala just in the 1980s and over 200,000 including those killed earlier and since,

-- a mere 11,000 in Nicaragua that got off relatively easy because the people had an army to fight back while in El Salvador and Guatemala the army was the enemy.

The tally shows Ronald Reagan gets credit for over 160,000 Central American deaths alone, but not ordinary ones. They came "Pol Pot-style....with extensive torture, rape, mutilation, disappearance," and political assassinations against members of the clergy including El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero gunned down by an assassin while celebrating mass inside San Salvador's Hospital de la Divina Frovidencia. His "voice for the voiceless" concern for the poor and oppressed and courageous opposition to death squad mass-killing couldn't be tolerated in a part of the world ruled by wealthy elites getting plenty of support from some of the same names in Washington now ravaging Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chomsky cites the Reagan Doctrine's commitment to opposing leftist resistance movements throughout the 1980s, conducting state-sponsored terror to "construct an international terrorist network of impressive sophistication, without parallel in history....and used it" clandestinely fighting communism.

With lots of help from Congress and the dominant media, the administration contained the damage that erupted in late 1986 from what was known as the Iran-Contra scandal over illegally selling arms to Iran to fund the Contras. Just like the farcical Watergate investigations, the worst crimes and abuses got swept under the rug, and in the end no one in the 1980s even paid a price for the lesser ones. So a huge scandal greater than Watergate, that should have toppled a president, ended up being little more than a tempest in a teapot after the dust settled. It makes it easy understanding how George Bush gets away with mass-murder, torture and much more almost making Reagan's years seem tame by comparison.

Chomsky continued discussing our "culture of terrorism" with the Pentagon practically boasting over its Central American successes directing terrorist proxy force attacks against "soft targets" including health centers, medical workers and schools, farms and more, all considered legitimate military targets despite international law banning these actions.

Latin America is always crucial to US policy makers referring to it dismissively as "America's backyard" giving us more right to rule here than practically any place else. It's because of the region's strategic importance historian Greg Grandin recognizes calling it the "Empire's Workshop" that's the title of his 2006 book subtitled "Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism." In it, he shows how the region serves as a laboratory honing our techniques for imperial rule that worked in the 1980s but now face growing rebellion providing added incentive to people in the Middle East inspiring them to do by force what leaders like Hugo Chavez do constitutionally with great public support.

But Washington's international terror network never quits or sleeps operating freely worldwide and touching down anywhere policy makers feel they need to play global enforcer seeing to it outliers remember who's boss, and no one forgets the rules of imperial management. Things went as planned for Reagan until the 1986 scandals necessitated a heavy dose of damage control. They've now become industrial strength trying to bail George Bush out his quagmire conflagrations making Reagan's troubles seem like minor brush fires. It worked for Reagan by following "overriding principles (keeping) crucial issues....off the agenda" applicable for George Bush, including:

-- "the (ugly) historical and documentary record reveal(ing)" US policy guidelines;

-- "the international setting within which policy develops;"

-- application of similar policies in other nations in Latin America or elsewhere;

-- "the normal conditions of life (in Latin America or elsewhere long dominated by) US influence and control (and) what these teach us about the goals and character of US government policy over many years;

-- similar matters (anywhere helping explain) the origins and nature of the problems that must be addressed."

It was true in the 1980s and now so these issues "are not fit topics for reporting, commentary and debate" beyond what policy makers disagree on and are willing to discuss openly.

The book concludes considering the "perils of diplomacy" with Washington resorting to state terror enforcing its will through violence when other means don't work. But the US public has to be convinced through guile and stealth it's all being done for our own good. It never is, of course, but most people never catch on till it's too late to matter. They should read more Chomsky, Herman, Ahmad, and Michel Chossudovsky discussed below, but too few do so leaders like Reagan and Bush get away with mass-murder and much more.

Chomsky wrote another book on terrorism titled "Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World." It was first published in 1986 with new material added in more recent editions up to 2001. The book begins with a memorable story St. Augustine tells about a pirate Alexander the Great captured asking him "how he dares molest the sea." Pirates aren't known to be timid, and this one responds saying "How dare you molest the whole world? ....I do it with a little ship only (and) am called a thief (while you do) it with a great navy (and) are called an Emperor." It's a wonderful way to capture the relationship between minor rogue states or resistance movements matched off against the lord and master of the universe with unchallengeable military power unleashing it freely to stay dominant.

The newest edition of "Pirates and Emperors, Old and New" explores what constitutes terrorism while mainly discussing how Washington waged it in the Middle East in the 1980s, also then in Central America, and more recently post-9/11. As he often does, Chomsky also shows how dominant media manipulation shapes public perceptions to justify our actions called defensible against states we target as enemies when they resist - meaning their wish to remain free and independent makes them a threat to western civilization.

Washington never tolerates outlier regimes placing their sovereignty above ours or internal resistance movements hitting back for what we do to them. Those doing it are called terrorists and are targeted for removal by economic, political and/or military state terror. In the case of Nicaragua, the weapon of choice was a Contra proxy force, in El Salvador, the CIA-backed fascist government did the job, and in both cases tactics used involved mass murder and incarceration, torture, and a whole further menu of repressive and economic barbarism designed to crush resistance paving the way for unchallengeable US dominance.

The centerpiece of US Middle East policy has been its full and unconditional support for Israel's quest for regional dominance by weakening or removing regimes considered hostile and its near-six decade offensive to repress and ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians from all land Israelis want for a greater Israel. Toward that end, Israel gets unheard of amounts of aid including billions annually in grants and loans, billions more as needed, multi-billions in debt waved, billions more in military aid, and state-of-the-art weapons and technology amounting in total to more than all other countries in the world combined for a nation of six million people with lots of important friends in Washington, on Wall Street, and in all other centers of power that count.

It all goes down smoothly at home by portraying justifiable resistance to Israeli abuse as terrorism with the dominant media playing their usual role calling US and Israeli-targeted victims the victimizers to justify the harshest state terror crackdowns against them. For Palestinians, it's meant nearly six decades of repression and 40 years of occupation by a foreign power able to reign state terror on defenseless people helpless against it. For Iraq, it meant removing a leader posing no threat to Israel or his neighbors but portrayed as a monster who did with Iranian leaders and Hugo Chavez now topping the regime change queue in that order or maybe in quick succession or tandem.

It's all about power and perception with corrupted language, as Orwell explained, able to make reality seem the way those controlling it wish. It lets power and ideology triumph over people freely using state terror as a means of social control. Chomsky quoted Churchill's notion that "the rich and powerful have every right to....enjoy what they have gained, often by violence and terror; the rest can be ignored as long as they suffer in silence, but if they interfere with....those who rule the world by right, the 'terrors of the earth' will be visited upon them with righteous wrath, unless power is constrained from within." One day, the meek may inherit the earth and Churchill's words no longer will apply, but not as long as the US rules it and media manipulation clouds reality enough to make harsh state terror look like humanitarian intervention or self-defense by helpless victims look like they're the victimizers.

Michel Chossudovsky on "The War on Terrorism"

No one has been more prominent or outspoken since the 9/11 attacks in the US than scholar/author/activist and Global Research web site editor Michel Chossudovsky. He began writing that evening publishing an article the next day titled "Who Is Osama Bin Laden," perhaps being the first Bush administration critic to courageously challenge the official account of what took place that day. He then updated his earlier account September 10, 2006 in an article titled "The Truth behind 9/11: Who is Osama Bin Ladin." Chossudovsky is a thorough, relentless researcher making an extraordinary effort to get at the truth no matter how ugly or disturbing.

Here's a summary of what he wrote that was included in his 2005 book titled "America's War on Terrorism (In the Wake of 9/11)" he calls a complete fabrication "based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden (from a cave in Afghanistan and hospital bed in Pakistan), outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus." He called it instead what it is, in fact - a pretext for permanent "New World Order" wars of conquest serving the interests of Wall Street, the US military-industrial complex, and all other corporate interests profiting hugely from a massive scheme harming the public interest in the near-term and potentially all humanity unless it's stopped in time.

On the morning of 9/11, the Bush administration didn't miss a beat telling the world Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon meaning Osama bin Laden was the main culprit - case closed without even the benefit of a forensic and intelligence analysis piecing together all potential helpful information. There was no need to because, as Chossudovsky explained, "That same (9/11) evening at 9:30 pm, a 'War Cabinet' was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. At 11:00PM, at the end of that historic (White House) meeting, the 'War on Terrorism' was officially launched," and the rest is history.

Chossudovsky continued "The decision was announced (straightaway) to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks" with news headlines the next day asserting, with certainty, "state sponsorship" responsibility for the attacks connected to them. The dominant media, in lockstep, called for military retaliation against Afghanistan even though no evidence proved the Taliban government responsible, because, in fact, it was not and we knew it.

Four weeks later on October 7, a long-planned war of illegal aggression began, Afghanistan was bombed and then invaded by US forces working in partnership with their new allies - the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or so-called Northern Alliance "warlords." Their earlier repressive rule was so extreme, it gave rise to the Taliban in the first place and has now made them resurgent.

Chossudovsky further explained that the public doesn't "realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks." This one, like all others, was months in the making needing only what CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks called a "terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event" to arouse enough public anger for the Bush administration to launch it after declaring their "war on terrorism." Chossudovsky, through thorough and exhausting research, exposed it as a fraud.

He's been on top of the story ever since uncovering the "myth of an 'outside enemy' and the threat of 'Islamic terrorists' (that became) the cornerstone (and core justification) of the Bush administration's military doctrine." It allowed Washington to wage permanent aggressive wars beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq, to ignore international law, and to "repeal civil liberties and constitutional government" through repression laws like the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. A key objective throughout has, and continues to be, Washington's quest to control the world's energy supplies, primarily oil, starting in the Middle East where two-thirds of known reserves are located.

Toward that end, the Bush administration created a fictitious "outside enemy" threat without which no "war on terrorism" could exist, and no foreign wars could be waged. Chossudovsky exposed the linchpin of the whole scheme. He uncovered evidence that Al Queda "was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war" era, and that in the 1990s Washington "consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placing him on the FBI's 'most wanted list' as the World's foremost terrorist." He explained that the CIA (since the 1980s and earlier) actively supports international terrorism covertly, and that on September 10, 2001 "Enemy Number One" bin Laden was in a Rawalpindi, Pakistan military hospital confirmed on CBS News by Dan Rather. He easily could have been arrested but wasn't because we had a "better purpose" in mind for "America's best known fugitive (to) give a (public) face to the 'war on terrorism' " that meant keeping bin Laden free to do it. If he didn't exist, we'd have had to invent him, but that could have been arranged as well.

The Bush administration's national security doctrine needs enemies, the way all empires on the march do. Today "Enemy Number One" rests on the fiction of bin Laden-led Islamic terrorists threatening the survival of western civilization. In fact, however, Washington uses Islamic organizations like Islamic jihad as a "key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union" while, at the same time, blaming them for the 9/11 attacks calling them "a threat to America."

September 11, 2001 was, indeed, a threat to America, but one coming from within from real enemies. They want to undermine democracy and our freedoms, not preserve them, in pursuit of their own imperial interests for world domination by force through endless foreign wars and establishment of a locked down national "Homeland Security (police) State." They're well along toward it, and if they succeed, America, as we envision it, no longer will exist. Only by exposing the truth and resisting what's planned and already happening will there be any hope once again to make this nation a "land of the free and home of the brave" with "a new birth of freedom" run by a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" the way at least one former president thought it should be.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

Venezuela's RCTV: Sine Die and Good Riddance

Venezuela's RCTV: Sine Die and Good Riddance - by Stephen Lendman

Venezuelan TV station Radio Caracas Television's (known as RCTV) VHF Channel 2's operating license expired May 27, and it went off the air because the Chavez government, with ample justification, chose not to renew it. RCTV was the nation's oldest private broadcaster, operating since 1953. It's also had a tainted record of airing Venezuela's most hard right yellow journalism, consistently showing a lack of ethics, integrity or professional standards in how it operated as required by the law it arrogantly flaunted.

Starting May 28, a new public TV station (TVES) replaces it bringing Venezuelans a diverse range of new programming TV channel Vive president, Blanca Eckhout, says will "promot(e) the participation and involvement of all Venezuelans in the task of communication (as an alternative to) the media concentration of the radio-electric spectrum that remains in the hands of a (dominant corporate) minority sector" representing elitist business interests, not the people.

Along with the other four major corporate-owned dominant television channels (controlling 90% of the nation's TV market), RCTV played a leading role instigating and supporting the aborted April, 2002 two-day coup against President Chavez mass public opposition on the streets helped overturn restoring Chavez to office and likely saving his life. Later in the year, these stations conspired again as active participants in the economically devastating 2002-03 main trade union confederation (CTV) - chamber of commerce (Fedecameras) lockout and industry-wide oil strike including willful sabotage against state oil company PDVSA costing it an estimated $14 billion in lost revenue and damage.

This writer explained the dominant corporate media's active role in these events in an extended January, 2007 article titled "Venezuela's RCTV Acts of Sedition." It presented conclusive evidence RCTV and the other four corporate-run TV stations violated Venezuela's Law of Social Responsibility for Radio and Television (LSR). That law guarantees freedom of expression without censorship but prohibits, as it should, transmission of messages illegally promoting, apologizing for, or inciting disobedience to the law that includes enlisting public support for the overthrow of a democratically elected president and his government.

In spite of their lawlessness, the Chavez government treated all five broadcasters gently opting not to prosecute them, but merely refusing to renew one of RCTV's operating licenses (its VHF one) when it expired May 27 (its cable and satellite operations are unaffected) - a mere slap on the wrist for a media enterprise's active role in trying to overthrow the democratically elected Venezuelan president and his government. The article explained if an individual or organization of any kind incited public hostility, violence and anti-government rebellion under Section 2384 of the US code, Title 18, they would be subject to fine and/or imprisonment for up to 20 years for the crime of sedition.

They might also be subject to prosecution for treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the US Constitution stating: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" such as instigating an insurrection or rebellion and/or sabotage to a national defense utility that could include state oil company PDVSA's facilities vital to the operation and economic viability of the country and welfare of its people. It would be for US courts to decide if conspiring to overthrow a democratically government conformed to this definition, but it's hard imagining it would not at least convict offenders of sedition.

Opposition Response to the Chavez Government Action

So far, the dominant Venezuelan media's response to RCTV's shutdown has been relatively muted, but it remains to be seen for how long. However, for media outside the country, it's a different story with BBC one example of misreporting in its usual style of deference to power interests at home and abroad. May 28 on the World Service, it reported RCTV's license wasn't renewed because "it supported opposition candidates" in a gross perversion of the facts, but that's how BBC operates.

BBC online was more nuanced and measured, but nonetheless off the mark in key comments like reporting "Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Caracas Sunday, some to celebrate, others to protest" RCTV's shuttering. Unexplained was that Chavez supporters way outnumbered opponents who nearly always are part of rightist/corporate-led staged for the media events in contrast to spontaneous pro-government crowds assembling in huge numbers at times, especially whenever Chavez addresses them publicly.

BBC also exaggerated "skirmishes" on the streets with "Police us(ing) tear gas and water cannons to disperse (crowds) and driving through the streets on motorbikes, officers fired plastic bullets in the air." It also underplayed pro-government supportive responses while blaring opposition ones like "Chavez thinks he owns the country. Well, he doesn't." Another was "No to the closure. Freedom." And still another was "Everyone has the right to watch what they want. He can't take away this channel." BBC played it up commenting "As the afternoon drew on, the protests got louder." The atmosphere became nasty. Shots were fired in the air and people ran for cover. It was not clear who was firing" when it's nearly always clear as it's been in the past - anti-Chavistas sent to the streets to stir up trouble and blame it on Chavez.

BBC's commentary ended saying "The arguments highlight, once again, how deeply divided Venezuela is." Unmentioned was that division is about 70 - 80% pro-Chavez, around 20% opposed (the more privileged "sifrino" class), and a small percentage pro and con between them.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Saturdays at noon US central time.

Forty Years of Occupation

Forty Years of Occupation - by Stephen Lendman

This June will mark an anniversary that will live in infamy for the people affected by the event it commemorates following a far greater one 19 years earlier on May 14, 1948. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its so-called "Six-Day (preemptive) War" against three of its neighboring Arab states - Egypt, Jordan and Syria - claiming it was in self-defense to avoid annihilation Israeli leaders later admitted was spurious and false cover for a large-scale long-planned, calculated war of aggression it believed it could easily win and did.

The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin's (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: "In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."

Two time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: "I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offense against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."

General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: "Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it."

General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma'ariv in April, 1972: "We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility."

Other Israeli leaders and generals voiced the same sentiment that in June, 1967 Israel was under no threat, yet preemptively undertook a war of aggression falsely telling the world it had no other choice. It had a clear one. It could have chosen peace, but didn't and never did earlier or since to the present because discretionary aggressive wars of choice serve Israeli interests as they do its US imperial partner.

In 1967, it was the Jewish state's third major aggressive war that grew out of the founding of Zionism in 1897 by Theodor Herzl aiming to establish a permanent Jewish state. He planned the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, became its first president, and envisioned a permanent Jewish homeland in Palestine justified by what Professor Norman Finkelstein called the "colossal hoax" Jews got there first establishing their ancestral home on "a land without people for a people without land." It became the state of Israel in May, 1948 during the new Jewish state's first preemptive aggressive so-called "War of Independence" Palestinians call "al-Nakba" - the catastrophe.

From it, Jewish forces seized 78% of British Mandatory Palestine establishing the state of Israel May 14 when the Mandate ended. It was 40% more territory than UN Resolution 181 of November, 1947 allowed with a 56 - 44% division that already gave Israel most of the fertile land, nearly all urban and rural territory, and 400 of over 1000 Palestinian villages their residents lost by UN mandate, with no right of appeal, to the Jewish population comprising one-third of the total at that time.

The 1948 negotiated cease-fire line became known as the "Green Line." Egypt occupied Gaza, and Jordan controlled the West Bank. It was Israel's moment of triumph. The war lasted six months, expelling and killing about 800,000 Palestinians. It destroyed 531 Palestinian villages, 11 urban neighborhoods, and was a clear case of ethnic cleansing international law calls a crime against humanity. Guilty Israeli leaders were never held to account for it or forced to admit what, in fact, they indisputably did according to recently declassified Israeli archival material Israeli historian Ilan Pappe used for his important new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Noted British journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger calls him "Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian."

In his book, Pappe documented Israeli crimes including cold-blooded mass-murder; destruction of homes, villages and crops; rapes; other atrocities; and massacres of defenseless men, women and children shown no mercy. It happened because British Mandate forces did nothing to stop it, and when neighboring Arab states finally intervened, they acted pathetically without conviction against a superior Israeli fighting force easily able to defeat the small, ill-equipped and unmotivated token forces matched against it.

Israel's second war of aggression was launched along with Britain and France October 29, 1956 against Egypt following President Nasser's decision to nationalize the Suez Canal. Invading forces gave in to US and Soviet pressure to cease fighting eight days later, and after the Federal Reserve began selling large amounts of British pounds undermining the dollar-pound exchange rate. It ended when Israel withdrew its last troops March 8, 1957.

On June 5, 1967, Israel launched its third major war of aggression but hardly its last with another one always planned and ready to unleash on the flimsiest pretext almost no other nation could get away with. It did it for the usual reasons nations go to war when under no external threat to do it - territory, resources (for Israel Golan's water was key), and a desire for unchallengeable regional dominance. As it always did since, Israel falsely claimed its security was threatened by creating myths Syria was shelling Israeli farmers; legitimate, non-threatening Egyptian military exercises masked a preparation for war; and that "incendiary Arab rhetoric" proved it. With plans set and a date picked, Foreign Minister Abba Eban flew to Washington May 26 to inform Lyndon Johnson of Israel's intentions and was assured the US backed them.

The war began preemptively June 5 and proved to be an impressive display of overwhelming power with Israel destroying 90% of Egypt's 300 + aircraft on the ground and two-thirds of the Syrian Air Force the first day. After 24 hours of conflict, Israeli Air Force (IAF) Commander Mordechai Hod announced the combined Arab air forces were destroyed, and the devastating toll on them proved it. Israel lost a mere 19 fighter aircraft while Egypt lost about 300, Syria 60, Jordan 35, Iraq 15, and Lebanon one or more. The Palestinians were about to lose much more - the remaining Gaza and West Bank parts of their nation leaving them stateless.

On day 2, Israel invaded Gaza and the West Bank; on day three Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) entered northern Sinai, devastated Egyptian brigades, captured Jerusalem, and got Jordan to surrender. On day four, the IDF invaded Haram Al-Sharif and central Sinai, and by day five had advanced to the Suez Canal, taking all of Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights. The war was practically over before it began, but Israeli forces showed no mercy using their unopposed air power to massacre thousands of defenseless Egyptian troops on the ground. It was a turkey shoot made possible largely because Washington supported it providing Israel with the latest munitions including tarmac-shredding explosives preventing undamaged planes from taking off making them sitting ducks to follow-up attacks. In addition, a US carrier group provided intelligence and communications help standing ready to intervene if needed.

Though nothing like today, even then Washington showed its commitment to Israel, and ignoring and covering up the USS Liberty incident highlights it. The intelligence ship was in the Mediterranean about 13 nautical miles off the Sinai Peninsula when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked it with full knowledge it was a US vessel as the senior Israeli lead pilot later admitted. Thirty-four on-board were killed after which Johnson Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an inquiry that concluded the incident was a case of "mistaken identity" despite knowing full well it wasn't. Later, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer said the incident was "one of the classic all-American cover-ups" for a close ally Washington has made excuses and allowances for ever since along with providing huge amounts of financial aid and modern weaponry and munitions in near-limitless amounts.

Israel used what it got then for its one-sided blitzkrieg ending June 10 with Israeli forces completing the job left unfinished following their 1948 "War of Independence." They took the remaining 22% of ancient Palestine comprising Gaza and the West Bank, and on June 6, 2007 will have held the territories for 40 repressive years of the longest continuous illegal occupation in the world under which Palestinians (including Israeli citizens and Palestinian Christians) lost their personal, political and economic freedoms under Israeli rule affording those rights only to Jews.

Worldwide Solidarity Actions Opposing the Illegal Occupation

To commemorate this infamous anniversary, the International Coordination Network on Palestine (ICNP) was launched at the annual UN civil society conference in 2006. It supports the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people under their banner, "The World Says No to Israeli Occupation." ICNP called for global days of protest June 9 - 10 demanding an end to the occupation; the realization of the Palestinians' inalienable rights including their right to self-determination; their Right to Return to their homeland; and to establish an independent, sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem where it rightfully belongs.

ICNP is building nonviolent global action campaigns for boycotts, divestment and economic and political sanctions. In addition, it engages in a wide range of educational and cultural activities with the same aims in mind. It insists governments across the world stop providing Israel economic, political and military support and work instead together to end an occupation that never should have been tolerated in the first place. It wants it replaced with a "just and lasting peace."

Hundreds of other organizations, networks and groups across the world are also mobilizing for a global protest day June 9. One of them is the "Occupation 40" coalition calling for "six days" of actions (from June 5 - 10) marking 40 hellish years of occupation. In addition, a Global Day of Action was called for on Saturday, June 9. The coalition is comprised of grassroots Israeli groups and organizations, peace activists, artists, student groups, internal Palestinian refugees, anarchists, animal rights activists, and leftist groups including socialists and communists. There will be a six-day convergence in Israel including demonstrations, direct actions, discussions and cultural events.

"Occupation 40" is also calling for international direct actions against the illegal occupation from June 5 - 10 including economic punishment against corporations profiting from an occupation that cost Palestinians their homeland. The planned agenda for these days is as follows:

-- June 5: An international action day against militarization, wars and occupations in advance of the June G-8 summit in Germany.

-- June 6 - 8: Protests against the G-8 by Palestinian and Israeli activists and Palestinian Solidarity groups across Europe where German authorities are already cracking down in advance of the June 6 - 8 summit of world leaders taking place at the German resort of Heiligendamm in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommen on the Baltic coast.

Wherever George Bush travels, unprecedented levels of security are needed the result of intense worldwide anger against him and his administration showing up in mass public actions justifiably protesting his presence. As a result, the Heiligendamm resort is being turned into a luxurious armed military fortress with a huge protective wall around it costing $17 million a German newspaper called "the equivalent of a maximum security prison (in reverse) to keep people out."

In addition, the Baltic Sea surrounding the resort will be patrolled by nine naval vessels supplementing 16,000 local police and 1100 soldiers guarding the area to keep protesters several miles from the meeting. Add to that the police state-style raids now ongoing targeting global justice and leftist organizations across the country on the phony pretext they're involved in the "creation of a terrorist organization."

-- June 6 - 12: Protest action days against the occupation in Palestine, Israel and internationally.

-- June 9: A mass rally in London along with a Global Day of Action Against the Occupation.

-- June 10 - 11: A protest, teach-in and lobby in Washington, DC.

All these actions across the world are intended to send Israel, G-8 governments and all nations around the world "a message they cannot ignore."

Life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)

IDF occupation forces continue assaulting Palestinian civilians and property daily in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and while November 8, 2006 wasn't typical, it shows how horrific some attacks have been. It began November 1 with Operation Autumn Clouds when Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) attacked Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza launching their largest assault on the territory since the late June Operation Summer Rains deadly one killing at least 240 mostly civilian men, women and children. In one November, 2006 week, 80 innocent civilians were dead, hundreds wounded, and many bodies afflicted with terribly disfiguring cuts, burns and hard to explain loss of limbs unseen before that had to have been from experimental bombs and shells likely containing radiation or other chemical materials able to burn human flesh. More on this below.

The attack culminated November 8 when Israeli tanks shelled Palestinian homes killing at least 20 and wounding 60 more in what's now called the Beit Hanoun massacre. Ironically, or maybe intentionally, it happened the day after IDF forces withdrew following the week-long Operation Autumn Clouds operation that already devastated the town and its people. The Beit Hanoun massacre wasn't typical. But it highlights how, on any pretext at any time, Israeli forces freely attack defenseless Palestinians with unrestrained viciousness maybe just to show they can get away with almost anything.

Mel Frykberg in the April 26 - May 2 issue of Al-Ahram Weekly reports some of the worst of what Israel is doing (unreported in the West) in his article called Israel's lab in Palestine. He wrote about Gaza-based doctors recently reporting severe wounds clearly made by horrific experimental weapons inflicting shocking damage with graphic web site pictures painful to view:

-- disfiguring burns caused by intense heat requiring amputation;

-- legs sliced from victims' bodies "as if a saw was used to cut through bone;"

-- the absence of shrapnel in or near wounds but the presence of a powder-like substance on victims' bodies and internal organs identified by lab analysis as carbon and tungsten (microscopic shrapnel) with many affected patients dying several days later; and

-- internal organs severely burned in the absence of external wounds.

The article further explained Italian RAI News 24 satellite TV reported on a laboratory analysis of substances taken from victims alleging Israel used "dense inert metal explosives (DIME)" last summer in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and that a high concentration of carbon, copper, aluminum and tungsten points to a DIME weapon this time. RAI News 24 indicated military experts said DIME weapons are "carbon-encased missile(s) that shatter on impact into minuscule splinters (simultaneously exploding with) blades of energy-charged, heavy metal tungsten alloy (HMTA) powder (like) cobalt and nickel or iron, with a carbon fibre casing. It turns to dust on impact....burning and destroying....everything within a four-metre range."

In addition to causing severe disabling and dismembering injuries, DIME weapons leave carcinogenic fallout (like depleted uranium - DU - or other toxic chemical pollutants) in areas targeted by them resulting in environmental contamination with virtually certain large increases in future cancers for people living close by and exposed.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) on the ground in the territories documents it all daily, and its weekly report ending May 17 reads like all others depending on how horrific each week is with some hugely more so than others as Palestinian victims can attest. PCHR (and other groups) publish an account of daily incursions, assaults, shootings, targeted assassinations, aircraft intrusions and attacks, arrests, torture, home demolitions, restrictions on movement, crop destruction, land theft, and countless other types of harassment and humiliations making life in occupied Palestine repressive and unbearable for its residents who somehow resist and endure.

In nearly all cases, Israeli actions are unprovoked or barely so like responding with overwhelming force to children throwing rocks or Palestinians defending their homes, neighborhoods or communities from repeated IDF incursions. Palestinians only have crude and light weapons against the world's fourth most powerful military with nearly every imaginable modern weapon including sophisticated nuclear ones and delivery systems to use them effectively. Specifically during this one week, IDF ground forces killed six Palestinians in Gaza and a baby in his mother's womb in the West Bank. They also wounded 36 Palestinians and a French solidarity activist.

In Gaza on May 15, IDF border forces killed a Palestinian National Security Forces officer fleeing Fatah-Hamas armed clashes with US and Israeli fingerprints all over this renewed fighting aimed at toppling the unity government. To do it, Fatah security forces were supplied with millions of dollars in funding, weapons and Egyptian-based training for this type operation ebbing and flowing with renewed fighting erupting on any pretext when cease-fires break down.

On May 16, Israeli forces killed three Executive Force members of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior. They also wounded 27 other Palestinians (including two journalists and a civilian bystander) by Israeli air attacks on a Rafah Executive Force site. On the same day, two Hamas members were killed and three others wounded by air attacks in northern Gaza. Earlier on May 10, IDF forces near Khan Yunis burnt large areas of Palestinian agricultural land in Khuza'a village in a deliberate act of military vandalism.

Also, on May 10, the IDF attacked Israeli solidarity and Palestinian civilian and international activists' peaceful demonstration protesting the construction of the Annexation/Apartheid wall in Bal'ein village west of Ramallah wounding three Palestinian adults, one child and a Swiss solidarity activist. On May 13, an Israeli settlement guard shot from "zero range" wounding a Palestinian taxi driver.

From May 10 - 17, IDF forces conducted at least 26 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank arresting 41 civilians including seven children. That brings the number of Palestinians arrested in the West Bank alone this year to 1,164. Israeli forces also demolished one home and arrested two Palestinians in Gaza. Throughout this period, the IDF continued imposing a tightened siege on the OPT severely restricting movement including in occupied East Jerusalem and at border crossings through which essential humanitarian goods and services must have access but often don't when most needed.

The important Rafah International Crossing Point has been closed since June 25, 2006 except for three days. Because of this and other crossing point restrictions, markets aren't getting food, stores aren't getting goods, and hospitals don't have vital medical supplies, with most Palestinian patients unable to travel to them in Israel or the OPT anyway as needed. In addition, Palestinians have been prevented from fishing in the Mediterranean for nearly one year depriving them of their livelihood and the people of the food they harvest from the sea.

In recent days, Israel launched heavy air strikes against Hamas government Gaza targets killing 36 mostly Palestinian civilians and wounding 97 others through May 21 as well as destroying dozens of homes and parliamentary sites. This is on top of renewed Israeli-instigated Fatah-Hamas armed clashes in Gaza killing 47 and injuring scores more through May 19. On May 18, independent Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad wrote on the Electronic Intifada web site of a recent "terrifying 24 hours (with) sporadic gunfire and ghostly streets."

She mentioned a phone call from her father describing a (US-supplied F-16-caused) "tremendous explosion (sending) intense shockwaves through our house....so powerful....it blasted off the windows from my cousin's home in the neighbourhood behind us. This attack was followed by another then another, and then another." There were six Israeli (F-16) air strikes in one morning with "Israeli tanks....amassing at Gaza's northern border, and unmanned Israeli drones whirring menacingly overhead in great numbers patrolling ghostly skies....preparing..for yet another strike against an already bleeding, burning, and battered Gaza" from Israeli terror attacks.

Tony Karon, writing in the Electronic Intifada May 15, notes the current conflict "has assumed a momentum of its own" Palestinian leaders are unable to contain because Washington and Israel want it that way in the wake of Hamas' victory in the January, 2006 elections. He then adds ominously this may end up "turning Gaza into Mogadishu" just the way the Bush administration is now "busy turning Mogadishu into Mogadishu all over again."

The "If Americans Knew" web site also publishes and keeps current shocking information on the daily toll in the OPT. Some of its disturbing figures affecting Palestinians from September 29, 2000 (the first day of the Second Intifada) to the present at the hands of Israeli forces are as follows:

-- 934 Palestinian children have been killed in most cases while engaging in normal daily activities like going to school, playing, shopping, or being in their homes. PCHR reports a total of 4284 Palestinian deaths through March 23, 2007.

-- A known total of 31,307 Palestinians have been injured, mostly civilians, and mostly under the same circumstances children were killed. The B'Tselem Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories reports these numbers are extremely conservative while the internationally respected Palestine Red Crescent Society reports much higher totals that are likely more accurate. In addition, these figures exclude large numbers of Palestinians who die when unable to reach medical care in time because of Israeli checkpoints, road closures, curfews and other restrictions on mobility in the OPT. Also, no accurate records are available on the large number of avoidable Palestinian deaths resulting from deprivation and/or disease following the first time ever imposition of sanctions on an occupied people from early 2006 to the present.

-- The cite reports US financial aid to Israel is $7,023,288 per day, but the true number is far higher including:

- around $3 billion or more annually in direct aid;

- billions more in loans as needed;

- millions annually for immigrant resettlement;

- multi-billions in waved loan repayments;

- billions more in military aid, financial help to develop Israel's defense industry, transfer of state-of-the-art technology and the latest US weapons, and US guarantees for Israel's access to oil;

- $22 billion Israel got over the past 50 years through the sale of its below-market paying bonds that have financed half its development - meaning the colonization of annexed Palestinian land; military aid for its imperial aggressive wars; and still more as needed and requested.

Tiny Israel today (with six million Jews) gets more US financial aid (in all direct and indirect forms) than all other countries in the world combined.

In addition, a 2006 "Washington Report" piece by Shirl McArthur estimated the minimal amount of US aid to Israel since 1948 in an article titled "A Conservative Estimate of Total US Aid to Israel: $108 billion." Again, the true number is far higher. Over the same period to the present, US aid to the Palestinians was "zero" except what's supplied for "security" for Israel and now to aid quisling Fatah forces fight the democratically elected Hamas government Israel, Washington and the West won't recognize.

-- Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions ignoring them all. The Palestinians have been targeted by none.

-- One Israeli corporal is held prisoner by the Palestinians. At least 10,756 Palestinians are now imprisoned by Israel, most held on "administrative" or no charge, and according to the B'Tselem Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories the great majority of them are abused or tortured. PCHR reports from 1967 through 1994 alone, 775,000 Palestinians were imprisoned for periods ranging from one week to life.

The Israeli human rights organization HaMoked Center for the Defense of the Individual confirms this in an April, 2007 report it jointly published with B'Tselem titled "Utterly Forbidden - The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees. It's based on testimonies of dozens of Palestinians arrested, interrogated and tortured by Israel's ISA, formerly known as the General Security Service. In addition, even Israeli authorities openly admit using "exceptional" interrogation methods and "physical pressure" against Palestinian detainees that translated means "torture." However, B'Tselem reports the State Attorney's Office "covers up these illegal acts, thereby assisting in the breach of international law and of High Court of Justice's prohibitions."

It hardly needs mentioning international laws ban torture for any reason, but it never deterred Israel or the US from using it freely. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in 1948. The Fourth Geneva Convention banned any form of "physical or mental coercion" in 1949 requiring detainees at all times to be treated humanely. The European Convention affirmed this in 1950, and in 1984, the UN Convention Against Torture became the first binding international instrument dealing exclusively with banning torture in any form for any reason. Israel and the US both have contempt for international law mutually affirming the other's right to act as it pleases with no protests heard in the West or hardly anywhere else.

-- 4170 Palestinian homes have been demolished according to a B'Tselem November 15, 2004 report titled "Through No Fault of Their Own." The Israeli Committee Against House Demotions (ICAHD) reports a far larger number calling them "the hallmark of the Occupation." It cites the demolition of around 12,000 Palestinian homes (on their own land in their own country) since June, 1967 to the present, leaving about 70,000 Palestinians "without shelter and traumatized."

B'Tselem reports three types of demolitions:

-- 1. As "clearing operations" to meet Israeli "military needs."

-- 2. Administration demolitions of houses built "without a permit" meaning Israel won't let Palestinians build homes on their own land.

-- 3. Demolitions for punitive reasons against Palestinians "suspected" of attacking Israeli (occupying) soldiers or civilians. In many cases, adjacent homes are destroyed as well.

PCHR reports other destruction of land and property from September 29, 2000 through June, 2005 including 31,500 dunums (31.5 million square meters) of mostly agricultural land in Gaza or 10% of the territory's arable land total. Israel seized the land for illegal settlement development. In addition, 656 businesses, factories and schools were either destroyed or damaged over this period.

-- World Bank data estimates Palestinian unemployment at 40%. The true figure, however, is much higher, at least 70% and likely higher still, while available employment is grossly inadequate to meet essential human needs in most cases. It's the result of Israeli and western political and economic sanctions imposed on the democratically elected Hamas government after January, 2006. It was the first time ever an occupied people were put under a virtual midieval siege in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention obligating the international community to protect an occupied civilian population. Instead, a state of belligerency was imposed causing chaos and mass human misery, deprivation, starvation, illness and disease so far unaddressed and worsening. Almost none of this is reported in the dominant western media.

As early as June 28, 2002, PCHR reported 40 - 50% of Palestinians were living below the internationally recognized poverty line of $2 a day with the figure in Gaza 81%. Two-thirds of them were called the "new poor," having been impoverished since the outbreak of the Second Intifada September 29, 2000. Nearly five years later, the figures are far higher.

-- Israel currently has over 400,000 Jews living in 121 Jewish-only settlements and 102 "outposts" on stolen Palestinian land violating Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stating "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population in the territory it occupies." The number continues growing with deputy Jerusalem mayor Yehoshua Pollack announcing in May 20,000 new homes will be built in Arab East Jerusalem on more land annexed from its legal residents Israel is systematically ethnically cleasning toward making the entire city 100% Jewish.

In addition, 500 more houses will be built in Abu Dis village, southeast of Jerusalem with new home construction aimed at creating territorial continuity between Jerusalem and "Gush Etzion" settlement bloc, south of Bethlehem, and between Jerusalem and "Beit Eil" settlement, north of Ramallah. Toward the same end, the Israeli government allocated $1.5 billion in US taxpayer aid May 13 to developing Jerusalem settlement neighborhoods to reduce an increasing Palestinian population in the city.

At the same time, Palestinians in Salama and Fqaiqees villages, east and south of "Noghohot" settlement, west of Hebron, were ordered to stop building 10 houses and a mosque on their own land in their own country. Then on May 11, Israeli settlers in "Sousia" setttlement, south of Hebron, attacked Palestinian farmers on their agricultural land near the settlement without provocation.

End the Illegal Occupation Now

For 40 years under occupation on one-fifth of their original land and nearly 60 years after the "Nakba," Palestinians are forced to endure the most appalling repression no one should have to face for a single day. Five million of them, including 1.4 million Israeli citizens, are denied all rights afforded Jews only and are subjected to daily abuse and neglect along with regular IDF assaults against which they're defenseless. The Palestinians suffer for it, and the world community is silent except, like Israel, to shamefully call the victims the victimizers.

Then there are the five million refugees in the Palestinian diaspora (by some estimates the number is seven million) including 260,000 internally displaced and living inside Israel. Those outside the country are denied the absolute universal "Right of Return" affirmed in UN Resolution 194 passed in December, 1948 resolving that "refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property....made good by the Governments or authorities responsible."

This "Universal Right" was also established in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as various Geneva Conventions Israel won't recognize just as it ignores over five dozen UN resolutions condemning or censuring it for its actions against the Palestinians or other Arab people, deploring it for committing them, or demanding, calling on or urging the Jewish state to end them. One of them was UN Resolution 273 passed May, 1949 giving Israel UN membership conditional on its implementing Resolutions 181 of November, 1947 partitioning Palestine 56 - 44% in its favor and 194 passed December, 1948 giving Palestinians their absolute universally accepted "Right of Return."

From 1948, when Palestinians lost 78% of their homeland, to 1967 when they lost the rest to a hostile foreign occupier, to the present, life in the OPT has been oppressive, intolerable and criminally imposed on a defenseless people helpless against it and unsupported ever since in their courageous struggle for liberation one day they'll achieve because they'll never give up till they have what they rightfully and legally deserve. For 40 years under occupation they have no recognized state of their own, no right of citizenship, and no power over their daily lives.

They live in a constant state of fear in the virtual open-air prisons of Gaza and the West Bank under Israel's racist apartheid laws even the Israeli High Court shamefully upholds. They're strangled economically and politically; denied free movement in their own country from a structure of roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences and a land-grabbing "Apartheid Separation wall" the World Court in the Hague ruled (14 - 1) is "contrary to international law" because it "destroyed and (illegally) confiscated" property, it greatly restricts Palestinian movement, and it "severely impedes the exercise by the Palestinian people of (the) right to self-determination."

For its Jewish citizens, Israel is nominally democratic, although far from perfect at the least. For its Arab Muslim and small Christian population, it's a daily struggle for survival under the harshest conditions of all kinds imaginable those outside the territories and most Jews in Israel can't possibly understand and too few even try. For 40 brutal years, Israel has illegally controlled all aspects of Palestinian life in the OPT with an iron fist it freely swings on the slightest pretext. It cantonized the indigenous population under deplorable conditions in refugee camps and bantustans surrounded and cut off from all other ones. It rules defenseless people by intimidation and repressive military might. It denies Palestinian people their right to a truly sovereign independent state and won't allow Muslims, Christians and other non-Jewish legal residents in greater Israel the same rights as Jews including the right of citizenship and safety under one sovereign nation for everyone entitled to it.

Israel claims it wants peace but never negotiated in good faith to get it. The current so-called "road map" is a cruel hoax going nowhere. It's as fraudulent as all other phony peace efforts before it. Beginning with Camp David in 1978, the US bribed Egypt with billions in "baksheesh" in return for peace with Israel leaving Palestinians out in the cold. The predictable result was festering anger that exploded in what became the First Intifada in 1987 killing hundreds of Palestinians that finally led to the Oslo Accords and their so-called Declaration of Principles in 1993. Under them, Israel got what it wanted giving back nothing more in return than the right of Palestinians to be Israeli enforcers in their own land. So highly touted and praised when signed, it offered no Right of Return, no independent Palestinian state, no portion of Jerusalem as a capital, and no Palestinian control over their own daily lives free from a foreign occupier. From then till now, things only got worse.

Oslo I led to Oslo II in 1995 that divided the West Bank into the way it exists today in Areas "A," "B," "C," and "D"; "H-1" and "H-2" in Hebron; nature reserves (in the OPT) for Jews only; closed military areas; security zones; and "open green spaces" for Jewish-only housing developments in over half of Arab East Jerusalem (slowly being stolen entirely) leaving Palestinians confined to unconnected cantons surrounded by growing Israeli settlements, restricted roads, and all kinds of impediments restricting free movement preventing any semblance of normal daily life.

So-called "permanent status" talks then began in July, 2000 at Camp David resulting in another insulting betrayal. Portrayed in the West as a generous offer in good faith, it was, in fact, just another example of US-Israeli duplicity leaving out entirely what Palestinians most want - a free and sovereign state or a single multi-ethnic one with Jews and Palestinians having equal rights, the Right of Return, a portion of Jerusalem as a capital or the entire city as capital for both, and an end to foreign occupation. All that was offered in exchange for "peace" Israeli-style is what they now have - life locked down in unconnected cantons on mostly scrub land in virtual open-air prisons surrounded by expanding Israeli settlements continuing to encroach on Palestinian lands fast disappearing as Israelis take what they want dunum by dunum.

Again justifiable festering anger erupted into the Second (al-Aqsa Mosque) Intifada in September, 2000 following former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the holy al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem (the Noble Sanctuary for Muslims and Temple Mount for Jews and Christians). It became far worse following elections for Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) seats on January 25, 2006 when, fed up with years of Fatah-led corruption and betrayal, Palestinians democratically elected a Hamas government Israel, Washington and the West acted savagely against since to destroy because its leaders won't act as a quisling government the way Fatah's Yasser Arafat and current Fatah Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, and his powerful National Security Advisor and "Gaza warlord," Mohammed Dahlan (controlling Fatah security forces), were always willing to do and Abbas and especially Dahlan still are. For Hamas' courage and dedication to their people, the Palestinians have paid dearly ever since and still do. This must end.

It's long past time people of conscience everywhere take a public stand and demand 40 years of illegal repressive occupation end so Palestinians can finally have what all people have a right to expect and demand - to live freely in their own land the way international law mandates with nations supporting it accepting nothing less.

Palestinians and their legions of supporters worldwide aren't waiting for conflict resolution that won't ever come unless enough committed people everywhere demand their leaders act on it. A growing effort is building to convince them by calling for an organized global campaign for boycott, divestment and political and economic sanctions against Israel the same way they developed in the 1980s against the South African apartheid state that finally brought results.

It must include a demand that the world community of nations ends the "last taboo" of silence when it comes to Israel. It must be willing to expose and denounce what no longer can be tolerated that current South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils calls worse than apartheid saying Israel "behav(es) like fascists when they do certain things (like attacking Palestinians with helicopter gunships and tanks)." What better time to do what Kasrils is surely calling for than on the 40th anniversary of the longest continuous occupation in the world that no longer can be tolerated.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen each Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com at noon US central time.

Review of End Times

A Review of Alexander Cockburn's and Jeffrey St. Clair's End Times - by Stephen Lendman

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are both veteran journalists and authors doing the kind of muckraking political and other investigative writing only found in the US online and in out-of-the-mainstream publications and political newsletters like the one they co-publish and edit - CounterPunch with its counterpart web site of the same name.

Cockburn is also a regular columnist with The Nation magazine, and his writings appear regularly in the New York Free Press and Los Angeles Times. He formerly wrote extensively for numerous other publications as well including the Wall Street Journal's far right editorial page oddly in the 1980s when its late editor Bob Bartley decided to have an alternate point of view and certainly got an exceptional one the mirror opposite of the array of extremist hard right contributors he allowed regular space to all the time as does his successor today. Cockburn's also authored, co-authored and co-edited 18 books, the latest one being "End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate," along with co-author St. Clair, and subject of this review.

St. Clair has authored, co-authored and co-edited 10 books including his powerful and extraordinary post-9/11 2005 expose of war profiteering - Grand Theft Pentagon - Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror. He's also worked as an environmental organizer and activist, writes for the environmental magazine Forest Watch, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, and has written for Friends of the Earth, Clean Water Action Project and his native state Hoosier Environmental Council. In addition, he's a contributing editor of In These Times magazine and has written for The Nation, The Progressive, New Left Review and other publications.

End Times - A Collection of Essays from Cockburn and St. Clair On the Dismal State of the Dominant Print Media

"End Times - The Death of the Fourth Estate" is a collection of 50 wide-ranging essays written in recent years under six topic headings, mostly by Cockburn and St. Clair with a few by other contributors, on the dismal state of the corporate print media today. They were dominant at their zenith in the mid-1970s Pentagon Papers - Watergate era but now, the authors say, are in an inevitable state of decline agreeing with media mogul (Cockburn-labeled "WORLD-SCALE MONSTER") Rupert Murdock's characterization of a long twilight at best.

Even more, their current state is symptomatic of our overall societal decay with unprecedented wealth disparities, the nation in endless wars of illegal aggression, predatory corporate giants ruling the world, and our democracy on life support heading for the crematorium to be heralded on arrival in front page coverage of the nation's leading purveyors of "news unfit to print." This review covers the authors account of their decline at a time noted historian Gabriel Kolko calls "the most dangerous period in mankind's entire history" when the kind of news and information we most need isn't served up by the dominant fourth estate suppressing it in service to power. The essence and flavor of the book is covered with selected examples from it in an age of media concentration, deregulation and "in-bed-with" journalists posing as the real thing.

The book came out at a time public distrust for traditional print and electronic news is increasing as growing numbers of people, hungry for real information, are turning to alternate sources including a new, vibrant world of them online like CounterPunch the authors say gets around three million daily hits, 300,000 page views, and 100,000 unique visitors including 15,000 regular US military readers stationed around the world, a sign many thousands more of them visit other sites like CounterPunch and pass on what they learn to others. A hopeful, but not certain, indication of a growing trend too powerful to stop. More on that at the end.

The Fourth Estate "tremble for Power," the authors state, acting instead as "Accomplices in the great and ongoing Cover-up of Everything that Really Matters" that destroys their reliability to deliver real news and information. Still, as End Times contributor Ken Silverstein (co-founder with Alex Cockburn of CounterPunch in 1993) writes, there were moments when broadsheet papers like the Washington Post (New York Times and others) did what their readers want and expect - their job reporting the news and enough of it in depth from investigative work unimaginable today in an age of lies, cover-up and "journalism" being just another profit center. Silverstein cites late fall 1974 as the Washington Post's time of "supreme triumph" post-Watergate after reporters Woodward and Bernstein took credit toppling Richard Nixon who did a pretty good job doing it to himself the way George Bush is trying to match today.

From its brief time of triumph forward, it's been all downhill since with the corporate media now concentrated and dominant and little more than our national thought-control police gatekeepers daily serving up a full plate of pap and propaganda suppressing real news "fit to print" but hardly ever is or at least where it's easy to find. That's the dismal state of the prominent print press today End Times writes about drawing lots of blood dissecting it, example by example, showing it's doing what 1920s intellectual writer and dean of journalists in his day, Walter Lippmann, called the "manufacture of (public) consent" in a nominally democratic state where it can't be done by force.

"Manufacturing Consent" was the title used by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky for their landmark 1988 book explaining the dominant media's "propaganda model" to program the public mind to go along with whatever agenda best serves the power structure. It was also the subject noted author, academic and social critic Michael Parenti chose for his 1986 book "Inventing Reality" explaining how they "set(ting) the agenda, defining what it is we must believe or disbelieve, accept or reject (by) defining the scope of respectable political discourse, channeling public attention in directions that are essentially supportive of the existing political-economic system." In other words, the idea is to make us submissive good citizens willing to go along with whatever agenda the supreme rulers of the universe wish even if their interests harm ours.

Today, prominent broadsheets like the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Times (along with publications they own) have a virtual stranglehold on mass print communication along with major publishers of large-scale circulation magazines like Time and US News and World Report. They're able to use their reach and influence (even ebbing) to destroy the free marketplace of ideas vital to a healthy democracy now on life support at best in large measure from the damage these papers and magazines inflict on the body politic.

The Washington Post's Fall from Grace

Ken Silverstein explained "The Fall of the Washington Post" when Katherine Graham ran the paper and in 1974 signaled Watergate-type exposes and similar reporting no longer were welcome in the press she felt "should....be rather careful about its role." She called for a return to basics with journalists behaving more deferentially to the powerful figures they covered. And so they have with assistant managing editor Bob Woodward of Watergate fame now fawning over George
Bush in books like Bush at War and Plan of Attack, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan in Maestro, and others best ignored.

Cockburn and St. Clair continue the saga in Woodward at Court saying first off "It's been a devastating fall for what are conventionally regarded as the nation's two premier newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post." The Times saw its "star reporter" Judith Miller fall from grace, and the Post faced the challenge of dealing with its famed staffer's multiple conflicts of interests including his formerly concealed (to the public and his bosses) role in the outing of Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame when she worked at CIA.

In an embarrassing climb-down, Woodward had to testify in a two-hour deposition to Special Council Patrick Fitzgerald whom he denounced on TV the night before Lewis Libby's indictment in the case as "a junkyard dog of a prosecutor" in his post-Watergate role as chief flatterer of George Bush and other powerful Washington figures. Cockburn and St. Clair speculated whether Woodward's high level (unrevealed) source for the Plame leak was Dick Cheney ending their article referring to Woodward going "From Nixon's nemesis to Cheney's savior," but the same can be said for the kind of empire-supportive "journalism" found all through the dominant press, especially on issues like war and peace.

The "Dogs of War"

The authors devote a whole section to it called "The Dogs of War." In it we learn how easily journalists are corrupted so news can be managed to deliver only favorable accounts of some of the most appalling events. Even more stunning is the authors citing a 1977 Rolling Stone Carl Bernstein story estimating more than 400 journalists were allied in some way with the CIA between 1956 and 1972 leaving readers to wonder how many do it now in the age of George Bush when anything goes and the law of the land is just an artifact.

Joe Trento's "Secret History of the CIA," published in 2001 and cited in "End Times," gave us an idea of its extent earlier naming big names involved in a CIA operation code-named "Mockingbird," not too subtlety picked using a bird known to mimic the calls of other birds. Noted syndicated columnist through the 1970s Joseph Alsop was one of them along with his brother Stewart. Other notables "willing to promote the views of the CIA" included Ben Bradlee (Newsweek and Washington Post), James "Scotty" Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time magazine), and Walter Pincus (Washington Post), among others.

The section also includes St. Clair's article How to Sell a War. It makes powerful reading, and he's right observing it'll be remembered for how it was sold, not how it was waged. It will also be remembered for portraying an illegal lost cause as a noble undertaking. St. Clair explains it was a propaganda war, designed by PR experts, promoted by spin doctors, all aimed at us as the target audience ingesting it like mother's milk - at least most of us long enough to get the war machine rolling and be too far along to be recalled - until eventually and inevitably it is because the best-laid plans turned to mush.

In charge were people like ad maven Charlotte Beers appointed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (aka pre-war propaganda) for her known business skills as "a grand diva of spin." Fortune magazine featured her among the most powerful women in America in 1997 for her achievements advertising the merits of Uncle Ben's Rice and Head and Shoulders shampoo. The Bush administration naturally thought she could sell America to the Muslim world in her Brand America campaign as well as she could peddle over-the-counter products to gullible consumers. She fleeced the taxpayers a whopping $500 million trying, stayed on from October, 2001 till just before the March, 2003 "shock and awe" assault began mistakenly thinking the war was won before the real fireworks began.

St. Clair explained tens of millions more went into prepping the public on Saddam's danger to the free world and why he had to be removed before "the smoking gun" we saw turned out "to be a mushroom-shaped cloud" according to National Security Advisor at the time Condoleezza Rice. Topping the threat-sellers was Washington heavy-hitting hired gun and "Beltway fixer" John Rendon, head of the Rendon Group. He's been around Washington for years and earlier got the Bush administration's assignment to sell the Afghanistan bombing, following up with a host of PR schemes on Saddam and Iraq, pre and post-March, 2003. He flopped convincing the UN and NATO pre-war but had no trouble duping the US public long enough to convince them blowing up Iraq was the best way to save it and end up being be safer at home.

St. Clair also reviews the role of other players in the scheme to sell war and occupation including the one played by PR firm Hill & Knowlton's Victoria Clark in her role at DOD as PR assistant secretary to Donald Rumsfeld and other assorted players in the media like writer and accomplished liar Laurie Mylroie, the Post's Charles Krauthammer, Max Boot, and the lead role played out daily on the New York Times' front pages mainly by now discredited and fired Judith Miller.

Cockburn devoted a chapter to her deservedly. He titled it well - Judith Miller: Weapon of Mass Destruction. Indeed she was and then some, and it's arguable that without this now disgraced former Times' reporter (or someone else in her shoes) there might not have been an Iraq war. Miller was part of the scheme from the get-go serving up a daily serving of propaganda in what media critic Norman Solomon calls "the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA" - the Times' front page.

Miller introduced us to Khidir Hamza, Saddam's self-proclaimed bomb-maker, later outed as a fraud. She kept at it daily using as her key source leading Iraqi exile and known fraudster/schemer Ahmed Chalabi. She also was little more than a Bush administration/ Pentagon stenographer/cheerleader transmitting their lies and deceptions to the public effectively enough to sell a war based on administration lies and hers that never should have happened with many in the Washington power structure now wishing it hadn't.

Cockburn writes about her: "With Miller we sink to the level of straight press handout. Lay all Judith Miller....stories end to end, from late 2001 to June, 2003, and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists." And he added most of what she wrote was "garbage, garbage that powered the Bush administration's propaganda drive toward invasion....She knew what she was doing." One thing she didn't or left out was Ben Franklin's take on wars that "There's no such thing as a good war and there is no such thing as a bad peace." Case close, and well said about a woman who disgracefully won a Pulizer Prize for her reporting Cockburn and others demand be thunderously withdrawn to complete a full defrocking.

The killing fields for unembedded independent journalists in Iraq was covered as well. It's been notorious (the worst in the world by far) with over 130 "wrongful deaths" reported since March, 2003 including those deliberately targeted for elimination by US or other forces to silence them. In times of war, the first casualty is always truth with corporate media "embeds" obliging to keep it that way, and the Pentagon ready to target anyone reporting what Washington wants suppressed. It was covered in Christopher Reed's contribution titled Have Journalists Been Deliberately Murdered by the US Military along with examples by Cockburn and St. Clair in their essays. Reed mentions Britain's Independent Television News (ITN) senior unembedded war correspondent Terry Lloyd killed near Basra on the third day of the war. A court of law ruled on his case calling it "Unlawful homicide" at the hands of US Marines, but his deliberate targeting is only one among many others.

Al-Jazeera was first targeted in November, 2001 when a US missile destroyed its Kabul offices in Afghanistan. It was no accident. The Pentagon repeatedly harasses the Arab news channel in Iraq as well, occasionally closed it down, and in 2003 attacked its Baghdad offices by air killing one of its correspondents and injuring another. One other example of willful murder was veteran camerman Mazen Dana targeted by a US tank in broad daylight while he filmed outside Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Still another time, a US tank, with no provocation, fired point blank at the Palestine Hotel housing most unembedded international journalists killing reporters from Reuters and the Spanish network Telecino.

Thankfully, in spite of clear dangers to their safety, independent unembedded journalists (like Alex's brother Patrick Cockburn) are getting out real news on the war so others like Reed, A. Cockburn and St. Clair can help spread it to many others here at home and around the world. None of it shows up though in the "newspaper of record" the authors devote a whole section to with examples below.

The Long Ugly Record of the New York Times

The New York Times calls itself the "newspaper of record" reporting "All the News That's fit to Print." A more accurate label would be the closest thing in the commercial media to an official ministry of information and propaganda. Former longtime NYT journalist John Hess said it this way: "(I) never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never saw a fare...rent...or utility increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't get me started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?"

Cockburn had plenty to say about the Times as well, and reflected in his Rosenthal's Times essay on AM Rosenthal's passing in May, 2006 saying he "saved" the Times as Executive Editor in the 1970s enhancing its coverage at the same time "sow(ing) the seeds for the Times' present difficulties" fostering the likes of Judith Miller and the rest of the paper's staff who knew what the boss wanted and dared not deliver under Rosenthal through the mid-1980s and for his successors thereafter.

The Times wanted war in Iraq and served up generous helpings of lies to get it with Michael Gordon helping Miller report phony stories like the aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment one that was pure baloney and lots of others in a daily drumbeat of scare-talk misinformation. When everything began unravelling, the best the Times could do was offer "a few strangled croaks" in an 1100 word editorial climb-down never even mentioning the lead role Miller played making the case for war that disgraced the Times and got her fired.

The Times is also notorious for rewriting history when their fraudulent "first draft" of it unravels. They did it last September claiming "the 'possibility' that Saddam Hussein 'might' develop 'weapons of mass destruction' and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq." Miller's reports of clear evidence he had them pre-war is now only a "possibility" according to Times-speak. This kind of revisionism is standard practice at the NYT and one more example of its shameless deference to power.

Earlier, Cockburn and St. Clair reported an egregious example in what they called "one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in the history of journalism." It was about the Times' key role framing Wen Ho Lee beginning March 6, 1999 in the James Risen/Jeff Gerth Breach at Los Alamos story claiming an unnamed lab scientist gave the Chinese People's Republic stolen nuclear secrets. It got Lee arrested, fired and held without bail in solitary confinement for 278 days ending when he pleaded guilty to the watered-down charge of improperly downloading Restricted Data with Judge James A. Parker apologizing for the government's "abuse of power" the Times could never admit responsibility for.

Then there's the Cockburn - St. Clair piece on NYT Kid Glove Journalism on the NSA's Illegal Spying without warrants violating the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requiring them. The Times held off reporting the story for a year staying mute in deference to the Bush administration's request, then leaving out a full account of it when it finally did.

Endless examples could be given of the Times' betrayal of the public trust in service to power. A striking one goes back to the 1945 writing of science reporter William Laurence on the Manhattan Project, who along with his Times assignment was also on the War Department payroll as a PR consultant/cheerleader-propagandist writing press releases on the atomic weapons program. His job was to mislead the public initially covering-up what actually happened at the first atomic bomb Alamogordo, NM test. From there, it was to sell the program, lie about the Hiroshima/Nagasaki horror on the ground, and then deny what historian-attorney Jonathan M. Weisgall later called the "silent nuclear terror of radioactivity and radiation" and that radiation sickness killed people. He was such a good liar, he won a Pulitzer Prize for it and got to fly on the plane that bombed Nagasaki, later describing it in the Times with religious awe. But the Times duplicity didn't end there.

Beverly Ann Deepe Keever, in her 2004 book "News Zero," documented the central role the Times played for years thereafter creating false and misleading perceptions about the nature and dangers of nuclear power in any form and the deadly effects of radiation. More than any other source, the Times willfully and deceitfully misled the public, opinion leaders, production workers, uranium miners, US servicemen exposed to radiation, Pacific islanders exposed to tests, and everyone living near nuclear test sites or where nuclear materials are produced, processed or used. To this day, little has changed at the Times in how it reports on this vital issue it's complicit in keeping its readers in the dark about.

More examples of Times duplicity involve the paper's one-sided support for all things business because it's a major player itself in the corporate giant community. So it showed strong support for NAFTA even though it was clear before it passed it would cause hundreds of thousands of job losses in its three signatory countries including many high-paying US ones.

Earlier it was late on major stories like the 1980s Savings and Loan scandal and then tepid reporting how excess banking deregulation and concessions to Wall Street caused it. It was the same covering the 1991 Bank of Credit and Commerce (BCCI) $20 billion + heist scandal, and since March, 2003 it failed to report on the misuse of multi-billions of taxpayer dollars by the likes of Halliburton, Bechtel, the entire defense establishment, and other war profiteers benefitting hugely from the scheme in Afghanistan and Iraq. But readers of this review can get the whole ugly story told stunningly in St. Clair's 2005 book "Grand Theft Pentagon" that shows how profitable wars are and why we fight so many of them.

Such is the state of the leading newspaper on the planet today saying a lot about how bad the rest of the dominant media are. Cockburn explained part of the problem in his essay on the Post's Katherine Graham titled She Needed Fewer (political) Friends. They dined at her Georgetown home and turned out in force for her July, 2001 funeral because she was one of them. Long before it corrupted Graham's Post, it was how business was done at the Times best remembered during James "Scotty" Reston's prime years, the most influential, widely-read journalist of his time. He walked easily in the halls of power, befriended its denizens, and tainted his objectivity by giving them free reign to do almost anything without fear they'd be held to account for it by him.

Today, fourth estate elites' values are the same as the figures they cover because they'd paid so well for their work. It stands to reason they want to protect their high salaries and prominent positions by never biting the powerful hands feeding them. They, and their younger up-and-coming aspirants, have what Cockburn calls a built-in "compass in their heads" to know what to do and how to please the boss. Any divergence could mean "swift and disastrous retribution" with reassignment to the Siberia of obit writing or an invitation to find another line of work in an age when it's hard telling the difference between prostitution and so-called journalism corporate media-style.

More Examples of the Fourth Estate's Fall from Grace

The authors' book is wide-ranging and full of examples of fourth estate betraying the public trust precipitating its fall from grace. Rare exceptions aside, the dominant media never report what the authors published in their stunning 1998 book "Whiteout" about the CIA's long history of involvement in and profiting hugely from drugs trafficking. In his essay What You Can't Say, Cockburn explained the book "protrayed Uncle Sam's true face (that CIA was) Not a rogue agency but one always following the dictates of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, drugging its own subjects, approving acts of monstrous cruelty" developed by Nazis recruited to America post-war.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb said it too and got mainstream space in Knight Ridder's flagship San Jose Mercury News doing it for his 1996 Dark Alliance 20,000 word three-part series later expanded into his 550 page 1999 book with the same title. It involved CIA, the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, and the distribution of crack cocaine in Los Angeles at the time. It got him national attention, and what the authors call "one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence in living memory" by his colleagues at the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, LA Times, American Journalism Review with even the "progressive" Nation magazine piling on (dis)courtesy of its contributor David Corn who poses as a liberal but often doesn't act like one. It cost Webb his career and marriage and finally his life in an apparent suicide in December, 2004 the result of his depression because his career was ruined.

The authors also wrote about The History of "Black Paranoia" that's easily justified from the long history of white on black abuse. One example was the 600 poor black men recruited in 1932 in Macon County, Alabama for a US Public Health Service study for which they used as guinea pigs. Four hundred were infected with syphillis, were lied to and told they were being treated for bad blood, and only got an aspirin-iron supplement so researchers could monitor the natural progression of the disease. After penicillin was available as a cure in 1943, the study subjects never got it and 100 of them died from neglect with an overdose of racism. The authors quote Dr. Vanessa Gamble, associate professor of history of medicine at University of Wisconsin, Madison, saying these kinds of experiments go back over 100 years usually "done by whites on slaves and free blacks" than on poor whites.

Then there's the ugly history of snooping on blacks most notoriously done by the FBI against Martin Luther King and the infamous COINTELPRO program begun in 1956. J. Edgar Hoover said it was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize (meaning assassinate)" black organizations like the Black Panthers the FBI wanted to destroy and pretty much did.

The Nixon foray on drugs and later Reagan-Bush-Clinton one and now GW Bush all out war on them is really a war on blacks mainly. It led to the US having the largest prison population in the world at over 2.2 million with over 1000 new prisoners put in cages each week in a burgeoning prison-industrial complex that's now big business exceeding $40 billion annually and rising with blacks being the main source of revenue for it. Blacks account for half the prison population, over half of them are there for non-violent offenses, and half of those are drug-related. While inside, these and other prisoners are exploited by private contractors as de facto chattel making them the cheapest, easiest source of near-free labor this side of slavery and one more reason why "black paranoia" is real.

Other examples show it, too, with contributor Ishmael Reed writing on How the (white-controlled) Media Use Blacks to Chastise Blacks letting them say and write the kinds of things they can more easily get away with without being called racists. A lot of it is blaming the victim the way Reagan administration officials did it to impoverished single black mothers demonizing them as "welfare queens" to help justify Reagan's assault on essential social services he saw no need for.

Add to it the way elections are now held with voter roles cleansed of blacks along with their being intimidated the way they were in Florida with many prevented from getting to the polls, others turned away after arriving, and still more legitimate black voters obstructed with long lines, too few voting machines and precincts closing early to keep black people from voting "the wrong way." The fourth estate turned a blind eye, but St. Clair wrote about it in his essay What You Didn't Read About the Black Vote in Florida. He used the characterization Edward Herman chose for his 1984 book "Demonstration Elections" saying the process "demonstrated how rotten the whole system is" throughout the country.

Then there's torture the authors say is As American as Apple Pie that goes on routinely in the home-based US Gulag Prison System this reviewer wrote about in an early 2006 essay by that name calling it a crime against humanity and shame of the nation. The fourth estate never reports it and was embarrassed when they had to after the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib scandals broke, but quickly backed off once the heat died down.

CounterPunch's Side of the Story

The final part of the book includes some of its most interesting parts that only can be touched on here. One is Cockburn's essay on The Great Communicator who needs no identifying except to point out what a dreadful job of it he did except for hard core true believers hanging on every word the way they do for GW Bush like it's gospel. In Reagan's case, Cockburn wrote some classic lines saying "Truth for him, was what he happened to be saying at the time. He went one better than George Washington in that he couldn't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the truth, since he couldn't tell the difference between the two."

Mark Hertsgaard wrote how deferentially the press treated Reagan in his 1989 book "On Bended Knee" explaining they never tried laying a glove on him till the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986 and then did its best to go easy. All this was for "an awful president, never as popular as the press pretended, presiding over a carnival of corruption and greed" only the Bush administration has exceeded, so far. But when he died in June, 2004, the media practically defied him for endless days of turgid eulogies suppressing his callous indifference for the needy and scorched earth legacy he left behind in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world where he won't be easily forgiven if ever.

Gore, Clinton and Kerry are then deservedly taken to the wood shed in a trio of essays. Gore is portrayed as an erstwhile opium-laced marijuana and coke user selling himself otherwise in 2000 when the authors wrote about him as a tough-on-crime law and order hard-liner supporting the death penalty that's far from the image he's now covets as a friend of the earth. Clinton, on the other hand, back then wanted an office in Harlem to shed his image as a moral reprobate and war criminal but keep the false part of it as a man of the people "feeling our pain."

Then there's John Kerry the authors give twice the space to as the former president and vice-president combined. It's to tell the story of a 1966 Skull and Bones elite secret society Yale grad who joined the Navy and shot up the world from his Swift boat patrol in Vietnam. In the process, he earned Silver and Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts, and former CNO (chief naval officer, Vietnam) Admiral Elmo (Bud) Zumwalt's opprobrium for being a loose cannon killing too many civilian non-combatants and assaulting other non-military targets. He was so zealous and out-of-control the admiral "virtually (had) to straightjacket him" to hold him back saying Kerry even then had large ambitions his Vietnam service would haunt him pursuing if he tried doing it on a national stage.

The book ranges over much more from Billy Graham the anti-semite and supporter of mass-killing in Vietnam if the Paris peace talks failed, to the press' endorsing and covering up the Delta Force slaughter at Waco, to all the pro-war news fit to buy from willing fourth estate players and PR pros like the Lincoln Group hired to plant phony stories in Iraqi newspapers and at US-controlled al-Arabiya TV about Pentagon military successes in the country the public there could plainly see was pure baloney. Lincoln also had a near open-ended $100 million PsyOps contract to improve its creativity and foreign public opinion about the US, especially the military needing all the burnishing it can get.

The final section also covered The Row Over the (powerful) Israeli Lobby the press can't admit exists with Cockburn saying it's been a fixed part of the scene for over six decades and questioning its existence is like doubting there's a Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor or White House on Pennsylvania Avenue. Part of the Lobby's job is suppressing real news about Palestine Cockburn says he first wrote about in 1973 and continued thereafter exposing wanton Israeli acts of daily killings including targeted assassinations, land confiscations, home demolitions, torture, illegal settlement building on occupied lands and a host of other endless human degradations to ethnically cleanse all parts of Palestine Israelis want for themselves. Try finding news on that in "The Newspaper of Record" that's only possible if a publication named the Times operates on another planet and does there what journalists should be paid here to do - their job.

There's lots more this review can't include, so it will end will a final well-deserved jab at a worthy recipient before some final personal comments. It's Cockburn's article called Murdoch's Game about the venomous king of media moguls the author calls (as mentioned above) a "WORLD-SCALE MONSTER." He writes what distinguished Australian-raised journalist Bruce Page did about him in his chronicle called "The Murdock Archigelago." It has material in it Murdock supporters wouldn't want repeated in polite company about "one of the world's leading villains (and) global pirate" they support no doubt because of his rampages in the mediasphere putting world leaders on notice what he expects from them and what he's prepared to offer in return.

The essence of Page's book is that Murdock's core thesis is wanting to privatize "a state propaganda service, manipulated without scruple and with no regard for truth" in return for "vast government favors such as tax breaks, regulatory relief, and monopoly" market control as free as possible from competitors having too much of what Rupert wants for himself. The problem is he usually gets his way mostly in places that matter most with the biggest markets and greatest profit potential in a business where reporting accurate news is off the table and partnering with governments assuring a growing revenue stream is all that counts. Cockburn sums up Murdock's Game in the essay's lead-in quote from Othello: "I have done the state some service, and they know 't."

Some Final Thoughts of Hope for What's Ahead

At the top of this review, this writer noted the public's hunger for real news and information turning for it to progressive publications and online web sites providing it to growing audiences disillusioned with what they're not getting in the mainstream. Do you blame them? The above material offers plenty of examples making the case.

But as alternative news sources gain prominence and influence, the battle lines are forming to preserve and keep them free from state or corporate control. It's the battle for Net Neutrality pitting us, the public, against telecom, broadcast and cable giants, and what's at stake is the last media frontier of a free and open internet that's the best hope to revive a flagging democracy now on life support at best. The demise of HR 5252 in the Senate (the so-called "Anti-Net Neutrality Bill) in the 109th Congress means it's up to the current 110th Congress to settle the issue by either keeping the internet free and open or allowing it to be exploited by corporate predators for commercial gain and allow them to control its content to suppress material like this review.

Those concerned enough better do more than just hope for a favorable outcome from a corrupted Congress unpredictable on which way it'll go on an issue that can turn either way but is picking up positive tailwind with Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards voicing support for Net Neutrality in a recent Howard University speech. He now joins others in the field like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson plus Al Gore who may jump in later as well.

This is what's needed and more as freedoms don't protect themselves and the power lined up against them is formidable. The commercial giants are outspending public interest advocates 500 - 1, but concerned citizens fought back flooding the 109th Congress with over one million letters (and did it again to the 110th with over 1.6 million) and took to the streets in 25 cities delivering "Save the Internet" petitions to their senators last summer demanding they oppose the corporate attempt to gut Net Neutrality and instead enact a free and open internet information commons. This issue can be won, but only by lots more letters, emails, phone calls and innovative action from an aroused and mobilized public unwilling to let business or government take away what already belongs to us and that we can't afford to lose. Stay closely tuned.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen each Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The MicroEffect.com at noon US central time.

The War on Free Expression

The War on Free Expression - by Stephen Lendman

In a post-9/11 climate, the right of free expression is under attack and endangered in the age of George Bush when dissent may be called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason. But losing that most precious of all rights means losing our freedom that 18th century French philosopher Voltaire spoke in defense of saying "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Using it to express dissent is what noted historian Howard Zinn calls "the highest form of patriotism" exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech, the press, to assemble, to protest publicly, and associate as we choose for any reason within the law.

Even then, there are times more forceful action is needed, and Thomas Jefferson explained under what circumstances in the Declaration of Independence he authored. When bad government destroys our freedoms, we the people have the right and duty to disobey civilly and resist. Henry David Thoreau called it "Civil Obedience" in 1849, and men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King practiced it successfully 100 years later. That's our challenge today at a time our constitutional rights are more compromised and threatened than at any previous time in our history. Resistance is the antidote to restoring them, and freedom-loving people have a duty and obligation to do it.

That's what democracy is all about and what our Founders had in mind when they crafted what they called "the great (democratic) experiment" that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights, imperfect as they are with omissions and ambiguities. In words first written by Thomas Jefferson, they "declared their independence" in 1776 from the British king who ruled the colonies with "repeated injuries and usurpations (by his) absolute Tyranny" using language considered audacious then or now:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (and) endowed....with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government....to effect their Safety and Happiness." Try doing that today, and it's called treason, a capital offense. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and others thought otherwise saying we must act in our own defense when government won't do it for us.

Their "experiment" was glorious, even flawed, and never before tried in the West in any form since its few decades of existence in ancient Athens under its system of "demokratia" or rule by the entire body of Athenian citizens - or at least the non-slave adult white male portion of it meaning a selective democracy for an elite minority excluding all others the way it's always been here. It began in 1776 with our Declaration of Independence followed by our Constitution ratified in 1789 and Bill of Rights in 1791. This extraordinary document's Preamble said what our country's liberties are in 52 historic words even though the language belied the reality:

"WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." And so it was with all its flaws in a nation beholden to privileged white male property owners, doing little for others including women, nothing for black slaves who were property, and even less for "original Americans" exterminated to make way for "newer ones." We called it democracy Winston Churchill once said was the "worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Today it's also called "Western civilization" Gandhi thought "would be a good idea" when asked what he thought about it.

At best, our form of it is a flawed, unfinished project. At worst, it's heading in reverse at a time of our single-minded pursuit of empire in an age of:

-- Predatory capitalism and corporate dominance, incompatible with democracy;

-- Sparta-like iron-fisted militarism and all its fallout: mass killing and destruction, occupation, torture and overall inhuman barbarism;

-- The most secretive, intrusive, repressive and lawless government in our history;

-- An unprecedented wealth disparity former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once warned about saying: "We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both;"

-- The rollback of civil liberties and essential human rights and needs;

-- A contempt for the rule of law;

-- A deepening social decay;

-- The absence of checks and balances and separation of powers and a president usurping "unitary executive" powers to claim the law is what he says it is; and

-- The loss of our constitutional freedoms heading the nation toward tyranny and ruin unless reversed.

More than ever, the right to freely express dissent is crucial to surviving. Lose it, as is happening, and lose everything.

The Constitution's First Amendment explicitly bestows that right no government can lawfully remove, but this one's doing it anyway. It states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." No other nation in history ever granted more of these freedoms, and few, if any, matched them in law or practice.

Nonetheless, there were numerous examples of abusive earlier laws violating various constitutionally guaranteed rights including that of free expression. The Sedition Act of 1798 (with the ink barely dry on the Bill of Rights) did it making it a crime to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the president (John Adams) or Congress but allowed it against the vice-president and Adams rival (Thomas Jefferson). It thus illegally banned dissent the Constitution allows.

During WW I, the Espionage Act was passed (under Democrat Woodrow Wilson) in 1917 imposing a maximum 20 year sentence for anyone causing "insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or (encouraging) refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States." It was aimed at First Amendment speech protesting the war and US participation in it everyone lawfully has the right to do. The Sedition Act in 1918 went further criminalizing "disloyal, scurrilous (or) abusive" anti-government speech. Shamefully, the Supreme Court upheld the Espionage Act, most notably in (Eugene) Debs (five time socialist presidential candidate) v. United States resulting in his serving prison time for speaking out against militarism and the US entry into WW I.

Other High Court Rulings Affirming or Infringing on First Amendment Rights

-- On war protests when the Warren Court in 1968 disallowed draft card burning claiming it would disrupt the "smooth and efficient functioning" of the draft system. But in 1969 the Court said students had free speech rights and could wear black arm bands protesting the Vietnam war. And it ruled for KKK leader Brandenburg against Ohio in 1969 holding that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it directly incites lawless action. Then in 1971, the Court upheld Cohen against California ruling four-letter word anti-war profanity was permissible on a jacket in Los Angeles country courthouse corridors. Don't try it in the halls of Congress.

-- On flag burning in 1989 in Texas v. Johnson when Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, said "if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable," and that includes the right to protest by burning the flag in public.

-- On obscenity where Courts ruled against pornographic speech especially to protect children from it but held no government can prohibit its possession in the home.

-- On slander and libel impermissible in cases of intentional instances of "actual malice" or speech provably false, but acceptable for opinions which cannot be held legally defamatory.

-- On political speech in the famous Buckley v. Valeo 1976 ruling when the High Court held that limits on campaign contributions "serve the basic governmental interest in safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process without directly impinging upon the rights of individual citizens and candidates to engage in political debate and discussion." However, the Court found expenditure limits imposed "substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech." The Court also ruled in 2003 upholding provisions barring the raising of "soft money" contributions to a political party, not a candidate.

Now the High Court is considering arguments on that restriction in the five year old McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and may soon rule to weaken it. At issue is a provision barring corporations and unions from funding campaign ads 60 days before an election and 30 days before a primary naming a candidate for federal office. In their 5 - 4 December, 2003 decision, the court upheld the provision, but its new majority may rule otherwise inviting a tsunami of paid political speech as the 2008 federal elections heat up.

-- On press freedom with High Courts ruling for and against the media on matters of taxes and content issues involving political speech, religious speech, "criminal syndicalism," defamation, obscenity, personal injury, hate or other offensive speech, and other constitutional issues affecting press freedom. Various High Courts have had differing notions of free speech and press rights with some like the current hard right sitting one unlikely to be shy ruling they're not what the Constitution says they are.

The Post 9/11 Climate of Fear and Attack on Dissent

Thomas Jefferson said "What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance." He also said free speech "cannot be limited without being lost." Former US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall added "Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression (regardless of its) ideas...subject matter (or) content....Our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship."
Former Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleicher's response was: "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say (and) watch what they do...." implying those who don't at best are unpatriotic and at worst are terrorists or sympathetic to them meaning you'll be targeted for prosecution.

Indeed they will and have been, with a vengeance, with lots of help from the dominant media, the courts and even academia, one of the latest examples being Catholic liberal arts Emmanuel College adjunct professor Nicholas Winset April 23. He lost his academic freedom and job when the Massachusetts-based college fired him by letter ordering him to stay off campus for holding a five minute classroom demonstration on the Virginia Tech mid-April shootings school officials deemed inappropriate even though students hearing it felt otherwise and seemed supportive.

Though now unemployed, Professor Winset is a free man. Other academics like former South Florida University (USF) Professor Sami Al-Arian are not. He was arrested, indicted, exonerated in court but remains imprisoned under harsh conditions in isolation reserved for dangerous hardened criminals because of his courageous and effective public advocacy for human and civil rights and liberation for his Palestinian people long oppressed for six decades (http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2007/04/long-ordeal-of-sami-al-arian-civil-and.html).

Dr. Rafil Dhafir's fate was the same for his "Crime of Compassion" (see dhafirtrial.net, Katherine Hughes). He, too, was arrested, indicted, tried, convicted and is now imprisoned for violating the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations (IEEPA) and 58 other trumped up charges including his public stance against gross injustice and for using his own funds and what he could raise through his Help the Needy charity to bring desperately needed essential to life humanitarian aid to Iraqi people the Clinton and Bush administrations disgracefully wished to deny them.

The (Professor) Ward Churchill Solidarity Network web site defends the academic freedom and right of free expression for one of the nation's most courageous advocates of those rights and much more for his own Native Indian peoples and all others. Churchill was viciously and unjustifiably attacked for his essay analyzing the 9/11 attacks he later included in his important 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. It detailed the stunning history of US military interventions since 1776 at home and abroad, the fact that this nation has been at war every year since inception (without exception) to the present day with one or more adversaries as well as our post-WW II obstruction, subversion and violation of constitutional and international law proving this country is and always was arrogant and lawless.

For his public stance on this and other injustices, Churchill receives a steady stream of death threats, and his home has been vandalized. He's also been viciously vilified in the corporate media and by University of Colorado (CU) officials (taking orders from the state's governor) who announced June 26, 2006 Churchill would be fired even though he's a distinguished award-winning tenured professor of ethnic studies guilty of no misconduct. His case continues so far unresolved while he remains suspended on pay from academic duties but backed in his struggle by CU students, noted academic members of "teachers for a democratic society," and many other supporters speaking out publicly in his behalf.

Another noted academic is also under attack and may be denied his well-deserved tenure because of his courageous writing and outspokenness. He's political science Professor and Israeli-Palestinian history and conflict expert Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University in Chicago. As a prominent public figure, he became a target of the hard right in the age of George Bush, but it was that way earlier for him as well. Finkelstein completed his doctoral dissertation at Princeton in 1988 on the theory of Zionism also exposing Joan Peters' "colossal hoax" in her 1984 best seller From Time Immemorial in which she falsely claimed Palestine was uninhabited when the Jews arrived. Ever since, Finkelstein's been practically radioactive for supporting the Palestinians' struggle for freedom and justice after decades of Israeli oppression and occupation.

Finkelstein is a major scholar known worldwide and a highly regarded DePaul academic evaluated by his students as "truly outstanding, and among the most impressive" of all university political science professors. That's why his Department of Political Science recommended he be granted tenure when it said of him his academic record "exceeds our department's stated standards for scholarly production (and) department and outside experts we consulted recognize the intellectual merits of his work." Nonetheless, Finkelstein is being attacked and vilified by DePaul officials making his tenure struggle a much greater issue. It's for his academic freedom right to dissent publicly and in his writings and for his constitutional right of free expression no one should be denied use of even when exercised on the most sensitive of all political issues most public figures won't touch - criticizing Israeli policies openly, harshly and deservedly. For that he should be praised.

Instead, Finkelstein is assailed and denounced. He's called a self-hating Jew, an anti-semite, a Holocaust- denier and more. Unmentioned is that his now departed parents survived the Warsaw ghetto and years in concentration camps including time at Auschwitz, and that he lost all other family members on both sides at the hands of the Nazis who exterminated them.

Nonetheless, university officials want to deny him tenure even though two campus committees voted he be granted it. For now, the issue is very much in play with his Department of Political Science and College Personnel Committee supporting him and administration officials opposed including College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Chuck Suchar who incredibly wants Finkelstein judged according to Vincentian," or religious, values, not on his merits as a teacher and scholar. What he's saying, of course, is that faculty members expressing views other than ones DePaul considers acceptable will be punished for them.

Like his CU counterpart, Ward Churchill, Finkelstein's struggle continues unresolved thus far with DePaul students, academics around the world and others expressing their support through the Norman G. Finkelstein Solidarity Campaign gathering signatures on his behalf and on a letter sent to the school's administration. It says "Dean Suchar's letter sets a dangerous precedent, and also sends the signal that arts and sciences are now endangered at DePaul University and in the American academy in general" where free expression and dissent no longer will be tolerated.

The Corporate-Controlled Media's Assault on Free Expression

The dominant major media have always functioned to achieve what noted Australian academic, author and psychologist Alex Carey called "taking the risk out of democracy" to "protect corporate power against democracy" by acting as national thought-control police gatekeepers controlling what information reaches the public and what's suppressed. It's worse than ever now resulting from virtually uninterrupted media consolidation with friendly Democrat and Republican administrations allowing five giant global media cartels today to control most newspapers, magazines, radio, television, book publishing, and films. Other than the internet, they hold a stranglehold over the kinds of news, information, entertainment and other programming and material most people get from which they form their views of the nation's state, its government, and the world.

The media giants supplying it are master manipulators. They make sure the public gets their one-sided corporate/state-friendly views in their role as government/business partners instead of their watchdogs. It's called censorship, the willful suppression of free expression, ideas and thought in an age of sophisticated mind control "manufactur(ing) of consent" (see Manufacturing Consent - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky) in a democracy where it can't be done by force. It's an effort to program the public mind to go along with whatever agenda best serves wealth and power by effectively suppressing dissent against it.

The work of three noted print journalists are prominent cases in point, but shamefully what's true for them applies across all the entire dominant media landscape that ranges from pathetic to appalling. One example is Washington Post columnist and so-called dean of the Washington press corps and political "pundits" at age 77, David Broder. In many ways he's the worst of a bad lot because of his ill-deserved image as a man of integrity, decency, honor and perceived wisdom. It hides his dark side unprincipled support for the rogue administration in power and his willingness to cover for it and suppress its indisputable record of lawlessness and contempt for ordinary people everywhere.

Since George Bush took office in 2001, Broder has been out in front characterizing him as a strong, decisive, effective, and principled leader protecting the nation against threats to our national security including waging just wars for it. His harshest comments are reserved for Bush critics he attacks maliciously like calling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a "loose cannon" and "an embarrassment" for daring to say Iraq is a lost war even though anyone with common sense knows it is including high present and former Washington officials unwilling to deny what Broder does.

Broder is an "award-winning" journalist. It's long past time he took his ill-deserved trophies and ended his morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest lifetime career of misreporting at the Washington Post where he's done it for the past 40 years.

The New York Times never met a Republican president or US-instigated war of aggression it didn't love, fully support and be willing to give plenty of front page space to journalists like Judith Miller assigned to wave the flag and lead the journalistic charge. Miller had the dubious honor leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 and held it until she was forced to resign in disgrace in late 2005 ending her controversial 28 year career at the Times but not her presence in the corporate media where she's welcomed on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal never shy to publish material extremist enough at times to make a Nazi blush.

Miller is picking up there where she left off in shame across town with her latest near-full page "When Activists Are Terrorists" piece defending New York police Gestapo thuggery against anti-war protesters. Removed from leading the charge to wars of aggression, Miller's now out in front supporting police brutality and illegal political spying against people exercising their First Amendment right to protest publicly she can't tolerate so she's taking aim against them in a venue always friendly to her kind of extremist views.

With Miller gone, the New York Times continues its pro-war stance with military correspondent Michael Gordon, and former Miller co-conspirator, now putting out regular propaganda like they both once did together and Gordon always was comfortable doing alone. Michael Munk in an online February 11, 2007 After Downing Street.org article calls him "The Ghost of Judith Miller" citing one example of his reported "evidence" that Iran is supplying Iraq resistance fighters with "more effective IEDs" without a shred of evidence to prove it because there is none. The New York Times shamelessly ran Gordon's preposterous piece February 10 (and all his others prominently) titled "Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran (and) Used Against US Troops" citing anonymous sources only to back up his unsupportable claim.

Like Miller, Gordon excels in state and corporate supportive Times-speak suppressing the free and open kind his readers want but never get from him. Most often he cites as sources unnamed "American intelligence (or) Western officials (or those old faithfuls) high administration (or) Pentagon officials" while almost never quoting others with contrary views debunking his and theirs. Gordon, like Miller, is important because he writes lead stories on what media critic Norman Solomon calls the most valuable print real estate in the country - the front pages of the New York Times that are read by government and business leaders and opinion-makers everywhere. He's also the same Michael Gordon who wrote the false and discredited story on Saddam's aluminum tubes. He now continues putting out regular falsified reports on the Times front pages as an agent of the state he and his employer serve.

One of his latest efforts is titled "General Says Iraq Pullback Would Increase Violence." In it he parrots Iraq military commander General David Petraeus' administration-friendly line that reducing US forces would increase "sectarian violence" and increase internal instability caused, in fact, by the military occupation the general's in charge of running. Without a US presence, the generalissimo says, "It can get much, much worse (and) right now (with the troop surge) it's a good bit better" claiming "sectarian" killings declined two-thirds since January while ignoring how out-of-control things really are and the reverse of how he and Gordon portray them.

Gordon also goes along with Petraeus' assessment that "The new hydrocarbon law is of enormous importance," ignoring how it's structured to suck out Iraq's enormous oil wealth transferring most of it to Big (US) Oil from Iraqis who own it. Finally, comes the key part of the article with Gordon trumpeting the general's unsubstantiated claim of continued (unrevealed) evidence showing Iran is providing Shiite "militants" military and other support. Citing computer documents supposedly seized in a March Karbala raid, Petraeus claims "There are numerous documents which detailed a number of different attacks on coalition forces, and our sense is these records were kept so they could be handed in to whoever it is who is financing them" - pointing his finger directly at Iran from his previous comments with Gordon obligingly implying the same view on the Times front page.

Along with falsifying news, the Times also excels in suppressing it as willing Pentagon partners going along with Department of Defense (DOD) rules on reporting on Iraq. An absurd one on its face states: "Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member's 'prior' written consent." Of course, the Times and rest of the dominant media rarely ever do what this DOD regulation forbids so, rule or no rule, the Bush administration's happy-face-of-war is preserved to suppress its true ugly hidden one.

One other recent example of intimidation and censorship also deserves mention. It's a story reported April 27 by AP, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere that a straight 'A' Chicago area Cary-Grove High School senior of Chinese ethnicity, with no history of disciplinary problems or trouble with the law, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct for comments he made in an assigned creative-writing classroom essay. Students were told to "write whatever comes to your mind. Do not judge or censor what you are writing" and apparently were also told to exaggerate. Lee followed instructions, made comments his teacher thought were violent, and she reported it resulting in his arrest and removal to an off-campus learning program.

This is a small incident, likely to be easily resolved, about one student in one school. Yet it signifies a state-induced climate of fear and intimidation heightened by TV transmitted color-coded terror alerts, daily reports of permanent war, imagined enemies stalking us everywhere, and events like the over-reported and hyped Virginia Tech shootings making it worse. Now even freely expressed creative classroom speech is threatened with suppression and punishment unless it conforms to acceptable school content norms, whatever they are. In the age of George Bush, it's another reminder of former press secretary Ari Fleischer's warning that Americans (even teenage straight 'A' high school students) "need to watch what they say," or else.

Organizations in the Lead for Free Expression

The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) was founded in 1974 to support our constitutional right of free expression and defend against the dangers of censorship. It's an "alliance of 50 national non-profit organizations, including literary, artistic, religious, educational, professional, labor and civil liberties groups" united for that common purpose and to promote an open marketplace of ideas and thought.

It does it through local and national grassroots organizing and activism on:

-- free speech issues;

-- educational activities;

-- conferences and public meetings;

-- publications like its quarterly Censorship News reaching 25,000 readers;

--providing help, advice, and information to individuals, organizations and community groups around the country;

-- monitoring and interpreting litigation and legislation on First Amendment issues;

-- and aiding "thousands of artists, authors, teachers, students, librarians, readers, museum-goers and others around the country opposing censorship" on issues ranging from:

-- politics and political correctness

-- the media and internet

-- academic freedom

-- race and ethnicity

-- religion

-- culture

-- the arts and entertainment

-- sex education and orientation

-- class

-- science

-- obscenity, and more.

NCAC rejects all barriers in a pluralistic society on any material no matter how controversial or abhorrent to some. That's what the free interchange of speech, ideas and thought are all about in a democratic society that can't be one without upholding that freedom. Today, supporting and telling the truth is what Orwell called "a revolutionary act" in times of "universal deceit" now plaguing us. It's why organizations like NCAC are important defenders of our constitutionally protected free speech rights as well as being bulwarks against the forces effectively denying them to us.

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression is in this fight as well to defend "free expression in all its forms (as) concerned with the musician as with the mass media, with the painter as with the publisher, and as much with the sculptor as the editor." The Center was established in 1990 and is based near Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, VA, also near the University of Virginia he founded in 1819 is and with which it has close ties. Its mission ranges over a wide range of programs in education, the arts, and in judicial and legislative matters involving all forms of free expression. Each year around Jefferson's April 13 birthday, "Jefferson Muzzles" are awarded to individuals or organizations committing especially outrageous affronts to free expression. Annual William J. Brennan, Jr. Awards (honoring the former High Court Justice) are also given to individuals or groups showing special commitment to free expression issues and values in the spirit of the former Justice.

The Free Expression Network (FEN) is another organization, among many others, in the struggle for free and open expression. It's an NCAC financially sponsored "alliance of organizations dedicated to protecting the First Amendment right of free expression and the values it represents, and to opposing governmental efforts to suppress constitutionally protected speech." It does it through its Free Expression Network Clearinghouse web site as well as maintaining a listserv for private communications among its members who also meet quarterly with invited guests to share information and strategies. Its many member organizations include the Thomas Jefferson Center, People for the American Way, ACLU, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, The Center for Media Education, Feminists for Free Expression, and First Amendment Center.

Post-9/11 Constitutional Violations to Our First Amendment Rights

Organizations like NCAC, the Jefferson Center, FEN and others courageously defend our First Amendment rights especially under attack post-September 11, 2001. Six weeks later, the USA Patriot Act began assaulting those rights (and Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment ones too) all of which were well eroded already.

Most disturbing in the law is Section 215 under which federal investigators may seek a search warrant relating to an ongoing terrorism or intelligence investigation without meeting probable cause standards for it. It can then be used for intrusive unconstitutional searches without our knowledge for "any tangible things" about our speech-related activities in libraries, bookstores, banks and other repositories of our financial records, places of worship, medical provider records, internet use records, floppy disks, computer hard drives and other documents or places with records or information on our speech-related activities.

Section 505 of the Patriot Act is about as intrusive as Section 215 as it authorizes administrative subpoena targeting of bank and other financial records, credit reports, telephone and e-mail logs and more by use of a National Security Letter (NSL). Again, no probable cause standard is needed, and those receiving NSLs are gagged from disclosing its issuance so those targeted never know. Unlike Section 215, however, NSLs require no judicial oversight, only that they relate, without corroborating evidence, to an ongoing terrorism investigation on federal investigators' say alone.

A scant two decades longer than Orwell imagined, high tech surveillance makes it possible for modern-day thought control police to watch and know our activities, control our lives, and, if they wish, make us believe and accept as true "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, (and) Ignorance is Strength" under an omnipotent state using its will to subvert ours. Where there's a "signing statement," there's a way to do it on top of complicit congressional pre and post-9/11 legislation passed to make it simple enough already.

George Bush is a serial abuser of the presidential practice of attaching "signing statements" to laws passed although nothing in the Constitution allows it. He's done it around 800 times, more than all past presidents combined, using his usurped "Unitary Executive" power to claim the law is what he says it is. He issued one "statement" shortly after 9/11 authorizing the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop, for the first time ever, without legally required Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrants on international phone and e-mail communications originating from or received within the US.

Then following the passage of the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act of 2006, he issued another "signing statement" giving himself broad authority to order opening US citizens' mail without a warrant. In so doing, he violated US law and regulations including FISA permitting warrantless surveillance only for foreign intelligence collection between "foreign powers" for up to one year. With a warrant, FISA courts nearly always approve requests allowing surveillance and physical searches of US citizens' "premises, information, material, or property used exclusively by" a foreign power or by an individual thought to be an "agent of a foreign power."

Never satisfied, the Bush administration now wants expanded warrantless spying authority within and outside the country requesting Congress amend the FISA law legalizing what it's already doing anyway, law or no law. On May 2, director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee claiming the president may legally authorize warrantless surveillance (under the Constitution's Article II making him commander-in-chief) but wants FISA amended so it can do it without challenge it'll ignore anyway. It also wants to fix and modernize what McConnell calls "communication gaps" in intelligence gathering including "monitoring" the internet, cell phones and other new technology as well as "transit traffic" international phone calls and emails.

Amendments requested would further erode laws protecting against illegal searches and seizures and our First Amendment rights connected to them. They would also allow surveillance of any non-citizens in the country "reasonably expected to possess, control, transmit, or receive foreign intelligence information while such a person is in the United States," even if they're not a target of an investigation. In addition the administration wants legal cover to spy on anyone it claims engages in activities related to buying or developing WMDs, even with no evidence to prove it. Bottom line: the Bush administration wants Congress to give it near limitless authority to spy on anyone in any way in the name of national security, and sadly, rhetoric aside, this complicit Congress will likely give in, further eroding what little freedom we still have.

Post-9-11, other unconstitutional speech-related monitoring began as well including John Ashcroft's short-lived Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Operation TIPS). The idea was to use civilian informers like postal employees to report "unusual" neighborhood activities, police-state style. The scheme flopped when the postal service refused to be spies. Then there was the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) renamed Terrorism Information Awareness to monitor anything about anyone under the spurious cover of it relating to "terrorism." TIA came under considerable congressional flack but some or all its activities continue under new names relating to other Pentagon projects and initiatives so illegal military spying continues unabated.

One program is called the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) to conduct domestic intelligence by amassing a huge data base, again spuriously related to "terrorism." It focuses on war protesters targeted by police state monitoring of their constitutional right to freely oppose the nation's illegal wars of aggression, meaning in Pentagon-think they're threats to national security in the age of George Bush. Now the Pentagon has second thoughts after drawing flack for its illegal intrusions against peace activists. Under secretary of defense, James Clapper, announced through his spokesperson in late April TALON's results have been disappointing and doesn't "merit (being) continued (as) the program (is) currently constituted...in the light of its image in Congress and the media."

What he's likely saying is TALON's activities will be rebranded and continued, the same way all improperly intrusive domestic spying activities drawing flack are carried out in impressive Orwellian style. What he's not saying is all Pentagon domestic spying/surveillance programs violate the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibitions against them. However, last year's Public Law 109-364 (HR 5122 - Defense Authorization Act) revised the 1807 Insurrection Act and 1878 Posse Comitatus allowing the president illegal authority to give the military free reign on claims of a public emergency or that old standby "national security" in the "war on terror." That includes monitoring freely expressed speech and cracking down on it if so ordered.

Scott Horton reports on another Bush administration assault on free expression in his April Harper's magazine article titled "The Plot Against the First Amendment." In it he notes an important case going to trial in June in Northern Virginia "that will mark a first step in a plan to silence press coverage of (whatever the administration calls) essential national security issues." It would ban exposing policies like secret renditioning captives to torture-prisons to be held without charge, brutalized, denied due process, tried in military tribunals, and disposed of as the administration wishes. The scheme to pull this off is the work of disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his deputy Paul J. McNulty, the central figures in a "growing scandal over the politicization of the prosecution process."

Inspiring Gonzales' scheme is Britain's Official Secrets Act, the latest 1989 version of which is quite detailed but is intended overall to protect against revealing information the UK government claims relates to "national security." The act makes it crime for designated British subjects (in some cases all of them) under its 16 sections to do whatever that provision prohibits including disclosing what the state wants kept secret. Gonzales' interest is to devise a scheme based on the UK model to keep print publications and broadcasters from reporting information Washington claims is secret and thus criminal to disclose. In other words, the idea is to silence the media when government wants it silenced, as if it wasn't already secretive enough, except when it's dutifully trumpeting state and corporate-friendly propaganda, lies and distortion not good enough for Gonzales wanting more restrictions.

Horton reports Gonzales sees this scheme "as a panacea for his problems....Then you can torture and abuse prisoners....without fear of political repercussions." So they won't have to "close down Guantanamo (just) Close down the press." Horton explains further Gonzales wanted to propose the idea in end-run fashion with no official secrets language headlined he'd never even get Republican allies to adopt out of fear alone. So his idea was to "spin it out of whole cloth (by) reconstru(ing) the (repressive) Espionage Act of 1917" including in new legislation "the essence of the UK Official Secrets Act and try getting this version "ratified in the Bush administration's 'vest pocket' judicial districts (of) the Eastern District of Virginia and the Fourth Circuit."

The sordid tale continues, but it's coming to a head in a June Northern Virginia trial the outcome of which will indicate whether the administration can criminalize legal acts of journalism on matters it wants kept secret. If it can, Horton says what all free press advocates would agree on. It would be a "dream world for Karl Rove and Alberto Gonzales (and) a nightmare for the rest of us."

In addition, this scheme and all other Bush administration assaults on First Amendment freedoms make a sham out of the president's galling hypocrisy May 3 on World Press Freedom Day. Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported he denounced (with effrontery) a host of other countries for their lack of press freedom including China, Cuba, Iran, Syria, Russia, Belarus and Venezuela (all US targets for daring to place their own sovereignty above ours) saying "The United States values freedom of the press as one of the most fundamental political rights and as a necessary component of free societies" except whenever the press anywhere dares criticize his wars of aggression and other repressive, unjust and illegal policies.

That's the way things are by the rules of George Bush's Global War on Terror (GWOT) rebranded The Long War about to undergo another rebranding because the current name denotes the wrong message of endless wars and occupation the public is tiring of. The name may change, but the mission won't so long as George Bush remains president. According to him, opposition to his wars gives aid and comfort to the nation's enemies that's tantamount to treason. So is dissent and any criticism of his agenda by his reasoning but not according to the law of the land.

Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution defines the strict limits of what George Bush makes light of. It states: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." Crimes of treason include:

-- armed insurrection or rebellion;

-- mutiny or unlawfully taking over command of the US government or military;

-- sabotage including damaging or tampering with national defense material;

-- sedition intended to incite rebellion;

-- subversion defined as free speech gone too far by blatantly transmitting false information;

-- Syndicalism that's an act of organizing a political party or group advocating the violent overthrow of the government;

-- Terrorism defined as the systematic use of violence or threats of violence to intimidate or coerce the government or whole societies by targeting innocent noncombatants.

Speaking for the president, an unnamed White House spokesman said in January, 2003 George Bush "considers this nation to be at war, and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason" although he had no legal basis to say it, and publicly expressed opposition to government policies is not an act of treason as the Constitution defines it above. Nonetheless, according to Bush-think: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," and by implication are guilty of treason. According to Bush, if a US citizen or foreign state "continues to harbor or support terrorism (it) will be regarded by the United States as a hostile power," meaning, justified or not, line up behind George Bush, or else.

It's a dangerous and frightening time in America today as the nation hurtles toward tyranny, and our right to speak out and protest continues being challenged and undermined. That makes the battle for the last frontier of press freedom crucial to preserving our fragile democracy now somewhere between life support and the crematorium.

The Last Frontier of Press Freedom and Crucial Battle to Save It

If the telecom and cable giants prevail, lawmakers will remove the few remaining regulatory barriers remaining giving them full control over what they already have most of plus one remaining free and open public media space - the online world of internet communication still able to produce material like this article free from the censoring power of media giants or government to prevent.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, says in his book, Digital Destiny, the telecom and cable companies are lobbying ferociously for "new national policies....to connect everyone to what they call a 'superbroadband' Internet highway. (If they get their way), the companies vow that the nation will benefit from advances in healthcare, improvements in the quality of life for senior citizens, and major boosts for jobs and the economy." But to achieve this, government must get out of the way and give the media giants free reign as "Competition....will address any problem once handled by law or regulation and also bring us the promised digital cornucopia." It's hard believing any sane person would buy this argument, but who said lawmakers invoke reason or the public interest when huge campaign contributions are the mother's milk of politics, and no need guessing where they come from.

Today, the internet is last frontier of press freedom Net Neutrality supporters, like this writer, are fighting back to save. We're up against giant corporate predators aiming to take from us what's ours, and going against them is no easy task. There's even an astonishing and threatening report by Steve Watson (infowars.net) that federal government funded researchers "want to shut down the internet and start over, citing the fact that at the moment there are loopholes in the systems whereby users cannot be tracked and traced all the time." They call their proposed substitute Internet 2 claiming it would be faster and more streamlined for those willing to pay more for it.

Supporters of this idea won't say telecom and cable giants will control it, and they and government regulation would allow only "appropriate content" in the fast lane with whatever else is allowed "relegated to the slow lane internet." What's even more at stake is a free and open public internet space, as we know it, that will almost certainly disappear if this new scheme is developed with powerful gatekeepers in charge deciding what's published, what's not, and how much users will be charged.

Also at stake is bipartisan support for "all out mandatory ISP snooping on all US citizens" plus the Pentagon's recently announced "effort to infiltrate the Internet and propagandize for the war on terror," its foreign wars, and all others to come. Further, there are government efforts to force bloggers and activists (like this writer) "to register and regularly report their activities to Congress." Non-compliance could result in a prison term up to one year.

These are just some of the threats to the one remaining public space available to anyone to publish material free from corporate or government control or interference so long as the material doesn't advocate an armed insurrection to unseat the government the law says is treasonous.

Congress this year will resume debate from where the 109th Congress left off last year and likely will decide Net Neutrality's fate. The battle lines are drawn with public advocates facing down powerful cable and telecom giants going all out to gain what we the people can't afford to lose - keeping the internet free and open that's become a symbol and best hope to revive our flagging democratic society, structure and culture close to the tipping edge of tyranny.

If the media giants prevail, they'll establish internet toll roads or premium lanes so users wanting speed and access will have to pay more for it. Those who can't or won't will get slower service or none at all. Content as well be controlled with whatever is judged unfriendly to state or corporate interests kept out in a new age of online thought control.

Organizations like SavetheInternet.com are in the forefront supporting internet freedom, and it just marked its first anniversary. It's a coalition of more than a million "everyday people....banded together with thousands of non-profit organizations, businesses and bloggers to protect Internet freedom." Its coordinator is FreePress.net, "a national nonpartisan organization (this writer belongs to and supports) working to increase informed public participation in crucial media policy debates, and to generate policies that will produce a more competitive and public interest-oriented media system with a strong nonprofit and noncommercial sector (aiming for) a more democratic US media system (leading) to better public policies."

SavetheInternet's diverse members include Common Cause, Consumers Union, American Library Association, Consumer Federation of America, Prometheus Radio Project, ACLU, and hundreds of other groups and organizations from unions, women's groups, religious organizations, the arts, media, business and more.

SavetheInternet.com members and the public can't afford to lose this battle, and already over 1.6 million signatures have been collected on a congressional petition drive to save the internet as we know it. However, the outcome of this struggle is very much up for grabs with media giants outspending public citizen advocates 500 to 1. Winning in spite of their effort isn't everything, it's the only acceptable thing, and potential media reform depends on how it turns out and whether this nation can regain its democratic moorings now in tatters.

For now, one victory has been won but at a great cost, and it might end up less than it appears. In late December, media giant AT & T agreed to observe Net Neutrality principles for at least 24 months as part of an FCC deal allowing its $85 billion merger with BellSouth to be approved. The agreement does not preclude other media giants from continuing to lobby for ending Net Neutrality that's now up to Congress to prevent by making it permanent by law.

Legislation has been drafted to prevent internet companies from charging content providers extra for priority access. In addition, the Internet Freedom Preservation Act (S.215) was introduced in the Senate in January with House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet chairman Edward Markey strongly in support saying "Saving the Internet is vital for civic involvement....and free speech." It aims to ensure broadband service providers aren't gatekeepers and won't discriminate against internet content, applications or services by offering preferential treatment to select customers and not others. Nonetheless, a final resolution remains an unfulfilled goal with powerful divergent interests on either side of this issue vying for which way it will turn out. It's crucial the outcome guarantees permanent Net Neutrality and that our representatives in Congress make it the law of the land.

New Postal Rate Increases Will Undermine Small Publications

Free expression in the nation is coming under assault in numerous ways that must be strongly and effectively countered if we're to save it (http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-us-postal-rates-undermine-small.html). Another First Amendment enemy emerged when the US Postal Service (USPS) for the first time ever in its 215 year history implemented what Free Press founder and noted professor of media studies at the University of Illinois' main Champaign-Urbana campus called "a radical reformulation of its rates for magazines" placing a much greater cost burden on smaller publications than on larger ones standing to benefit from the policy change.

The new rates are scheduled to take effect July 15 that will force small publications to pay postal rates as much as 20% higher than the largest ones in a willful effort to undermine them, weaken competition further, and make it almost impossible for new independent magazines or other publications to be launched. The scheme was secretly crafted without public involvement or congressional oversight by media giant Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the country, and postal officials agreed to it announcing the change protests against which have been mounted. This is another effort toward media consolidation that will further erode the most precious of our constitutional rights - our free and independent speech without which no democracy can survive.

McChesney explained how corrupt and sleazy the whole scheme is that his Free Press organization is taking the lead to undo. The deadline for USPS comments has passed, but it's never too late standing against what no one constitutionally has the right to take from us. A good place to start is freepress.net.

Congressional Efforts to Criminalize Speech

Legislation is being introduced in Congress in the form of an Orwellian "hate crimes" bill that's being supported by organizations like People for the American Way (PFAW), Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and other action groups for civil and human rights everyone should support. PFAW makes a credible case on its web site "urging Congress to expand the current federal (hate crimes) law to protect victims of hate crimes based on disability, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity. In addition, we have advocated extending the protections of present law to 'all' hate crimes victims."

These stated aims are noble, but the problem is Congress will likely pass a hate crimes bill other than what PFAW wants though it may appear otherwise, although it won't likely override a George Bush veto. Hate and all other crimes are abhorrent, and laws are needed protecting us from them, but not ones that harm more than they help. That's what's likely to emerge from the 110th Congress with legislation on a hate crimes bill called The Hate Crimes Prevention Act (H.R. 1592) already passed in the House with the Senate soon to take it up. In an effort to criminalize preaching hate against gays, minorities and all other targeted groups, Congress is likely to produce a "Thought Crimes Act" that may make dissent a crime and/or ban any exercise of free expression government wishes to deny making it punishable by heavy fines, imprisonment or both.

The 110th Congress will pass a hate crimes bill because all Democrats will vote for it, and no Democrat-led body ever failed not to. But what's likely to emerge, if it becomes law, may turn out to be another blow to our First Amendment rights eroding them further that's not what PFAW, HRC, other civil and human rights groups and ones supporting free and open expression want or should tolerate. In the age of George Bush, anyone may be prosecuted for terrorist-related activities without corroborating evidence because repressive laws were passed making it possible. If hate crimes legislation gives government similar latitude against unacceptable speech it calls "hate," another serious blow will have been struck against our First Amendment freedoms already reeling under so many others.

John McCain's Assault On the First Amendment

Republican presidential candidate John McCain proposed his "Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children's Act" on December 6, 2006 as another example of what this hawkish, anti-democratic figure would do if elected in 2008. If this act becomes law, it will fine bloggers up to $300,000 for posting offensive statements, photos and videos online as a thinly veiled hardball effort exploiting the issue of child abuse to suppress anti-war voices. This is another intrusive effort to regulate speech allowing the federal government the right to decide when our First Amendment rights apply and when not to stifle criticism by imposing heavy fines on dissenters. In John McCain's world, only government-supportive voices will be allowed online while critics Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff calls "disaffected people living in the United States (with) radical ideologies and potentially violent skills" will be heavily fined and effectively banned.

The War On Free Expression We Can't Afford to Lose

A play on Thomas Jefferson's words might be that "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience" to be denied their First Amendment rights to speak, write and otherwise communicate freely and openly without fear of recrimination in a state they want to remain democratic but won't without that right. Today our freedoms are jeopardized in an atmosphere of heightened fear with too few people aware how threatened their most important one of all is at a time there's risk they all may be lost without a concerted effort to save them.

It starts by propping up our First Amendment one without which none of the others are guaranteed or safe. Freedom of expression is the foundation of a free society, or as Jefferson put it: "Information is the currency of democracy (and) If a nation expects to be ignorant (uninformed or misinformed) and free....it expects what never was and never will be."

Potentially, it's never been easier if we can hold what we have and act to restore what's eroding. There's never been more ways to do it including an expanding and amazing online world of web sites, databases, portals, subject gateways, desktops, laptops, palmtops, "begged and borrowed new and used-tops," remote access, authentication protocols, logins, iPods, eservices, ebooks, eresources, eworld-at-our-fingertips, and a wondrous almost limitless future online world connecting potentially everyone to almost anything with a click provided we're the gatekeepers, not the corporate predators out to get what belongs to us.

They'll do it unless we're mobilized and energized enough to stop them in a mega-struggle where they have the resources and friends in high places, and we're the people potentially empowered as famed Chicago community organizer Sol Alinsky noted saying: "The only way to beat organized money is with organized people," and with enough of them committed they'll win. It's our choice, and the stakes are too great not to go all out for what we can't afford to lose.

It starts at the grass roots with a well-coordinated massive outreach effort to bring together educators; human and civil rights groups; labor; the clergy; alternative media journalists; writers; artists; women's groups; small business; your friends, family and neighbors; and other organizations and activists of all stripes concerned enough to build a collective mass-action movement in numbers too large to be stopped. History's lessons are clear. Whenever enough determined people are set on achieving something and go about it effectively, no power of government anywhere can deter them. Is saving our Republic not incentive enough to go for it? It starts with saving and preserving our most precious of all First Amendment rights to speak freely and openly and be able to spread our ideas, thoughts and beliefs widely for the things we hold most dear - our rights as free people.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com each Saturday at noon US central time.

Wall Street Journal Claims Chavez Oil Policy "Aims to Weaken US"

Wall Street Journal Claims Chavez Oil Policy "Aims to Weaken US" - by Stephen Lendman

The Wall Street Journal's main Hugo Chavez antagonist is its self-styled Latin American "expert" Mary Anastasia O'Grady who makes up for in imagination and vitriol what she lacks in knowledge and journalistic integrity. She, however, wasn't assigned to write the May 1 Journal attack piece reporters David Luhnow in Mexico City and Peter Millard in Caracas got to do titled "How Chavez Aims to Weaken US." Of course, when it comes to Venezuela, the issue is oil and Chavez's having the "audacity" to want his people to benefit most from their own resources, not predatory foreign oil companies the way it used to be when the country's leadership only served the interests of capital ignoring essential social needs. No longer.

Chavez, of course, announced months ago his government would complete renationalizating his country's oil reserves when state oil company PDVSA became the majority shareholder May 1 in four Orinoco River basin oil projects with a minimum 60% ownership in joint ventures with foreign partners. The plan was broadly denounced in the US major media with Journal columnist O'Grady writing April 16 "Chavez (was) brimming with bravado as he shredded (the) oil contracts (telling) foreigners to step aside because he's in charge now (but the move will likely) end up hitting the 'commandante of the revolution' in the pocketbook (because of) corruption, incompetence and mismanagement" meaning Venezuela will now run all its own oil operations and forge its own future, not Big Oil O'Grady wants sole right to do it. No longer indeed, and O'Grady's not pleased. She's also dead wrong in her outlook for Venezuela's oil future run by PDVSA with foreign partners, but don't ever expect her to admit it.

So is the New York Times agreeing April 10 with O'Grady and other corporate media Big Oil cheerleaders. The Times used charged language condemning Chavez's "revolutionary flourish (and his) ambitious (plan to) wrest control of several major oil projects from American and European companies (with a) showdown (ahead for these) coveted energy resources...." The Times went on to claim this action would undermine Venezuela's growth hinting Big Oil's threat to leave might get Chavez to back down enough to get them to stay. It never happened as this writer suggested April 12 in an article titled "Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack journalism." The article made it clear oil exploration and production in Venezuela is so profitable that even with a smaller share of the profits US, European and other Big Oil investors wouldn't dream of leaving. Whine plenty, leave, not likely, and now we know they won't.

AP's Natalie Obiko Pearson reported April 26 that "Four major oil companies (stopped whining April 25 and) agreed to cede control of Venezuela's last remaining (majority-owned) privately run oil projects to President Hugo Chavez's government" with ConocoPhillips coming around May 1 showing it, too, was all bark and no bite. Those agreeing through signed memorandums of understanding were Chevron, BP(Amoco) PLC, France's Total SA, Norway's Statoil ASA, ConocoPhillips, and with most antagonistic of all to the idea ExxonMobil finally doing it privately as was almost certain to happen and then did.

AP reported ConocoPhillips has the most Orinoco basin exposure in two of four projects, Ameriven and Petrozuata with a (former) 50.1% stake in the latter. It was inconceivable the company would abandon them, and on May 1 it announced it would stay on. The one remaining issue to be resolved is compensation with foreign investors having until June 26 to negotiate terms for their reduced stakes. Expect more Big Oil whining followed by capitulation again to Venezuelan Energy Ministry's expected offer of fair and equitable takeover terms.

On April 26, PDVSA's web site reported a total of 10 foreign oil companies agreed to transfer majority control of their "Oil Belt" operations to the state-run oil company. Further, the company expects to achieve a daily capacity of 5.85 million barrels in 2012 and said its January 1 taking control of 32 oil fields will advance the country "toward full national sovereignty over (its) natural energy reserves."

In response to these actions, and on the day it took effect, the Journal went on the attack again with more ahead certain to be as false and misleading. Its writers called Chavez a "self-proclaimed Maoist (wanting to) reshape the global oil business by sidelining the US and making China his country's chief strategic energy partner" for investment and export. The Journal also accused Chavez of using "oil as a political weapon" since taking office in 1999 offering discounted oil "to dozens of Latin American countries" as his weapon of choice plus forging alliances with US "economic rivals like China and political rivals like Iran."

Hugo Chavez, in fact, is a self-proclaimed social democrat charting his own independent course toward progressive "21st century socialism" along the lines Latin American expert James Petras calls the "pragmatic left" in contrast to the more "radical left" of Colombia's FARC guerrillas; elements of "teachers and peasant-indigenous movements in Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chiapas in Mexico;" many "small Marxist groups in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and elsewhere;" and Venezuela's "peasant and barrio movements," among others. Other Latin American leaders Petras calls "pragmatic" leftists include Bolivia's Evo Morales, Cuba's Castro and many "large electoral parties and major peasant and trade unions in Central and South America" including Mexico's PRD party, El Salvador's FMLN, Chile's Communist Party, "the majority in Peruvian (Ollanta) Humala's parliamentary party;" and others including "the great majority of left Latin American intellectuals."

Unlike what the Wall Street Journal and rest of the US corporate media report or imply, Chavez and others on the "pragmatic left" aren't aiming to destroy capitalism, just tame it. They also plan no wholesale renunciation of accumulated IMF, World Bank and other international lending agency debt, only calling for it to be on more equitable terms; restructuring it to make their nations' debt burden fair; and aiming to become free from its repressive yoke as Venezuela did paying it off completely with Chavez announcing May 1 his country is pulling out of the IMF and World Bank, formally breaking free from the kind of debt slavery these institutions impose on countries they lend to guaranteeing their people continued impoverishment.

It's an important move that may encourage other countries to follow as Ecuador's President Raphael Correa already did ousting the country's World Bank representative saying "we will not stand for extortion by this international bureaucracy." Look for more IMF-World Bank resentment to surface ahead as Chavez's and Correa's courage may embolden other leaders to move in the same direction or at least begin by openly voicing public discontent as a first step to possible policy change to follow.

Hugo Chavez offers them a new choice having announced in March he intends creating a Bank of the South social democratic alternative to the repressive neoliberal Washington Consensus IMF-World Bank model. So far Bolivia and Argentina have agreed to be part of it with Chavez hoping other Latin countries will join as well by contributing 10% of their capital reserves for this enterprise he hopes will be operating by summer.

Additional parts of Chavez's plan involve forging stronger ties to other oil importing nations like China to reduce Venezuela's dependency on a hostile US. He also announced April 29 the nation hopes to gradually sell its seven US-based Citgo refineries replacing them with a new Latin American-based network in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Dominica. It's part of his plan to provide the region a stable oil supply and 100% of the energy needs for Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) members and Haiti.

He further offers discounted oil to Latin American and other nations, not to buy support as the Journal claims, but to build progressive ALBA trade and other good neighbor alliances with regional nations the opposite of WTO-style Global North exploitive one-way deals. The Fifth ALBA Summit held in Barquisimeto, Venezuela just ended April 29 at which heads of state from Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti signed strategic ALBA agreements with delegations from Ecuador, Uruguay, Dominique and St. Vincent and the Grenadines also attending along with social movements from other states.

Chavez aims for more than just fair and equitable trade and other commercial, industrial and energy deals, and Summit leaders made progress toward them. They agreed to alliances in ALBA Education, Health, Culture, Food, and Telecommunications that may ahead extend Venezuela's and Cuba's social agenda to other ALBA countries and Haiti.

The May 1 Wall Street Journal article says "Chavez wants to replace the US as Venezuela's main partner and client in the oil business (and) The big winner could be (big, bad US rival) China" that spells bad news for Washington and Big Oil. It continued saying the country has the largest proved reserves outside the Middle East, and if Chavez succeeds he'll force the US to be even more dependent on that volatile region than it already is. Further, Journal writers take aim at PDVSA demeaning it as a state-run company claiming it has "little focus" because Chavez turned it into a "poverty-alleviation ministry." As a result, the Journal says it became inefficient and its production fell from 3.1 million barrels a day when Chavez first took office in 1999 to 2.4 million barrels a day now according to US government Energy Information Administration (EIA) figures that look to have been cooked to bring them down.

They're disputable with differing ones coming from alternate sources including the 2006 CIA World Factbook listing Venezuela's daily production at slightly under 3.1 million daily barrels, around the same figure PDVSA reported then including extra-heavy crude from Orinoco belt production. In May, 2006, Venezuelan Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Raphael Ramirez indicated the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the nation's daily oil production at over 3 million daily barrels while the government reports it now at 3.3 million compared to 2.6 million or less claimed by international oil analysts and EIA deliberately understating oil output the way Washington and the West distort everything positive about Venezuela under Hugo Chavez.

The Bush administration and US corporate media, flacking for Big Oil, is all over Hugo Chavez with the Journal's May Day article staying true to form. It ends saying Venezuela "was historically one of the US's most reliable energy allies" pumping all out to guarantee America a steady supply when it was most needed as it did in WW II, the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1991 Gulf war. It then blamed Chavez for changing that instead of reporting Washington was at fault for soured relations that hit rock bottom during the aborted two-day April, 2002 coup against him the Journal can't admit the US instigated and supported.

All it can say, with a heavy-handed dose of sour grapes, is that "Mixing oil and politics may not help Mr. Chavez in the long run" as he'll need "private companies' expertise to develop the heavy crude in the Orinoco region" without ever conceding he already has it and a long line of takers ready to step in if any now there foolishly leave. They won't, but don't expect to see that opinion reported anywhere in the Wall Street Journal as they'd then have to admit everything they wrote earlier was false and misleading. They don't have to. You just read it here.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen each Saturday to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com at noon US central time.

"Worthy and Unworthy Victims

"Worthy and Unworthy Victims" - by Stephen Lendman

Economist and media critic Edward S. Herman and social and political critic Noam Chomsky note two kinds of victims in their classic 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent." So does journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger in his writings. "Unworthy" ones are the many unmentioned tens of thousands killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and all other places by US, Israeli and other rapacious imperial waring and occupying forces. "Worthy" ones, however, are those prominently mentioned who died or were hurt on September 11, 2001 in the US, on July 7, 2005 in a dubious London "terrorist" bombing, on March 11, 2004 in the Madrid train bombings, and the Israeli corporal practically the whole free world still knows about since he was taken captive in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) last summer and is still being held. More recent "worthy" victims are the 15 British Royal Navy seamen arrested by Iranian armed forces, now released, and BBC journalist Alan Johnston, also apparently abducted and held captive in the OPT since March 12 when his employer reported he was forcibly seized from his car by gunpoint driving home from work in Gaza City.

The Royal Navy and Johnston instances particularly stand out with the kind of steady BBC and western media reporting on the incidents usually reserved for figures of note but common as well for ordinary types when it serves a propaganda purpose.

First the Persian Gulf incident involving the British seamen. Iran claims geographical coordinates showed they were 0.5 km inside Iranian waters while the Brits claimed otherwise, but it hardly matters in waters where it's hard to tell. More important are CIA, Defense Department and former US and other officials admitting to years of covert and other incursions into Iranian territory on land, sea and by air. Iran is aware they're still ongoing and justifiably views them as hostile acts likely committed as prelude to planned future greater provocations or military action.

Up to now, Iran showed great restraint and patience, but had every right to defend its territory by seizing the intruders March 23. They were held for interrogation until ceremonially released April 5 following their 15 day captivity during which time it appeared they were well treated even though Britain's Ministry of Defense instructed them to say otherwise once they were back home.

Compare that to how British and US forces treat their captives in torture-prisons. Sent there are innocent men, women and children, held in most cases on administrative charges indefinitely, and subjected to harsh punitive treatment only revealed later by the few lucky enough to get out and go home to talk about their ordeals. Try hearing about them in the dominant western media deafeningly silent.

Economist, activist and web editor Michel Chossudovsky is never silent and reported more information on the British seamen April 6 on his Global Research web site. He wrote that British "Royal Marine Captain Chris Air told (British) Sky News TV that the object of their mission (in the Persian Gulf) was to 'gather intelligence' on Iran" in a pre-recorded interview done prior to his capture, but aired only after his release. Chossudovsky reprinted the interview on his web site and included a video link to Sky News TV so readers could watch and listen to it ending any doubt what British forces are up to repeatedly in the Gulf and Iranian waters. Chossudovsky also included a BBC TV video link and reprinted a transcript of BBC's interview with Captain Air and Lt. Felix Carman during which Carman admitted this operation "followed approximately 66 similar (ones) over the previous four weeks" done to conduct boardings of ships stopped to be inspected or crews interrogated in an intrusive (and likely illegal) operation called IPAT - Interaction patrol.

In spite of this, the 15 Royal Navy personnel got impressive and disingenuous headline coverage throughout their captivity during which time UK officials and Prime Minister Blair denied what Air and Carman admitted on British television so we all now know what only could be previously surmised. They're now released, back home unharmed, regarded as heros, at first allowed by Britain's Ministry of Defense to sell their stories (as obvious propaganda) to the media for profit until public outrage got the Ministry to change its mind meaning the seamen can still do it but only for free.

Now the case of BBC Gaza reporter Alan Johnston. Dozens of foreigners have been abducted in Gaza in the past, but none held as long as Johnston or given the kind of publicity he gets daily in the UK. Why? Because he's from the West and works for BBC that reports it has no knowledge where he is or who may be responsible for his apparent abduction. BBC also notes 6500 people worldwide have signed a petition calling for (in fact, demanding) his release. On April 9, rallies were held in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and London on his behalf. Prayer vigils as well since. BBC reports Palestinian officials insist they're doing all they can to locate and free him, and have ordered their security services and interior ministry to take "all necessary measures" on his behalf. BBC further notes, with irony, Johnston's Gaza posting was to have ended in March, but, of course, has now been involuntarily extended indefinitely.

There's more. In a show of solidarity, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ - representing over 500,000 journalists in more than 100 countries) called for Johnston's immediate release, and Palestinian journalists held a three day strike protesting what happened. IFJ General Secretary Aidan White noted that "Every day that passes jeopardises Alan's safety even further and we support our Palestinian colleagues (working for Johnston's release) quickly and unharmed." And he added "It is unconscionable that the Palestinian government has not done more to secure Alan's release." Try imagining that kind of statement if Johnston were Muslim and worked for an Arab publication or news service, especially one "unfriendly" to western imperial interests. Can readers name any Arab journalists targeted, abducted or willfully murdered in Iraq by US military forces since March, 2003?

The IFJ affiliate Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS) can and shows as much concern for Johnston's safety. It already held numerous demonstrations on his behalf and set up a protest tent in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) demanding the government do more to free him quickly.

There's more still. The IFJ, PJS, and British affiliate National Union of Journalists of the UK and Ireland combined to publicly call for Johnston's immediate release unharmed. IFJ pressed its demands in writing to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh asking them to intervene personally on Johnston's behalf. The Arab Media Forum and International Association of Press Clubs have also publicly called for Johnston's release, and BBC's web site petition has registered 50,000 names supporting Johnston's release with more added each day.

And there's still more as astonishingly the European Parliament in Strasbourg passed an "emergency resolution" April 26 calling for the immediate release of Johnston with an accompanying statement that MEPs of all political stripes back it. Try imagining a whiff of sympathetic parliamentary support (let alone congressional) for the many thousands of illegally held and tortured Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan and all other political prisoners held anywhere unless they're "worthy" ones from the West.

There's no end to this as even noted British journalist Robert Fisk now is "demanding the release of Alan Johnston" in his April 28 London Independent column adding "as long as he is held, how can we (other journalists) cover the atrocities of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Gaza?" Simple, as Fisk surely knows - do your job. If not you and other independent journalists, then who? However, Fisk's concern is understandable as he, as much as anyone, puts himself in the eyes of the Middle East storms he covers. He has good reason to be concerned and in the past had a few close calls.

Nonetheless, all this support just cited was for "one" journalist (likely unharmed), now almost as well known in the UK as the organization he works for. For many weeks last summer, the same was true in Israel and the West for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) corporal (left unnamed here) who also had, and may still have, strong name recognition on every continent. This is how he, Johnston, the 15 UK seamen, and other "worthy" victims are treated - elevated to celebrity status, pleas made on their behalf through the media, welcomed home on release ceremonially on national television and treated like heros because they're from the West and can be exploited for maximum propaganda value.

Another "worthy" victims example also deserves mention - the ones attacked, killed and injured by one or more apparent suicide bombers April 12 inside Baghdad's heavily fortified, fortress-like, four square mile Green Zone on the left bank of the Tigris River surrounded by thick blast-proof concrete wall protection against such attacks or other type bombing attempts to penetrate inside it. To enter what's called the "ultimate gated community," visitors must pass through up to eight checkpoints depending on where they're heading, and once inside security is intense including full body searches, dogs sniffing for explosives, electronic scanners and every other human and high-tech measure imaginable to guarantee safety inside no longer guaranteed.

The April 12 attack was "Tet"-like in impact in a country where every day is like "Tet" proving war there is unwinnable to everyone but Bush hard-liners yet to come around as well as being blind to see nowhere and no one in Iraq is safe. One thing, however is - the hero status of the attack's dead (eight apparently, including three lawmakers) and injured. They got instant media-manipulated elevation to "worthy" victim status with the number eligible changing daily then as the count did depending on what side of their mouth US military spokesmen spoke from in an effort to turn a calamity into what Condoleezza Rice brushed off as just a "bad day." In Iraq, every day is bad, and no amount of manufactured heroics or "worthy" victims will change things.

The most recent instance of "worthy" victim "made-for-TV" coverage happened April 16 in Blacksburg, VA, southwest of Roanoke, on Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's campus. It was falsely reported to be the deadliest shooting incident in modern US history conveniently ignoring state-sponsored ones and others of greater magnitude only one of which was the 1923 Rosewood, Florida massacre of up to 150 "unworthy" innocent black people.

Add bombings to shootings, and there was the May 18, 1927 dynamiting of a school in Bath, MI killing 45, mostly children; the Oklahoma City April 19,1995 bombing killing 168; the 51 day state-sponsored (US Army Delta force-FBI Hostage Rescue Team) terror siege and immolation of the Branch Davidian's Mount Carmel Waco ranch compound killing 84 innocent men, women and children; not to mention the 9/11 attacks killing several thousand or more cited above. And these attacks pale in significance to 500 years of state-sponsored genocidal terror attacks still ongoing against Native Indian peoples in all the Americas killing an estimated 100 million plus as many as 50 million black African captives perishing during a Middle Passage voyage never reaching shore for them. And this leaves out many millions more murdered by American imperial marauding on six continents with US presidents trying to best the appalling records of their predecessors and George Bush racing to the top of the charts.

Still, the Virginia Tech attack was horrific leaving 33 dead including five professors and the apparent shooter who reportedly shot himself in the head. For several days, this story preempted all others. It got round-the-clock blitzkrieg coverage (and is still considered newsworthy) for maximum effect highlighting "worthy" victims politically important enough for George Bush to deliver a pathetic grandstanding address in their honor to an April 17 convocation at the school's Cassel Coliseum.

This incident especially stands out as a prominent instance of anointing victims "worthy" hero status just because they died. It's also a setup for a criminal administration to gain maximum political advantage from a tragedy that should highlight the need to curb our out-of-control gun-crazed culture in which getting even violently today with lethal weapons is as common as ordinary fisticuffs once were decades back. But bloody noses don't make headline news in an age of mass communication when, more than ever, "worthy" victims are needed to do it. It lets a mass-murderer like George Bush honor the dead for maximum political gain and gives him cover to deflect attention away from his far greater crimes of war and against humanity. "God bless America('s) worthy victims" deserving better than to be defiled by George Bush's presence at a solemn occasion in their honor.

The Unknown, Unseen, Nameless, Faceless "Unworthy Victims"

In a recent article, John Pilger quotes historian Mark Curtis' characterization of "unworthy victims" as "unpeople" while Herman and Chomsky explain the "propaganda system," played out in the dominant media, characterizes people abused and victimized by us or our client states as "unworthy." They're everywhere in numbers so huge choices to cite are limitless. None, however, stand out more prominently than those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) where beleaguered Palestinians have endured six horrific decades under harsh Israeli rule and occupation. Their desperate state rarely gets media coverage, and when it does it's inadequate, demeaning, hostile and falsely reported turning victim into victimizer. Unmentioned is that Palestinians face daily constant Israeli-imposed assaults, restrictions and severe hardships creating nightmarish conditions for them living in virtual open air prisons enduring the cruelest kinds of endless collective punishments ignored in the West.

Consider the attention on a single captured Israeli corporal, BBC's Alan Johnston, 15 UK seamen, and the Virginia Tech dead. Compare it to the virtual media blackout on life in occupied Palestine overall and for 10,000 or more Palestinian prisoners. They were forcibly abducted by Israeli forces, are kept indefinitely under harsh conditions in prisons, held mostly on administrative charges as political hostages, and are routinely tortured according to Israeli human rights monitoring group B'Tselem in flagrant violation of international law banning the use of torture or degrading treatment under any circumstances.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in 1948. The Fourth Geneva Convention then did it in 1949 banning any form of "physical or mental coercion" and affirming detainees must at all times be treated humanely. The European Convention followed in 1950. Then in 1984, the UN Convention Against Torture became the first binding international instrument dealing exclusively with the issue banning torture in any form for any reason. Israel ignores international laws and norms and gets away with it because the US and West do nothing to hold its governments accountable for their actions. Why should they? Israel is a valued ally, and its crimes are against "unworthy victims" allowed no rights in a state where only Jews get them. Further, the US notably does the same things to many thousands of unknown "unworthy" prisoners in its torture-prisons where those held have no rights either and are treated any way their captors wish out of sight and mind and virtually ignored in the West as "unpeople."

For long-suffering Palestinians, their struggle for recognition, freedom and justice has gone on for six decades with little interest, redress, or aid from the West or even much of it from Arab neighbors willing to sacrifice Palestinian rights for their greater political and economic interests building western political and economic alliances, particularly with the US. As a result, over 5.3 million Palestinians (including 1.4 million Arab Israeli citizens) are denied all rights Israeli Jews get, are subjected to constant abuse and neglect, 3.9 million of them are virtual prisoners in the open air camps, cities and villages of Gaza and the West Bank (OPT), and over 10,000 are held and brutalized inside Israeli prison hellholes. They're all nameless, faceless, and ignored in the West because they're "unworthy" Palestinian Arab Muslim victims, so who cares if they're forced to endure a hostile occupier's unrestrained harshness against them.

"Unworthy" Iraqis

In March, 2003, US forces came, saw and "liberated" 26 million Iraqis from their freedom in a war beginning in January, 1991. They destroyed a once prosperous nation, the most advanced in the Middle East, leaving in its wake a surreal lawless armed camp wasteland with few or no essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel or most everything else needed for sustenance and survival. They also burnt, looted or destroyed most of Iraq's institutions of higher learning; plundered the nation's archeological museums, historic sites, libraries and archives - all part of a barbaric planned effort to destroy the country's cultural identity, control its vast oil resources, eliminate all opposition through daily land and air rampages through cities and neighborhoods assassinating targeted victims and randomly killing anyone including women and children sometimes for sport or out of anger. It's called democracy, US-style, through the barrel of a gun, where the law is what the occupier says it is and "unworthy" victimized subjects have no say in their own country known as "the cradle of civilization" now disappearing at the dawn of the 21st century.

Then there are the prisons. An unknown number of US-run ones are in Iraq and Afghanistan plus other proxy ones throughout the greater Middle East, Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and wherever else Washington can bribe or coerce other nations to be our enforcers to treat prisoners sent there the way we do in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib hellholes and the lesser known but equally infamous one at Bagram airbase near Kabul, Afghanistan.

Two Iraq prisons (Camp Bucca in the south and Camp Cropper near Baghdad) alone reportedly hold 18,000 captives among an official 34,000 known held throughout the country with the true number likely much higher. It's called justice, US-style meaning none whatever for our targeted nameless, faceless, unknown "unworthy victims" the West ignores with rare exceptions like the case of Australian David Hicks.

Other "Unworthy" US Victims

Hicks was held over five years at Guantanamo where he was abused, tortured, and one of only four prisoners there ever charged with an offense (using a cooked up charge of "material support for a terrorist group") after he agreed to a (Republican party official's politically arranged) plea bargain, was tried in a military tribunal kangaroo court Stalinist-type show trial, convicted unjustly and will now return home to serve nine more months in an Australian prison. As an "unworthy" prisoner, western media coverage was pathetic and inadequate failing to explain what was most important. He was a terribly abused innocent young man whose ordeal continues.

He won't be treated with laurels and a hero's welcome back home if Australian Prime Minister and Bush lap dog John Howard's view prevails. After the verdict, he echoed Rupert Murdoch's "Australian" calling Hicks a "confessed terror trainee." Howard told reporters Hicks is a dangerous terrorist who "pleaded guilty to knowingly assisting a terrorist organization." In spite of it all, Hicks, his family, friends and supporters hope one day he'll be able to resume a normal life that never can be that way again for him, thanks to US "justice."

Nor will it be for countless numbers of Iraqis and Afghans whose lives we changed forever, many of whom now want redress and have filed legal claims to get it. On April 11, the ACLU released information on hundreds of them obtained from the Pentagon after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get them in June, 2006. It's for 479 Iraq claims and 17 from Afghanistan that in total comprise a tiny fraction of the number of innocent civilians entitled to compensation for damages or loss of loved ones but who'll end up getting nothing.

So far, 198 claims have been summarily denied on grounds of "combat exclusion" meaning the incident cited was "from action by an enemy or resulted directly or indirectly from an act of the armed forces of the United States in combat." Other claims were rejected for "lack of evidence (or) lack of proof of US involvement." Another 10% were as well because incidents cited hadn't been reported in the US military's "SIGACT" (significant action) database.

Of the 496 claims ACLU knows of (there are likely others or will be), only 164 resulted in cash payment compensation to surviving family members in total amounting to $32 million that can't begin to make up for the human loss, immense suffering still ongoing, and permanent impairment to those on whom it was inflicted. Nor does it begin to address the pain, suffering and loss for millions of nameless, faceless "unworthy victims" of US aggression and occupation whose lives won't ever be the same again if they survive. How can they be as out-of-sight, out-of-mind demonized Muslims under US occupation in the age of George Bush's wars against them that "won't end in our lifetime."

Nor will Jose Padilla's life improve as a US citizen held as an "enemy combatant" in military confinement for nearly four years and since then by the Department of Justice (DOJ) even though no corroborating evidence justifies his guilt on anything, let alone his original charge of being part of a terrorist plot to detonate "dirty bombs" inside the country. Nonetheless, he's been kept in brutalizing solitary confinement and tortured there awaiting trial just begun April 16 on a lesser vague charge of "supporting terrorism (by being) part of a vast international movement of foot soldiers, recruiters and financiers who foment violent jihad around the globe" with no evidence to make this case or any other on an innocent man.

Occasionally a brief story pops up about him as it did when wire services like Reuters reported his trial began in Miami. It then quickly disappears as this "unworthy" abused, victimized and emotionally turned to mush young man is left to the whims of DOJ justice meaning he'll get none. Nor will the media explain he experienced some of the mind-altering treatment common at Guantanamo and Human Rights Watch says goes on at Kabul's US-run "prison of darkness" where detainees are so abused a lucky former one reported he "could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors (in a delusional state)." The Pentagon knows what it's doing and even puts it in writing. The current Army field manual states: "Sensory deprivation (or extremes) may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior (and) significant psychological distress."

John Walker Lindh got his share of it too. He's a US citizen former Attorney General John Ashcroft labelled an "American Taliban." He was captured, held and tortured in Afghanistan in 2001 based on false claims he was a Taliban terrorist fighting US forces. In fact, he only arrived in the country four weeks before 9/11 and went to help the Taliban fight the brutal Afghan warlords at a time Washington was still providing the Taliban financial aid. Under torture at Baghram Airbase, he confessed to crimes he never committed, for which there was no corroborating evidence, and while there was denied legal counsel. Lindh is an innocent man, should be freed, and likely is as bad off emotionally as Padilla.

Instead, he's been moved to the federal supermax prison in Colorado where he's held in brutalizing solitary confinement, forced to undergo sensory deprivation, other periods of extreme noise, routine beatings, mindless strip searches and more because that's what goes on in these hellholes designed to destroy human beings and doing a pretty good job of it. The public only got false and misleading reports and media images of Lindh portrayed as a "dangerous Taliban terrorist" now in custody and unable to commit further crimes. He never committed any. More injustice for another "unworthy victim" of it.

The Case of Lynne Stewart's Struggle for Justice As An "Unworthy Victim" Targeted by Bush's DOJ

Lynne Stewart's courageous struggle for justice is followed, discussed and will be remembered by growing legions of supporters everywhere in spite of the dominant media's blackout on almost all of it. DOJ indicted Stewart on four counts of aiding and abetting a terrorist organization April 9, 2002 under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). She was unjustly accused of providing material support for terrorism and violating Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) imposed by the US Bureau of Prisons including a gag order on Sheik Abdel Rahman whom she represented in his 1995 trial and who now is serving a life sentence for "Seditious Conspiracy" in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Because the so-called "radical" cleric was so radioactive, his case was high-profile enough to make Stewart herself a target that began with her arrest, indictment and trial using her case to threaten other lawyers not to represent unpopular clients in the age of George Bush's witch-hunt "war on terrorism" against them.

It was the beginning of Stewart's long ordeal that included her battle with breast cancer, de facto court disbarment following her conviction February 10, 2005 on all four counts of her indictment - made official April 25, 2007 when she was formally (and unjustly) disbarred by the New York Bar Association. October 17, 2006 was her sentencing date that could have been for life for a 67 year old woman if presiding Judge John G. Koeltl handed down the 30 years DOJ prosecutors asked for. Judge Koeltl, however, had other ideas effectively vindicating Stewart in his 28 month sentence, allowing her to remain free pending her appeal to a higher court which he acknowledged might overturn the case that was clearly a gross miscarriage of justice for a woman whose her long career was dedicated to fighting for justice.

Stewart spent 30 years as a civil rights attorney representing the rights of those in society never afforded due process unless they're lucky enough to have an advocate like her. For that and representing Sheik Rahman, she became a targeted "unworthy victim" whose struggle for exoneration continues. Both she and DOJ are appealing Judge Koeltl's sentence with Stewart's fate hanging on the outcome that likely will be appealed to the Supreme Court whichever way it goes with final resolution on it still many months away.

And it may not end there. If the High Court rules for Stewart or affirms her maximum 28 month sentence, DOJ may decide to reindict her on new charges meaning a new ordeal would begin where the present one leaves off. In the age of George Bush, that's how things work for society's "unworthy" targeted victims including those representing due process rights of others when DOJ doesn't want them to have any.

For now, Stewart's appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and DOJ's will be heard and likely ruled on together by a three-judge panel at a date so far unannounced. Stewart's appeal challenges the validity of the charges, the application of statutes used, the constitutionality of pre-trial tactics plus the conduct of and various rulings made at trial. Her hope is for what she deserves - a verdict reversal and full exoneration, case closed at the appellate level.

Stewart also opposes DOJ's objections to her sentence and has a January 22, 2007 US Supreme Court decision in Cunningham v. California to bolster her case. In the 6 - 3 ruling, the High Court affirmed the district judge's exercise of discretion in imposing sentence. The Court struck down California's tiered sentencing system under which judicial findings of fact resulted in higher sentences. That, in turn, bolsters the notion that prosecution Sentencing Guidelines are only advisory and aren't to be used as a line in the sand benchmark basis for imposing sentence.

Two other cases before the High Court may also bear on Stewart's appeal. One is Claiborne v. United States on whether extraordinary circumstances are needed to justify a sentence substantially different from Guidelines. The other is Rita v. United States on a sentence within Guidelines. Here the issue is whether Guidelines sentencing is presumed reasonable, or whether a court must still examine other factors justifiable enough to warrant a lesser sentence. Lynne Stewart's fate hangs on all these issues along with whatever DOJ has in mind for her ahead - whether to let her case end in the courts or continue its witch-hunt persecution of her. It may be a good while yet before it's known.

Other Examples of "Unworthy" Victims

In the age of George Bush, all Muslims are "unworthy," and those singled out for targeting are its victims. Citing national security, thousands were and still are hunted down witch-hunt style, rounded up, held indefinitely on administrative charges or none at all, denied bail, restricted or denied their right to counsel, tried in secret courts with no right of appeal, and incarcerated or deported. They're invisible save for their broad brush demonization in the major media as "Islamofascists" to justify the "long war on terror" against them because of their faith and ethnicity. They're its innocent victims.

Along with them are "unworthy" Latino immigrants here in the US undocumented because NAFTA, CAFTA and other predatory trade agreements destroyed their ability to survive at home leaving them no other choice than to come north. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) feels otherwise targeting them as criminals and terrorist threats. Its agents seize them at the border or in workplace raids separating parents from children, holding thousands in detention where they're harshly treated and denied any rights. The rest are deported, but will just return to face ill-treatment as exploited workers or by ICE if caught because of their race and ethnicity. More "unworthy" nameless, faceless victims.

The US-based Gulag Prison System's "Unworthy Victims"

Few people in the country know anything about the US prison system and who's held there because almost nothing about it gets reported in the major media. Most in it are many tens of thousands of "unworthy victims" because of oppressive statutes on the books incarcerating huge numbers unjustly, many innocent of any crime, and most come from society's most vulnerable and unwanted so who'll care or notice. The result is the largest prison population in the world at over 2.2 million, growing by over 1000 new inmates a week. Half or more are black, about two-thirds including Latinos, over half are there for non-violent offenses, and half of those are drug related.

Then consider how they're treated. What goes on at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other overseas hellholes happens here at home as well in US-based ones at both federal and state levels. It includes constant harassment, savage beatings by prison guards; attacks by fierce dogs inflicting painful bites; severe shocking with cattle prods and 50,000 volt-emitting Taser electro-shock guns strong enough to kill and often used multiple times making victims (who survive) shake in pain for hours; assaults by toxic chemicals like pepper spray inflicting severe discomfort or pain; and for many 23 hour lockdowns in rat and roach-infested windowless cells under 24 hour artificial light with alternating periods of sensory deprivation and extreme noise and kept in painful hand and feet shackles whenever outside their cells.

There's more including denial of medical treatment or poor quality when received even though prisons are known hotbeds of diseases including contagious ones. In September, 2006, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) estimated over half the prison population suffers mental problems, mostly related to their incarceration and for many it's severe. It includes serious melancholia, mania and hallucinations. In addition, an astonishing 1.5 million inmates are released each year afflicted with threatening contagious diseases like TB and HIV/AIDS. In prison, these and other diseases cause 7000 mostly preventable reported deaths yearly plus a rising level of suicides and many more unsuccessful attempts.

In addition, prison sexual assaults are commonplace, and victims of it have virtually no effective defense against predators. The UN Committee Against Torture reported the numbers conservatively estimating in May, 2006 it happens to at least 13% of inmates with many more suffering frequent sexual abuse. The UN Committee believes around 200,000 current inmates were or will become sexual assault victims and that over the past 20 years the number exceeds a shocking one million.

Then there are the political prisoners in the many hundreds in a nation where the very notion of them is repugnant and appalling. The Prison Activist Resource Center web site lists over 100 names it focuses on
(mostly unknown to the public) including a few that are like framed American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned 30 years unjustly, and internationally known journalist and former Black Panther activist Mumia Abu-Jamal on death row for 25 years for a crime he didn't commit. Most others there include former Black Panther members and other black activists; Native American activists; Puerto Rican freedom fighting activists; Muslims and undocumented immigrants because of their faith and ethnicity; and others (men and women) who dared fight for rights, principles and causes America rejects.

Palestinian refugee, scholar, academic, community leader, civic activist and freedom-fighting advocate Dr. Sami Al-Arian stands out as a dramatic example of injustice in post-9/11 America with its climate of state-induced fear and harsh repression targeting all Muslims, distinguished ones included. Following 11 years of investigations and harassment, he was arrested and imprisoned February 20, 2003 on trumped up charges, held in oppressive 23 hour lockdown solitary confinement in rat and roach-infested windowless cells under 24 hour artificial light even after being tried and acquitted December 6, 2005 on eight of 17 false charges with the jury deadlocked 10 - 2 in his favor on the other nine.

On March 2, 2006 he agreed to a plea agreement to bring closure to his case and end his long ordeal. Under its terms, the prosecution stipulated Al-Arian committed no violent acts or had knowledge of any; that he would not be required to "cooperate" further by providing prosecutors more information; and that he would be released for time served and be willing to be voluntarily deported.

It didn't happen because prosecutors subpoenaed Al-Arian to testify before a grand jury investigating an Islamic think tank violating his plea agreement that he no longer would have to cooperate in further goverment investigations. Al-Arian rightfully refused to testify knowing doing so might involuntarily entrap him in possible or interpreted perjury leaving him vulnerable to endless government opportunities to harass and reincarcerate him.

As a result Al-Arian's sentence was extended, and he remains imprisoned where, as a diabetic, he underwent a 60 day life-threatening hunger strike in protest requiring his transfer to the Butner, North Carolina medical facility where he remained until being transferred to the Alexandria Detention Center in northern Virginia. Before arriving, he endured a 30 hour stopover at the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia where, still recovering from his hunger strike, he was placed in a tiny, freezing cold windowless cell with pools of water on the ground and extremely cold air fed in through a vent, given no additional clothing or cleaning supplies to clean his cell, and no clock or watch to tell time or ability to know the proper direction to perform his Muslim prayers. In addition, guards illegally seized his legal documents and then claimed they misplaced them. They've yet to be found or returned.

This is how extra harshly Muslim political prisoners are treated post-9/11 as Al-Arian's long ordeal for freedom, justice and full exoneration continues. He's well represented by William Mitchell College of Law professor and past President of the National Lawyers Guild Peter Erlinder as his lead attorney, but his struggle ahead is daunting. Al-Arian is up against a rogue administration determined to resist efforts to free him and is ready to file new charges to keep him imprisoned as long as DOJ wants him there. Today, that's the state of judicial fairness in America endangering anyone daring to speak out and dissent in an age of state-sponsored terrorism targeting innocent victims.

Another noted one is Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a Muslim American of Iraqi descent and practicing oncologist until his license was suspended following his politically motivated conviction in a DOJ-run "kangaroo court" trial. He was charged with violating the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations (IEEPA) using his own funds and what he could raise through his Help the Needy charity to bring desperately needed essential to life humanitarian aid to Iraqi people unable to get it because of US/UN-imposed punitive sanctions from 1990 - 2003.

For his "Crime of Compassion" (see dhafirtrial.net, Katherine Hughes), he was convicted of violating the sanctions and a total of 59 of 60 trumped up total charges including tax fraud, money laundering, and mail and wire fraud resulting in a 22 year prison sentence he's currently serving in Terre Haute's special illegal secret "Communications Management Unit" (CMU) targeting Muslims. Its existence was first revealed in a breaking news story February 16 by lawyer and legal analyst, academic, author and journalist Jennifer Van Bergen in an online article in The Raw Story. Van Bergen reported the CMU is for so-called "high-security risk" Muslim and Middle Eastern (Arab) prisoners to severely limit or cut them off entirely from contact and communication with the outside world violating federal law prohibiting such action.

Sami Al-Arian was exonerated by a jury and Rafil Dhafir is an innocent man never charged with or convicted of "terrorism" or any act of violence. Neither is a "high-security risk" but both are treated like them because they're high-profile Muslims in the witch-hunt "war on terror" targeting them unjustly. These distinguished men are also "trophy" prisoners for the Bush administration using them especially, but all demonized Muslims as well, as scapegoats because of their faith and ethnicity and are treating them with extreme harshness as a result.

These examples aren't happening at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, but right here at home in prisons everywhere where mostly non-violent human beings are locked in cages. It's often for offenses deserving little more than a reprimand or fine or that never should have been criminalized in the first place. Or in the case of Al-Arian, Dhafir and many others it represents a state crime against humanity, against innocent men, women and even children unjustly imprisoned for political reasons only. The result is victims of injustice are forced to serve hard time, and for repeat offenders or political targets it could be life without parole because society judges them "unworthy," punishing them in ways never done to the "worthy" afforded special treatment because of their privileged status. In the age of George Bush, we're all potential Sami Al-Arians and Rafil Dhafirs, and far too many targeted end up unjustly in the heart of prison darkness on death row as the "unworthiest" of this country's "unworthy victims."

Today, the US is the only western country still using the death penalty as a punitive measure. Since 1985, over 50 countries abolished it and of the approximate six dozen still using it just a small handful account for nearly all executions. Amnesty International 2005 data showed 94% of known ones were carried out in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US.

The US-based Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) is a "chapter-based grassroots organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment in the United States (with) active chapters in cities and campuses across the country." It reports more than 3500 people now on death row in the country, the largest number ever and growing listing five reasons why it's wrong and must end. It's racist, punishes the poor, condemns the innocent, doesn't deter crime, and is "cruel and unusual punishment" nearly always targeting "unworthy victims" of our criminal justice system under which those on death row get the worst of it.

Since 1973, 123 or more US prisoners were released after evidence found them innocent. It concerned former Illinois Governor George Ryan enough in 2000 to declare a moratorium on all state executions after the 13th death row prisoner was found to have been wrongfully convicted since the nation's death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Ryan then pardoned four death row inmates and commuted 167 other sentences.

The ACLU reported the results of a disturbing study conducted by Columbia University professor James Liebman in which he examined thousands of US capital sentences reviewed by courts in 34 states from 1973 - 1995. His shocking conclusion was "An astonishing 82% of death row inmates did not deserve to receive the death penalty (and) One in 20 death row inmates is later found not guilty." Reasons why were that someone later confessed to the crime, key witness testimony was later found to be illegitimate, or new evidence supported innocence.

Investigations like this and others prove the death penalty is this country's ultimate punitive measure used almost exclusively against "unworthy, unpeople victims" to eliminate the unwanted, and those targeted are largely defenseless against it. Only the fortunate innocent few survive also proving our criminal justice system is irreparably broken and shamefully unjust in nominally democratic America for the "worthy" alone.

America the Beautiful - Only for the Privileged "Worthy"

"Worthy and unworthy victims" live in different Americas, highlighted in the age of George Bush in blazing starkness. Those anointed "worthy" are named, known, seen media-manipulated heros while the "unworthy" are mostly nameless, faceless unknown abused "unpeople" targets of the administration's "war on terror," the poor and anyone "in times of universal deceit" courageously daring to dissent. Above are case examples of injustice portraying America's dark side in contrast to those qualifying as special because Washington gets propaganda value from their misfortune. Add to them the privileged few, always special and "worthy" in a nation beholden to them at the expense of all others.

Boosted as well in the process is what Edward Herman calls our "indispensable state" image and essential goodness giving us special dispensation to wage perpetual wars for an elusive peace in the name of democracy, human rights and justice for all we preach but don't practice. They're easily justified by manipulating false notions of exceptionalism and moral superiority giving us special rights and obligations to spread our way of life to others hiding our darker imperial agenda to impose it on them through the barrel of a gun, like it or not.

This essay shows its effects on real people - those going along are "worthy" and those who don't or don't matter are "unworthy unpeople." Wellesley College English professor Katherine Lee Bates wrote the famous words to American the Beautiful on a trip west in 1893 but never could have imagined her "spacious skies...amber waves of grain...and purple mountain majesties" would become George Bush's ugly America for the "worthy" alone uncrowned by any of the "good" or "brotherhood" she wrote about "from sea to shining sea" everywhere.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to the Steve Lendman News and Information Hour on The Micro Effect.com each Saturday at noon US central time.