"It's not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without
understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it."   - John Pilger
See also Older Articles    Journalism & Films    Archives

Never has journalism been so important, yet so much of the media is little more than propaganda of great power. That's why Green Left Weekly is so crucial" - John Pilger, Journalist and friend of Green Left Weekly

Iraq is probably already lost, says former military-policy planner Mike Turner.
But there are still some smart strategies for Kerry to adopt.
One of the great mysteries of this election is the inability of John Kerry to challenge George W. Bush on his national-security credentials and to hold his administration accountable for its monumental failure in Iraq. These two issues remain the soft underbelly of the Bush campaign. That the Kerry campaign hasn't effectively exploited them is disheartening. That he's allowed Bush to actually spin them into strengths is mind-boggling. Since the American people seem to be buying the GOP's reality-TV version of events in Iraq, let's take a hard look at the military realities.

From Dr. Deagle:
I have a timely story to relay on warnings I received before 9/11.
The events of 911 have forever changed all Americans views of what it is to be a free citizen of a Western democracy. They must be re-evaluated as thousands of inconsistencies and contradictions make this Orwellian tale even more pressing, now that our calendars cross yet another 911 anniversary.

There are important issues that the following brilliant article; "The Triumph of Anything Goes" does not mention. These include Bush's neocon-inspired plans for more wars, and his new nuclear war doctrines. These license the US to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively, against both nuclear and non-nuclear states, if the US decides that state to be a threat to the US or its allies. As part of the Bush conspiracy, the US and UK declared Iraq was part of the 9/11 terrorist attack, had various WMD including nuclear weapons, and could attack the US and "UK in 45 minutes". All were found to be lies. The US and UK , having created these huge lies to persuade their governments and public's to accept and support the phoney war, then attacked Iraq and murdered thousands of civilians.

  We all know that George W. Bush's reelection would probably bring about more illiberal policies regarding social justice, education, the arts, economic fairness, environmental protection, consumer rights, racial equality, foreign policy, civil liberties, and workers' rights. Less obvious, but perhaps as consequential over the long term, is how a Bush victory in November would change the fundamental practice of democracy in Washington. If the public were to award Bush a vote of confidence on the basis of his first-term record, it would amount to a ratification of the ruthless style and philosophy that have underpinned Bush's presidency--what Barack Obama at the Democratic Convention called "the politics of anything goes."

In war, you deny information, spread lies and use psychological warfare. An expert on military information operations explains how Bush has mastered this technique -- and used it against the American people.
On Thursday, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will speak before a joint meeting of Congress, and from what he said in London on his way to the United States, it looks like Americans are going to be getting more of the strategic information operations that have been crucial to Bush's policy on Iraq from the beginning.

THE WAR IN IRAQ goes from worse to catastrophic. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed last week, as were two dozen US soldiers. Planned elections in January point less to democracy than civil war. Kidnapping has become a weapon of terror on the ground, matching the terror of US air attacks. An American "take-back" offensive threatens to escalate the violence immeasurably. The secretary general of the United Nations pronounced the American war illegal.

Turning up the campaign rhetoric on Iraq, Sen. John Kerry charged Monday that mistakes by President Bush in invading Iraq could lead to unending war. He said no responsible commander in chief would have waged the war knowing Saddam Hussein didn't possess weapons of mass destruction and wasn't an imminent threat to the United States.
"Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious?" Kerry said at New York University.

Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali held the US administration accountable for rising wave of terrorism, saying Washington’s unilateral approach has fuelled civil wars across the world.
Boutros-Ghali also asked American President George W. Bush to order his forces out of Iraq and to allow Arab countries mediate a peaceful settlement to the crisis gripping the war-scarred country.

 During a BBC radio interview on Wednesday, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan created a controversy by reiterating his long-held position that the Iraq War was illegal because it breached the United Nations Charter.
On Thursday, the imperial leaders of the "Coalition of the Willing" retaliated by vehemently arguing that their Iraq War was, to the contrary, legal.  
Obviously, this dispute raises a legal question: "Whose opinion is correct, and whose is incorrect?"  Additionally, we should be asking ourselves: "Who decides? (i.e., 'Whose jurisprudential opinion shall be dispositive for purposes of resolving this dispute?')" 

(YellowTimes.org) -- The United States went to war against Iraq in 2003 on the basis that Iraq was chock-a-block with '‘weapons of mass destruction’' (WMD). Eventually, the Americans had to admit they were wrong and they just couldn’t find those weapons. Many skeptics suspect the Bush administration lied about the WMDs in Iraq to cover a desire to invade and steal Iraqi oil.

Seems like this whole line of investigation (which appeared at the Prison Planet site and soon in Mike ruppert's book) is getting traction. Here's a piece from the Axis of Logic site which, while hardly "mainstream" is not "underground" either. It starts with the Israeli spying scandal and leads to the subject line above: http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_11837.shtml

Illegal weapons of mass destruction have not only been found in Iraq but have been used against Iraqis and have even killed US troops.
But Washington and its allies have tried to cover up this outrage because the chief culprit is the US itself, argue American and other experts trying to expose what they say is a war crime.

The new book "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and The Global Order" 369 pages, is published by Cambridge University. It is by Stephan Halper and Jonathon Clarke, well-connected foreign policy experts. The review is by Stanley Kutler, author of "The Wars on Watergate" and editor of "The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century". It was published in the Madison Wisconsin newspaper, "Capital Times" on Sept 12, 2004. It is a brief, and authoritative account of the capture of US foreign policy by Bush and the neocons he has appointed. Their purpose:, "under the guise of a war on terror, to reorder Mideast politics and initiate a new doctrine of pre-emptive war."

With less than 50 days to the US polls and a 10-point lead over John Kerry, George W Bush’s re-election as President looks a breeze. Despite his dodgy past, he has successfully sold himself as a ‘hero’ War President and defender of traditional US values. How did he do it? Bush’s people have run riot over Kerry’s record, so what about the President’s?

You can't buy this kind of publicity, even if you're George W. Bush and your campaign has raised more money than any other in U.S. history.
There he is on the homepage of the Southern Baptists' website, handing out "bags of ice and words of hope" on Wednesday to Floridians battered by Hurricane Frances. Whoops, there he is again on the homepage, in another photo, this time with Brother Jeb, putting ice and bottled water in another motorist's car. Oh, wait, there's a story too.

Three years after September 11, President George W Bush's crusade is a failure. "War on terror" is a meaningless myth: you
can't combat a supple attack machine like al-Qaeda with shock and awe. What should have been a long, meticulous police operation was turned by Bush - instigated by his foreign policy adviser, God - into an illegal, preemptive attack on a nation that had nothing to do with terror.
This policy has actually increased terror attacks around the world. Last year in Cairo, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Sheikh Yamani, a man who knows one or two things about Arabs, violence and oil, said the invasion would produce "one hundred bin Ladens". They are here, and they have no one else but Bush to thank.

1,000 US deaths after Bush announced victory over Iraq, he continues his phoney barbarous war and bombing. Bush has become a war criminal, violating the US constitution, many International Laws, the Nuremberg Charter and the UN Charter.
He has created a tissue of lies to justify an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and continued slaughter of Iraqis. The following article on US bombing of Falluja is an example of US barbarity.

Up to six Iraqis have been killed and 24 others injured in US air strikes that have rocked the town of Falluja.
In the first attack late on Tuesday, US jets fired several missiles on Falluja, killing four people and wounding 11 others. A hospital spokesman said that a child and an elderly man were among the dead.

For almost three years since 9/11 independent researchers have stockpiled individual smoking guns which prove that the official version of events was not only a lie but operationally impossible.
However, no single smoking gun has yet been forwarded to explain why air defenses categorically reversed Standard Operating Procedure and failed to respond to hijacked jetliners.
Until now. More and more individuals are looking at the facts and highlighting exercise drills that took place on the morning of 9/11.    See:   http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2004/080904wargamescover.htm

Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire
The election-year insta-docs keep rising like sunflowers from the Bush admin cow pile; this week, we have a Media Education Foundation–produced primer on neocon world-shaping, post–9-11 skullduggery, and Iraqi Freedom duplicity. More or less a Bud Abbott alternative to Fahrenheit 9/11's Lou Costello, the film sticks closely to well-established facts—the revelation of pre–9-11 plans to attack Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz's age-old rationales for global dominance, the self-contradictory public statements (read: lies) of virtually every major broker on the Bush team, etc.—and nicely, if redundantly, complements the familiar news footage with opinionated talking heads (Chomsky, Mark Crispin Miller, profs, vets, etc.).
Also a comment by Karen Kwiatkowski

An FBI investigation into suspected security breaches involving Pentagon officials and Israel is unlikely to result in prosecution of senior figures following pressure from the White House, according to people familiar with the case.

In the case of World War II the Germans were controlled by a dictatorship and fed hate and fear propaganda, (see Hermann Goering's quotes below) to get them to go to war against what they were told were threatening enemies. They became the real threatening enemies to everyone so it was just and necessary for the West to oppose them with war. I think Twain's quote applies to the Nazis, but not to those defending themselves against the Nazis.

Dear Governor Schwarzenegger:
Please know that I'm one among many Californians who are deeply disappointed in your increasingly-boorish gubernatorial misbehavior, which at best lacks ethical integrity, and at worst cannot stand the light of further public crutiny without seriously tarnishing California's reputation. I will offer you two illustrative examples.

Karl Rove's Republicans swerve right on the way to the middle
It looked like Karl Rove was going to get away with it: presenting a nominating convention the press would call "moderate." The Times reported the opening morning how the "party seeks to pivot to the center." The first day's reviews depicted undeniable success, the Christian Science Monitor, for example, reporting on the Republicans, um, "pivot to the center." MSNBC put up an astonishingly Orwellian "Question of the Day" on its website: "Did Rudy Giuliani's speech reassure you or move you to support the Bush-Cheney ticket?" You could click either "Reassure" or "Move to support."

How Soon Will the U.S. or Israel Bomb Iran?

IN LATE JULY more than 600 people showed up in Monterey to speak at a Federal Communications Commission hearing on ownership concentration in the news media. The participants were a diverse group, young and old, activists and workers, but they had a single consistent message: the mainstream news media have been doing a deplorable job of covering the day's most important stories.
Read more on DU:

The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees.
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq.
See also Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

Current Polls Project A Razor-Thin Margin Of Victory For John Kerry, But The Razor's Edge Could Cut Either Way By November
According to professional pollsters, the American electorate is so highly polarized in 2004 that only 3% are still undecided "swing-voters."  So who's ahead in the presidential race?  The answer depends on the specificity of the polls.  In a three-man race between George Walker Bush, John Forbes Kerry, and Ralph Nader, the more generalized national polls currently show that Mr. Bush leads Mr. Kerry by an average of about +2%. [1]  Nevertheless, if the presidential election was held today, the more specific state polls currently project that Mr. Kerry would win by a slim margin of 270 to 259 in our often-berated, little-understood Electoral College.

Howard Dean, previous presidential contender, warned recently about potential voting machine fraud and that voters should demand a paper trail for each machine - otherwise fraud can occur and be undetected. I suspect that Bush & Co. will arrange with his voting machine friends for the disappearance of some Democratic votes, dropping, losing or not counting enough of the democratic votes in borderline states, that Bush will win and appear to be re-elected by popular vote.

Chavez Could Teach US Leaders a Thing or Two About Winning Votes
I knew that the administration of Hugo Chavez had won my heart when I met Olivia Delfino in one of the poor barrios in Caracas. As I was touring the neighborhood with an international delegation here to monitor this Sunday's referendum on Chavez, Olivia came out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm. "Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez," she insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to her home. With that, she was able to get a bank loan to fix the roof so it wouldn't leak in the rain. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called "Rescatando la sonrisa" - recovering the smile - for the first time in her life she was able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job training program to become a nurse's assistant.

The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the state of Israel’s policies in the continued destruction of Palestinian identity and the increasing domination into American foreign policy no longer has the sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered. For too long this masquerade has been used to silence those opposing anything Israel, shouted at anyone disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the boy who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or hypnotic control, and today only serves to breed more anger and resentment against the apologists and smear mongers protecting the cancerous tentacles of Zionism and the crimes against humanity it spawns.
Also see The Other Superpower: Fraternity, Solidarity and the World's People
Other articles by Manuel Valenzuela and Manuel Valenzuela Archives

On 6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power."

A death sentence here and abroad
“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”

Last Clear Chance To Chase Down Electronic-Voting Before Its Security-Flaws Bring Down Our Electoral System There's really nothing new about terrorism-by-stealth, despite Mr. Bush's frequent protestations to the contrary. [1] Indeed, when the ancient Greeks feigned to sail away while the proud Trojans -- who'd resisted the Grecian siege for nine long years -- wheeled the Greeks' parting gift of a huge wooden horse inside their city's gates, the Trojans never stopped to consider terrorism-by-stealth, or that they'd be rudely awakened to discover too late that a lethal cargo of Greek guerrillas had been hidden inside its belly.

The last thing the United States needs in this part of the world is one more enemy. Yet last week, all indications were that the Bush administration was marching straight into a confrontation with Iran, the single largest demographic and military power in the Gulf region.

Bush, Blair and Howard nuclear gambled with our world, when they "willfully made war and promoted international dissension". Their completely phoney war on Iraq, justified by lies, was followed with a series of war crimes, including more lies, bombing, looting, killing, imprisoning and torturing. It was, and still is, camouflaged by a PR-Psywar campaign, reported by a cowed and co-operative mass media. As recommended by historian H. G. Wells, these "politicians" will be "in the dock" at:

So what's actually happening to Iraq's women? American journalist Lila Rajiva's 7-27-04 OW essay reports that the USA's government-media complex has been steadfastly refusing to investigate beyond the tip of the evidentiary iceberg, or it would have discovered these two barely-submerged facts: (1) that the rape and abduction of Iraqi women has, in fact, skyrocketed in "postwar" Iraq; and (2) that Iraqi women prisoners are, in fact, being raped, abused, and tortured inside the USA's military prisons.

Sibel Edmonds is an amazingly courageous former FBI translator. She lost her job at the FBI for insisting that extremely important information on the 9/11 attacks she came across in her work be correctly interpreted and passed on to the appropriate high-level officials. This information reveals clear foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks not mentioned in the recently released 9/11 Commission report. As I also work as a contract interpreter for the US Department of State, a mutual friend put me in email contact with Sibel several months ago. I have been deeply impressed with her unwavering commitment to honesty and to revealing the truth so that we can avoid another attack on the scale of 9/11. She has been courageously trying to expose this information ever since losing her job, until now working within the constraints of a gag order against her.

Terrorist Warnings Just Another Way Bush Will Steal Election
I'm probably one of thousands—maybe tens of thousands—who believe George W. Bush will do anything to retain control of the White House. It's not safe to have a healthy dose of skepticism like this these days. But this has to be said. I don't believe the country is going to be attacked by al-Qaeda anytime soon. I don't care how specific the so-called threat is. I don't care how many targets have been identified. I don't care how solid this new information is. I don't buy any of it. What I do believe is whenever Bush's approval ratings start slipping, the administration issues a terrorist warning saying an attack is imminent. Coincidence? I don't think so.

If desperation is ugly, then Washington, D.C. today is downright hideous.
As the 9/11 Commission recently reported, there was “no credible evidence” of a collaborative relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Similarly, no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. With U.S. casualties mounting in an election year, the White House is grasping at straws to avoid being held accountable for its dishonesty.

"One would think the physicians in the US military would have learned enough from the cautionary history of the Third Reich's ghoulish Dr. Joseph "The Angel Of Death" Mengele and his team of torture-doctors to know that they should
NEVER practice medicine in violation of universal human rights or their Hippocratic Oath. Evidently, they did not."

"Bush is taking powerful drugs to control his depression, erratic behaviour, and paranoia" "Psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, in his book "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President wrote that Bush was " a paranoid megalomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose mental capacities are seriously diminished" Couple these with Bush's bizarre Christian Fundamentalist religious beliefs, that the often predicted heavenly armageddon is coming with Israel the centre, when believers like Bush will go straight to heaven and the unbelievers (the rest of us) will rot in hell. An induced nuclear armageddon would be a fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy, or so some fundamentalists believe.

Osha Gray Davidson's article in 28/7/04 Rolling Stone, confirms a previous article by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker journalist) about US employees committing many sexual and other tortures of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including "raping a teenage boy". The Senate and Pentagon investigation into these tortures uncovered by US Maj. Gen. Antoni Taguba in his report, are now decreed as "classified documents. The investigation is stalled, probably because the details, which go to the top of the Bush Administration, would be considered so horrific by the average American, that to reveal them would damage Bush's re-election chances.

The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside.

It appears that the torturing of Iraq’s children is now a part of the Bush cabals “policy” of “bringing democracy, liberation and freedom” to the Iraqi people. This goes way past just simply outrageous.
Of the 535 members of congress, only one member has a child in Iraq, or in uniform for that matter. Not one within the executive branch can make any claim as not one of their children is in uniform, let alone in Iraq.
These are the people sending your sons and daughters off to kill and be killed in this Bush murderous mis-adventure in Iraq.

How do you explain the indefinite imprisonment of children, and sodomizing them, in Abu Ghraib prison in Bagdad?
Is that the way to "the hearts and minds" of those Bush wants to help; the way to introduce "freedom and democracy" to the oppressed victims of Saddam Hussein.? No?
There may be an overall Bush-neocom purpose in continuing the long litany of tortures, and taking their unlimited bestiality to new extrmes.

Said by some to be more dangerous than Osama bin-Laden, he has been condemned as a "war maniac," called a "moron" by the Canadian prime minister’s chief spokeswoman, ridiculed as "The English Patient" for his struggles with language, and likened to Adolf Hitler.
Of all the labels hung on George W. Bush, the hardest to shake may be the comparison with Hitler.

Proposed by Larry Ross - NZ Editorial Commission Of Enquiry - To assess individual NZ newspaper's coverage of Iraq since 2,000 and decide what they got right and what they got wrong.
Based on George Monbiot's article and suggestions in "Our lies led us into war" in The Guardian on July 20, 2004 which follows. This proposal was sent to various newspapers, editors, journalists, journalist schools and others to promote the obligation of freedom of the press to publish facts, not propaganda or lies, and to periodically assess what they have published that they now find is wrong, and publish corrections or retractions. People are invited to forward this proposal to other potentially interested people and institutions.

Iran gave free passage to up to 10 of the September 11 hijackers just months before the 2001 attacks and offered to co-operate with al-Qa'eda against the US, an American report will say this week.
The all-party report by the 9/11 Commission, set up by Congress in 2002, will state that Iran, not Iraq, fostered relations with the al-Qa'eda network in the years leading up to the world's most devastating terrorist attack.

Seymour Hersh : "The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."
Comment :-
Seymour Hersh is the veteran journalist who exposed US tortures at Abu Ghraib prison, in the US magazine: New Yorker. This latest torture expose of sodimizing screaming boys in Abu Ghraib is particularly foul. The long list of crimes and now this one, adds fuel to my accusation that the US is trying to promote Arab hatred of the US. This will result in more resistance and acts of violence, which the US refers to as "acts of terrorism". It will breed a civil war situation in Iraq. There would be the US and allies supporting their new appointed Government in Bagdad against any forces that oppose the Bagdad regime.

The 1988 gassing of Kurds in the village of Halabja has stood as the most oft-repeated charge against deposed president Saddam Hussein, yet even as Hussein stood before a US-established Iraqi court July 1, Iraqi doctors and ailing survivors told The Chicago Tribune that Halabja's plight was ignored during the period of official US occupation.
"This town has been totally destroyed in terms of the people's health physically and psychologically," Dr. Fouad Baban, an Iraqi surgeon and academic, told the Tribune. "Nothing has been done to help these people -- not by the Americans, not by the international community and not by the Kurdish regional government."

A US Army counterintelligence agent who accused fellow National Guardsmen of abusing Iraqi detainees says that his own commander coerced an Army psychiatrist into diagnosing him as "delusional." According to Sergeant Greg Ford, his commanding officer confronted psychiatrist Angelina Madera, a captain with the 30th Medical Support Element, after she had initially assessed Ford to be mentally stable.
Sgt. Ford says Captain Victor Artiga, the commander of the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion, told Dr. Madera she was to reclassify the whistleblower Ford as unfit for duty so he could be transferred out of Iraq immediately.