Neo-Con War Addiction Threatens Our Future
By Ron Paul | Texas Straight Talk | March 25, 2013
William Kristol knows what is wrong with the United States. As he wrote recently in the flagship magazine of the neo-conservatives, the Weekly Standard, the problem with the US is that we seem to have lost our appetite for war. According to Kristol, the troubles that have befallen us in the 20th century have all been the result of these periodic bouts of war-weariness, a kind of virus that we catch from time to time.
He claims because of the US “drawdown” in Europe after World War II, Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe. Because of war weariness the United States stopped bombing Southeast Asia in the 1970s, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. War weariness through the 1990s led to Rwanda, Milosevic, and the rise of the Taliban. It was our fault for not fighting on! According to Kristol, our failure to act as the policeman of the world is why we were attacked on September 11, 2001. Of the 1990s, he wrote, “[t]hat decade of not policing the world ended with 9/11.”
That revisionism is too much even for fellow neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to swallow. In a 2003 interview, Wolfowitz admitted that it was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia that led to the growth of al-Qaeda:
“(W)e can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina.”
But for Kristol and his allies there is never enough war. According to a new study by Brown University, the US invasion of Iraq cost some 190,000 lives, most of them non-combatants. It has cost more than $1.7 trillion, and when all is said and done including interest the cost may well be $6 trillion. Some $212 billion was spent on Iraqi reconstruction with nothing to show for it. Total deaths from US war on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been at least 329, 000. None of this is enough for Kristol.
The neo-con ideology promotes endless war, but neo-cons fight their battles with the blood of others. From the comfortable, subsidized offices of magazines like the Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives urge the United States to engage in endless war – to be fought by the victims of the “poverty draft” from states where there are few jobs. Ironically, these young people cannot find more productive work because the Federal Reserve’s endless money printing to keep the war machine turning has destroyed our economy. The six trillion dollars that will be spent on the Iraq war are merely pieces of printed paper that further erode the dollar’s purchasing power now and well into the future. It is the inflation tax, which is the most regressive and cruel of all.
Yes, Americans are war weary, concedes Kristol. But he does not blame the average American. The real problem is that the president has dropped the ball on terrifying Americans with the lies and imaginary threats that led to the invasion of Iraq. Writes Kristol: “One can’t, for example, be surprised at the ebbing support of the American public for the war in Afghanistan years after the president stopped trying to mobilize their support, stopped heralding the successes of the troops he’d sent there, and stopped explaining the importance of their mission.”
If only we had more war propaganda from the highest levels of government we could be cured of this war-weariness. Ten years ago the US invaded Iraq under the influence of neo-conservative lies. Those lies continued to promote US military action in places like Libya, and next on their agenda is Syria and then on to Iran. It is time for the American people to shout “enough!”
Washington Post Confuses Saving the Financial Industry with Saving the Financial System
CEPR Beat the Press | March 30, 2013
The Washington Post published excerpts from reporter Neil Irwin’s new book, The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, under the headline, “three days that saved the world financial system.” The headline is seriously misleading since it may cause readers to believe the world somehow would have lacked a financial system if the central bankers in Irwin’s story had not succeeded in their efforts.
This is not true. Had a financial collapse actually been the outcome, the central banks had the ability to take over failed banks and restart the system. (This is what the FDIC does all the time.) We would most likely see something similar to what Argentina experienced when it defaulted on its debt in December 2001 and broke the link of its currency to the dollar or what Cyprus is seeing today.
Presumably banks would be shut for a relatively short period of time until the regulators could do some preliminary workarounds. Then people would only be allowed access to a limited portion of their deposits, as is now the case in Cyprus. This situation might persist for weeks or possibly months as more money would gradually be freed up for withdrawal.
If Argentina is viewed as the model, this situation would likely lead to sharp downturn, but then a quick bounce back. By the summer of 2003 Argentina had made up all of the ground lost in the downturn. It was growing rapidly at the time and continued to grow rapidly until the world recession brought growth to a standstill in 2009.
Source; International Monetary Fund.
While the immediate hit from the financial collapse would have almost certainly been worse than what Europe and the rest of the world saw in the immediate wake of the initial euro zone crisis, the euro zone and world economy would almost certainly be much better off today if the central bankers had simply allowed the system to collapse. (This assumes that they are as competent as the economic policymakers in Argentina.)
In this sense, the heroes in Irwin’s book can be seen as saving the bankers, who would have been wiped out in a financial collapse, but not really doing much to benefit the rest of society.
Washington Post Prints Iraq Lies, 2013 Edition
By Peter Hart | FAIR | March 22, 2013
How long can media keep printing lies about the Iraq War? Today’s Washington Post (3/22/13) provides one answer, since they printed an 0p-ed by former Bush national security adviser Stephen Hadley where he argued this:
After Hussein was deposed, we did not find the stockpiles of WMDs that all the world’s major intelligence services, the Clinton and Bush administrations and most members of Congress thought that he had. It was less an intelligence failure than a failure of imagination. Before the war, no one conceived what seems to have been the case: that Hussein had destroyed his WMD stocks but wanted to hide this from his enemy Iran. The U.S. team charged with searching for WMDs concluded that Hussein had the intention and the means to return to WMD production had he not been brought down. (With Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, it is a good bet that he would have.)
This is complete, utter nonsense; a serious newspaper would be ashamed to print it.
Long before the war, the government had intelligence from the most famous defector from Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel. The government publicly claimed that what Kamel told them confirmed their threats about Iraq’s WMDs.
In fact, what Kamel actually told IAEA inspectors in 1995 was that the weapons stockpiles had been destroyed. This was reported right before the invasion by Newsweek magazine.
So it is 100 percent false to talk about “a failure of imagination.”
It is also false to talk about how “all the world’s major intelligence services” were in agreement on Iraq intelligence. Some remained quite skeptical about the analysis being promoted by the Bush administration. As a matter of fact, the Washington Post (3/18/03) printed an article to the effect right before the before the war started:
As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week, it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved–by the United Nations, European governments and even U.S. intelligence reports.
So the Post is publishing something that flies in the face of what its own reporters documented at the time.
What about the idea that Iraq was hiding its absence of WMDs from Iran? If they were, they weren’t do a very good job of it. Before the war, Saddam Hussein went on CBS with Dan Rather (60 Minutes II, 2/26/03) and stated quite clearly that he had no such weapons: “I think America and the world also knows that Iraq no longer has the weapons,” he told Rather. You can watch the video here.
To top it all the off, the parenthetical at the end–which stands as a final justification for the war–is completely unsupported; there is no evidence to suggest that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Does the Post factcheck op-eds? By the looks of it, they do not. But something tells me that if you submitted a column that made completely factual observations about Iraq–saying, for example, that there was clear evidence before the war that Iraq had destroyed its WMDs, and that Iraq had done its best to make clear that it didn’t possess any–you would have little chance of getting it published. And if, by some miracle, it did make through the early editing process, someone would demand that you substantiate these accurate claims.
No such burden would appear to have been placed on Stephen Hadley, who was part of the team that told the lies that took the country into war. Thanks to the Washington Post, he is still doing so.
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Sins of Omission
By Jason Hirthler | NYTimes eXaminer | March 21, 2013
The New York Times coverage of Hugo Chavez’ death was a bunker buster of misinformation.
The socialist left was plunged into a state of crisis last week when its leading advocate was felled by cancer. The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dealt a potentially crippling blow to the Bolivarian revolution’s hold on the Venezuelan nation. With their leader gone, Chavistas are scrambling to align their ranks behind Nicolas Maduro, an unimposing background figure in the Chavez narrative. And despite the stunning successes of the Chavez government—from a vertiginous drop in poverty to an equally dramatic rise in literacy, the establishment of a legislative apparatus designed to benefit the nation’s majority, and the nationalization of Venezuelan oil—the opposition is poised to renew its attack on the socialist experiment of the last decade and a half. Furious over repeated humiliations at the ballot box, the Venezuelan right, led by Henrique Capriles, is anxious to steer the country back to failed prescriptions of neoliberal economics, hoping to seize on an unexpected election to reclaim the presidency.
Naturally, few if any of the Bolivarian triumphs were mentioned in The New York Times ungenerous lead on the demise of the Venezuelan leader. Already, our leading propaganda daily has begun its historical revision of Chavez’ legacy. Its prejudiced coverage of the El Commandante’s death was remarkable only it what it elided from view—namely any of the progressive transformations the Bolivarian socialist engendered. Regarding the state of the nation, only a few conditions were noted. While vague mention was made that Chavez had “empowered and energized” millions of poor people, the print edition headline said Venezuela was a nation in “deep turmoil.” The digital edition brusquely mentioned, “high inflation and soaring crime,” as well as, “soaring prices and escalating shortages of basic goods.” While there is some truth to these claims—particularly in relation to crime—none of Chavez’ achievements were noted, an astonishing array of programmatic successes that have dwarfed the failures of his tenure.
But before adding anything else, let’s briefly look at the indictments delivered by the Times:
- After devaluing its currency in 2010, pundits predicted massive inflation. Instead, inflation declined for two years, while economic growth topped four percent both years. This is ignored. Nor does the article note Venezuela’s spiraling rate of inflation before Chavez took office—or that he has actually significantly reduced it. While prices rise with inflation, the government offers subsidized goods through weekly Mercal and also regularly adjusts minimum wage to match or exceed inflation, which increases consumer purchasing power, which itself has increased 18 percent in Chavez’ first decade in office.
- In stark contrast to improving economic numbers, Venezuela’s murder rate increased threefold during Chavez’ three terms in office, now third highest in the Americas, calling into question the effectiveness of police training. A new training program was launched in 2009, but has yet to produce results. The Bolivarian National Police, also launched in 2009, has lowered rates where it is active, but chronic problems continue to plague the country, particularly Caracas, including police corruption, biased judiciaries, the likelihood of not being prosecuted, the presence of millions of weapons, and the fact that Venezuela is a main thoroughfare for illegal drugs on their way to the United States.
- Food shortages are also present, another surprising condition in a country of declining poverty. Western critics naturally point to price controls as the cause, providing a typically ideological explanation for a problem that appears to have a more nuanced answer. Food consumption in Venezuela has exploded since Chavez took office in 1999. The population consumed 26 million tons of food in 2012, double the 13 million tons they consumed in 1999. The government suggests the shortages are a consequence of rapidly increasing consumption. Food production is up 71 percent since Chavez took office, but consumption is up 94 percent.
Claims without Context
A day later, the Times decided that its stinting initial coverage was too generous: it had merely listed the flaws in Venezuelan society. What it had failed to do was pepper the pot with a heavy dose of falsification. It then released a factless catalogue of misinformation that, when it wasn’t quoting louche academics, was irrigating the column with toxic dogma. It began, in its home page tout, with a headline about “Debating Chavez’s Legacy,” by author William Neuman. The sub-line anxiously opened the festivities with an elephantine distortion: “Venezuela had one of the lowest rates of economic growth in the region during the 14 years that Hugo Chavez was president.”
Well, after that opener, why bother writing a column? The case has already been made. Best to have the tout lead to a broken link, or redirect to Thomas Friedman hyperventilating about the glories of globalization on display in Indonesian sweatshops. But no, the Times were out for blood. This was no ordinary socialist. Chavez deserved a double-barreled dose of disinformation.
Regarding its initial claim that Venezuela had one of the “lowest rates of economic growth in the region during the 14 years that Hugo Chavez was president.” This statistic is taken from the World Bank. It is true. What it fails to mention is the nosedive the Venezuelan economy fell into when U.S.-backed, right-wing elites overthrew the democratically-elected Chavez in 2002. The economy fell at nine percent into 2003. Then there were devastating oil production shutdowns engineered by the same cadre of oppositionists when Chavez moved to nationalize the oil industry.
Despite this and other opposition attempts to sabotage the economy through food hoarding, price speculation, and other noble measures, the Times neither bothers to contextualize their claim nor balance it against the significant achievements of the Bolivarian government. If elements of socialism actually work, don’t the Times readers deserve to know about them? Evidently not, according to the editors, who see it as their duty to shelter their gullible readership from the facts. But consider these facts about Venezuela’s socialist experiment:
- Per capita GDP in Venezuela is up 50 percent since the coup.
- The Venezuelan economy was among the fastest growing Latin nations in 2012.
- Its economy has grown steadily for nine consecutive quarters.
- Inflation has been cut nearly in half since Chavez took office, when it was spiraling out of control thanks to the ever-efficient neoliberal private sector leadership.
A Legacy Belittled
The article then claims that Chavez’ massively attended funeral was “a tribute to the drawing power of the charismatic leftist leader, although perhaps not to the lasting influence of his socialist-inspired policies.” This line nicely inverts the obvious truth—the masses turned out precisely because of Chavez’ socialist-inspired policies. The policies the paper had given an unfair drubbing in the opening tout have driven consistent growth in society’s most impoverished sectors. Poverty has been reduced by 70 percent since Chavez won the presidency. Nutritional measures among the poor are up across the board, while strengthened pension programs, freely available healthcare, and an inflation-linked minimum wage are helping produce a viable workforce with growing purchasing power—a prerequisite of demand and economic expansion.
The paper then says Chavez’ revolution “remains more limited than he would have liked,” a spurious attempt to cast the Bolivarian revolution as a failure, when in fact, against most significant social and economic metrics, the socialist experiment exceeded itself. To reinforce this portrait of another foreclosed attempt to establish a socialist state, the Times trots out Alejandro Toledo, a former president of Peru. Toledo replaced the Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori, and was so unpopular—even though he succeeded one of the continent’s most vile authoritarians—that his approval rating dropped to six percent in 2004, when street rioting briefly paused to permit the survey. Here is Toledo:
“The important thing is that Mexico has not followed his example, Chile has not followed his example, Peru has not followed his example, Colombia has not followed his example, Brazil has not followed his example. I’m talking about big countries with large, sustained economic growth.”
Toledo, like the paper, obviates Chavez’ stunning impact on continental politics, an influence that has encouraged similar leftist triumphs in Ecuador, Argentina, Paraguay, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and others. Chavez convinced many of his regional colleagues of the dangers of forging discrete trade agreements with the United States—with NAFTA as the ne plus ultra in the category—and then promoted regional agreements among his Latin counterparts. Chavez worked to expand Mercosur into a continental trade platform, not simply that of South America’s southern cone. Then he established such inter-continental co-operatives as Telesur, PetroCaribe, and Petrosur, as well as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).
Sidelining Socialism
With little left to criticize, and plenty of column width to fill, the author resorts to repetition and veiled attacks on socialism. The claim about Venezuela’s low rates of growth is repeated. Then the social flaws from the previous day’s coverage are hurried back into commission: high inflation, shortages of basic goods. High crime, bitter political divisions.
Then, in a turn both sour and childish, the Times concedes that “poverty went down significantly,” but quickly adds that, “other countries…made progress in reducing poverty while following paths very different from that of Mr. Chavez.”
A Brazilian academic then claims that governments in countries like Brazil have “a more balanced position” and that unnamed left-leaning governments are looking to its model and not Venezuela’s for guidance.
No evidence is offered for this claim. Nor does the Carioca academic mention what precisely is “balanced” about a Brazilian society in which the household income of the top one percent is equal to that of the bottom 50 percent of society.
After a short series of additional points—including the passing notation that masses of citizens marched for hours alongside Chavez’ casket—much is made of Chavez’ use of oil resources to build relations with other South American governments. The unstated claim: that Chavez bought his friends. An “energy fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes rather peevishly that “Venezuela’s influence in Latin America was built on the back of oil exports,” as if it is somehow bad form to play one’s cards in international affairs. And as if the United States hadn’t been bribing its way across the Middle East for the last decade.
Disarming Protest
There you have it: the disingenuous reality of The New York Times, a paper that disguises its bias behind a thin veneer of cool detachment and a studied use of non-inflammatory language, much like the paper’s bedmate in neoliberal apologetics, The Economist. The lengths to which the paper will go to discredit the creditable would be laughable if the paper weren’t so popular among self-proclaimed progressives. It is a powerful tool by which corporate power softens the blunt edges of austerity and disarms mainstream liberals with soothing messaging about good intentions and “balanced” approaches to economic development.
By rehearsing the standard refrains of American exceptionalism—a love of democracy, an abiding concern for the voiceless inhabitants of the developing world and the scourge of tyrants that seem forever to afflict them, and a noble need to extend our love of freedom to points south as well as the backward caliphates of the East—the Times tranquilizes would-be progressive protestors with the gentle rationalizations of corporate life—the ultimate virtue of which is the appearance of even-handedness. The kind of professorial restraint best represented by Obama, a façade the opposite of which—the dangerous passions of the oppressed—is frowned upon as “counterproductive” and known to be the bane of respectable men. And by respectable one may read fatally compromised.
Jason Hirthler is a writer, strategist, and 18-year veteran of the communications industry. He lives and works in New York City. He can be reached at jasonhirthler@gmail.com.
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- “Humanity Has Lost a Titan”: Interview with William I. Robinson on the Legacy of Hugo Chavez (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Venezuelan Post-Chavez Roadmap to the Middle East (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- In the End, Awful Journalism (alethonews.wordpress.com)
The Ugly Truth Behind Obama’s Cyber-War
By ALFREDO LOPEZ | CounterPunch | March 22, 2013
Last week, a top U.S. government intelligence official named James Clapper warned Congress that the threat of somebody using the Internet to attack the United States is “even more pressing than an attack by global terrorist networks”. At about the same time, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, announced that the government is forming 13 teams to conduct an international “cyber offensive” to pre-empt or answer “Internet attacks” on this country.
This, as they say, means war.
Clapper issued his melodramatic assessment during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Director of National Intelligence, he testified jointly with the heads of the CIA and FBI as part of their annual “Threat To the Nation” assessment report.
While undoubtedly important, these “threat assessment” appearances are usually a substitute for sleeping pills. The panel of Intelligence honchos parades out a list of “threats” ranked by a combination of potential harm and probability of attack. Since they began giving this report (shortly after 9/11), “Islamic fundamentalist terrorist networks” have consistently ranked number one. Hence the sleep-provoking predictability of it all.
But Clapper’s ranking of “cyber terrorism” as the number one threat would wake up Rip Van Winkle.
“Attacks, which might involve cyber and financial weapons, can be deniable and unattributable,” he intoned. “Destruction can be invisible, latent and progressive.” After probably provoking a skipped heartbeat in a Senator or two, he added that he didn’t think any major attack of this type was imminent or even feasible at this point.
So why use such “end of the world” rhetoric to make an unfeasible threat number one?
The answer perhaps was to be found in the House of Representatives where, on that same day, Gen. Alexander was testifying before the Armed Services Committee about, you got it, “cyber-war”.
Besides being head of the NSA, Alexander directs the United States Cyber Command. I’m not joking. Since 2010, the United States military has had a “Cyber Command”, comprised of a large network of “teams” some of whose purpose is to plan and implement what he called “an offensive strategy”.
Up to now, the Obama Administration’s stated policy has been to prioritize protection and defense of its own Internet and data systems and, unsurprisingly, those of U.S. corporations. Now we realize that the President has been cooking another dish on the back burner. When these military leaders talk about “offensive strategy”, they mean war and in warfare, the rules change and warriors see democracy as a stumbling block at least and a potential threat at worst.
Is there a “cyber threat”? Sure, just like there’s a “personal security threat” at your front door. You live among other humans and a few of them sometimes rob people. The Internet is a neighborhood of two billion people in constant communication. To do what it was developed to do, it has to be an open, world-wide communications system and people can exploit that by harming your website or stealing your data if you don’t protect these things adequately. Developing protections is part of what technologists in every setting, including government services, do every day and they do it well, minimizing the incidence of an on-line hack.
That’s contemporary society. You lock the door to your house, turn on your car alarm on and protect your computer’s data. Most of the time it’s unnecessary but you do it for those rare occasions that it might be called for.
You do not, however, break into a thief’s home, kill him or her and wipe out everyone in the house. That’s what President Obama is proposing. No longer is this Administration interested in just “protection of data”; it now plans to pre-emptively attack data operations and Internet systems in other countries. The non-euphemistic term for this kind of “offensive strategy” is hacking and hacking takes two forms: data theft and disruption of service. In other words, the government plans to do what it throws people in jail for doing.
Clearly, this isn’t only about data theft or service disruption. It’s entwined with the political conflicts Washington has with other countries like China and Iran. The Internet is now another battlefield and this offensive strategy gives our government another weapon in its ceaseless war on the world.
While this weapon might sound benign, almost game-like, compared to other military adventures, it is actually a vicious and punishing strategy promising a festival of unavoidable collateral damage.
A “cyber offensive” can target just about anything in a country (like the computers running an Iranian power plant) and, depending on how the Internet systems are inter-connected, almost automatically cut service to people, schools, hospitals, security services and governments themselves. This is the digital version of nuclear warfare, horrific for its impact and its fundamental immorality.
When the announcements were made, the mainstream media flew into a frenzy of evaluation and analysis. Is this cyber threat real, commentators asked? Most of them found that, at this point, it isn’t. But that’s not the point and it isn’t the real threat.
The carefully planned and coordinated Clapper/Alexander testimony provides a pretext for the array of repressive Internet-governing laws, strategies and programs the Administration already has in place. Their purpose is a ratcheting control of the Internet by the government, a redefinition of our constitutional rights and the eviscerating of our, and the world’s, freedoms. Now, with this “cyber war” scenario, these measures can be more easily defended and made permanent.
We can group those laws and programs into three categories.
”Extreme Data Collection”
The Obama Administration is building a huge data center in Bluffdale, Utah whose role is to capture and store all data everyone in this country (and most of the world) transmits. You read that right.
“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication,” wrote James Bamford in Wired Magazine, “including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”
While having your entire on-line life tracked and stored in Utah is pretty creepy, the more pressing issue is how government officials plan to use this data and how they are collecting it. To mine its value, they need to order it to make searches, filtering and lists possible. You need a strategy and while Obama officials have been pretty open about what they’re building, they are closed-mouth about what they intend to do with it.
We know they are working hard on developing code-breaking technology which would allow them to read data which is super-encrypted, the last wall of privacy and protection we have. We also know that, to get this data, they have a remarkable system of surveillance that includes direct capture (capturing data from your on-line sessions), satellite surveillance and the tapping (through easily available data captures) of major information gatherers like Google and Yahoo. The fact that they plan to open this center in September, 2013 means that the intense surveillance and data gathering is in place. You are now never alone.
This is the kind of information on “the enemy” they need in a cyber-war but this information is about us and so the question pertains: who is the enemy here?
“Internet Usage Restriction”
If you’re conducting a war, you can’t have people running around the battlefield trading information and distributing it because, after all, you need secrecy. But collecting and distributing information is entirely what the Internet is about.
No reasonable person expects the entire shut-down of the Internet but the curtailment of on-line expression is now happening and getting worse, re-defining the meaning of free speech and making it an embattled concept.
Under the law, for instance, any corporation or individual can claim you are violating their copyright and demand you remove offending material from a website. You can challenge and litigate that but it doesn’t really matter because, under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act your web hosting service faces huge penalties if they keep the site on-line and the copyright violation is proven. So, to avoid the legal fees and the risk, they’ll just wipe your website. This happens all the time.
If the hosting service stands strong — as some progressive providers do — the people claiming the violation will just go “upstream” to the company that provides your web hosting service’s connection to the Internet and, to avoid legal problems, that “upstream provider” will just unplug the server. Servers host many websites, sometimes in the hundreds, and other services and so not only do you lose your site but everyone else on the server has theirs taken off-line. And this happens without even going in front of a judge.
Sure, there is still robustly exercised “freedom of speech” on the Internet. But the laws are in place to curtail it and, if the government wants, it can (and will) curtail. It’s a modern-day version of benevolent dictatorship which can, as history demonstrates, become pretty darn malevolent pretty fast.
“Selective Repression”
There are hundreds of criminal cases against Internet activists world-wide right now and scores in the United States. The ones most of us are most familiar with, those involving Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning, are only the tip of the frightening iceberg.
A day after the testimony before Congress, for example, federal authorities announced the case of a techie named Matthew Keys . Keys, who worked for a TV station in Los Angeles owned by the Tribune Company, is accused of leaking a username and password to an activist from the well-known hacker organization Anonymous. Authorities say the Anonymous activist used that user/password combo to satirically alter a headline on the website of the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times.
Keys is now charged with conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer; transmitting information to damage a protected computer and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer. Each count carries a 10 year jail sentence, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000. For giving someone who changed a headline a username and password!
Last year, we at May First/People Link were raided by the FBI which literally stole a server from one of our server installations in New York City. They were investigating terroristic emails from some lunatic to people at the University of Pittsburgh and the dozens of servers this bozo used included one of ours. We have some anonymous servers which means there are no records of who used them, no traces… no information about the person sending the email; it’s to protect whistle-blowers and others needing total anonymity.
The FBI knew this but they stole the server anyway and then, about a week later, put it back. They never informed us of any of this. We found out because one of our techies went into the server installation and found one of the servers gone and installed a hidden camera which caught the agents when they returned the machine.
If all these developments seem disturbing to you, that’s justified. These repressive and intrusive measures target the very essence and purpose of the Internet. Created as a way for people to communicate with each other world-wide, this marvel of human interaction is now being turned into a field across which countries shoot programming bombs at each other while repressing and even punishing ordinary people’s communication: dividing us, perpetuating the feeling of loneliness that’s a constant in today’s societies and crippling the struggles for change that combat the division and loneliness and depend on the Internet to do it.
The Internet’s true purpose is to bring the world’s people closer to each other. The Obama Administration is doing just the opposite. It would advisable for those of us who have consistently opposed and fought against wars of all kinds to view this “cyber war” as an equally dangerous and destructive threat.
ALFREDO LOPEZ is the newest member of the TCBH! collective. A long-time political activist and radical journalist, and founding member of the progressive web-hosting media service MayFirst/PeopleLink, he lives in Brooklyn, NY
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How to Read Stories About Israel in the NY Times (Hint: Very Carefully)
By Peter Hart | FAIR | March 21, 2013
Some days the Newspaper of Record says a lot–not always in ways you might expect.
Today (3/21/13) a story by Mark Landler and Rick Gladstone about allegations of chemical weapons in Syria includes something you see often–anonymous government sources. That can often be a bad thing; but today it’s pretty useful:
Two senior Israeli officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak, said that Israel was sure that chemicals were used, but did not have details about what type of weapons were used, where they came from, when they were deployed, or by whom.
A third senior official, also refusing to be identified, said, “It is possible that chemical weapons were used, or some concoction of chemical substances,” but he said he had not “seen clear confirmation.”
Why is this helpful? Because other Israeli officials, speaking publicly and for attribution, pretended to be more certain. From the very same Times piece:
Two senior ministers in Israel’s new cabinet said publicly on Wednesday that chemical weapons had been used, and several government officials said in interviews that Israel had credible evidence of an attack. The ministers, Tzipi Livni and Yuval Steinetz, were among those who met with Mr. Obama here on the first day of his trip.
and:
Israeli officials provided no proof of their assertions but appeared more confident that chemical weapons had been used.
Ms. Livni, the new Israeli justice minister, said in an interview with CNN, “It’s clear for us here in Israel that it’s being used,” adding, “This, I believe, should be on the table in the discussions.”
Mr. Steinetz, the minister for strategic affairs, said on Israel’s Army Radio, “It’s apparently clear that chemical weapons have been used against civilians by the rebels or the government.”
So is the Times, in its own way, telling us not to trust the officials speaking on the record? That’s certainly one way to read the piece.
Elsewhere in the paper we learn that part of Barack Obama’s visit to Israel includes a look at the country’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system, which is funded by the U.S. government. In one story, by Mark Landler and Jodi Rudoren, we read this:
Mr. Obama was driven across the tarmac to inspect a battery of the Iron Dome air-defense system. The system, built by Israeli companies but financed by the United States, is credited with intercepting more than 400 rockets fired from Gaza at Israeli towns….
Israeli officials say that Iron Dome has been a huge success, intercepting 86 percent of the 521 incoming rockets it engaged in the Gaza conflict. Some American missile-defense experts have questioned that figure, putting the hit rate at closer to 10 percent.
So they either knock down almost every rocket, or almost none. That’s pretty unhelpful; but the Times has another piece that actually digs into the evidence (“Weapons Experts Raise Doubts About Israel’s Antimissile System”). According to this account, “a growing chorus of weapons experts in the United States and in Israel…suggest that Iron Dome destroyed no more than 40 percent of incoming warheads and perhaps far fewer.”
One former Pentagon official says there’s no system that is 90 percent effective. And the article, by William Broad, includes this:
Theodore A. Postol, a physicist at M.I.T. who helped reveal the Patriot antimissile failures of 1991, analyzed the new videos and found that Iron Dome repeatedly failed to hit its targets head-on. He concluded that the many dives, loops and curls of the interceptors resulted in diverse angles of attack that made it nearly impossible to destroy enemy warheads.
“It’s very hard to see how it could be more than 5 or 10 percent,” Dr. Postol said.
Mordechai Shefer, an Israeli rocket scientist formerly with Rafael, Iron Dome’s maker, studied nearly two dozen videos and, in a paper last month, concluded that the kill rate was zero.
Reading all of that, it’s hard to imagine anyone could really believe the Israeli claims about Iron Dome’s success rate.
So if you want to get a handle on Iron Dome, ignore the story on page 10 and pay attention to the story on page 11. And if you’re trying to figure out which Israeli officials to trust on the Syria chemical weapons story, the unnamed sources seem to be the ones who are more forthright about what they know.
That’s a lot to ask of readers, isn’t it?
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Looking Back at Iraq With… Michael Gordon?
By Peter Hart | FAIR | March 20, 2013
The performance of the corporate media is one of the principal failures of the Iraq War. There are almost too many examples to name; but most critics agree that one of the most instrumental single pieces that made the false case for war was the front-page New York Times story (9/8/02) hyping the idea that Iraq was trying to procure special aluminum tubes for its nuclear weapons program.
Last night in its 10-years-later segment, the PBS NewsHour (3/19/13) made a rather stunning judgment: One of the two expert journalists was the guy who co-authored that piece.
New York Times reporter Michael Gordon was the lead author on that infamous tubes article, but his record goes deeper than that. A few days into the U.S. bombing (3/25/13), Gordon appeared on CNN to endorse the bombing of Iraqi TV’s offices, calling it “an appropriate target,” since “we’re trying to send the exact opposite message.”
When U.S. politicians began to seriously consider a withdrawal of U.S. troops, Gordon criticized that policy, especially in one article (11/15/06) headlined, “Get Out of Iraq Now? Not So Fast, Experts Say” (FAIR Media Advisory, 12/4/06). He went on the Charlie Rose show (1/18/07) to endorse a troop surge. (Even the Washington Post admits that the idea that the surge succeeded is a “myth”–3/15/13.) And in early 2007, Gordon wrote articles, relying heavily on anonymous U.S. sources, alleging that the Iranian government was sending weapons into Iraq (Action Alert, 2/16/07).
So why would Gordon be someone you’d want to listen to about the Iraq War? That’s hard to say, really. But Gordon had plenty to tell PBS viewers. He complained that the Obama White House wasn’t interested enough in Iraq–leading to “the decline of American influence.” As he put it:
I think they view Iraq as just another country. They don’t have the same emotional or psychological or even foreign policy stake in it that the previous administration had.
Gordon added that the U.S. military “see a lot of early mistakes in the first years” of the war, but that “I do think the surge, as a military operation and military strategy, was effective and was essential.”
When one of the hosts, Judy Woodruff, asked about the war’s legacy, he replied: “Well, I think the military learned how to do counterinsurgency. The public opinion may no longer support that, but forever is a long time. And I think you can’t say we won’t have to do that again at some point in the future.”
And if there is ever another moment that requires reporters to faithfully record the views of anonymous U.S. officials as they make their case for war, it’s a safe bet that Michael Gordon will be there to do that job.
Related video
31% of Americans Have Abandoned News Outlets Due to Perceived Decline in Quality
By Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman | AllGov | March 20, 2013
News organizations have lost a significant share of their audience due to budget cuts that have impacted the quality and quantity of reporting.
A new poll from the Pew Research Center found that 31% of respondents said they had stopped using a particular news outlet because it was no longer providing the same kind of news and information as in the past.
Pew researchers said that those most likely to stop using news sources were better educated, wealthier and older than those who still used them—“in other words, they are people who tend to be most prone to consume and pay for news,” Pew’s The State of the News Media 2013 read.
Losses of subscribers and ad revenues have negatively impacted many news organizations in recent years, forcing layoffs and reduced coverage. Most of the people to whom Pew researchers talked were either largely or entirely unaware of this situation, the survey revealed.
There is, however, a glimmer of hope for the embattled newspaper industry, which has been under financial duress since the onset of the recession in 2007 and growing competition from online news services. The Pew study reports that a trend of stabilizing revenue is evidenced by news organizations’ use of social media to support advertisers, digital pay plans, increased investor interest, and across-the-board advertising growth attributed to a modestly improving economy.
The Pew authors concede, however, that these positive signs “are, for the time being, mostly promise rather than performance,” and that the overall prognosis still appears grim.
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Venezuelan Electoral Authority Rejects U.S. Government Statements
Telesur – March 19, 2013
Tibisay Lucena, the president of Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) rejected statements on Sunday by U.S. State Department Assistant Secretary for Latin America Roberta Jacobson, who said it would be “a little difficult” for Venezuela to have “clean and transparent elections,” next month on April 14.
“We roundly reject the naïve statements of Ms. Roberta Jacobson, for their meddling and disrespectful content,” Lucena said during a speech at the CNE headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela. “Jacobson said that the elections in Venezuela should be free and fair, causing some to believe that Venezuelan elections do not comply with the basic conditions, when our electoral system has been recognized nationally and internationally, both by voters at home and abroad by experts like former President Jimmy Carter, who said that ‘Venezuela has the best electoral system in the world,’” she said.
Lucena called the statements imprudent, “especially when they come from the United States, a country with a fragile and unsafe electoral system that increasingly excludes minorities and low-income sectors.”
She said that Venezuela has an electoral system that guarantees the sovereign decision of voters “and while we audit 54% of the electoral booths at the end of the day, in the United States the results aren’t audited. For a long time, citizens’ groups have been fighting to be allowed to audit three to five percent of the booths after voting.”
She said that Venezuela’s fully automated electoral system, “more than just a technological platform, is the instrument of the expression of all our people.”
Lucena also announced Sunday that tests have already been carried out on the electoral platform ahead of the April 14 presidential vote “and we can guarantee that the machinery is working properly.”
“We guarantee trustworthy, transparent results and the integrity of the Venezuelan electoral system,” she said.
During the testing of the voting equipment, Lucena added, electoral accompaniers were present from the Inter-American Union of Electoral Bodies (UNIORE) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).
The CNE announced the date of the upcoming elections on March 9, and began accepting candidacies the next day. Campaigning will occur from April 2 to 11 at midnight.
Related article
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From the Archives
A decade of lies: The US-funded biolab denial saga
RT | May 15, 2026
Russia’s allegations that the US funded clandestine biological laboratories near its borders – claims denied until recently by Washington – have remained a persistent flashpoint in the steadily deteriorating relationship between Russia and the West for nearly a decade.
The biolabs affair was revealed in a 2017 exposé by RT that questioned a shady US military tender seeking the genetic material of living Russians. Over the years, Moscow has raised allegations against Washington of conducting clandestine bio-research, including potential WMD development and illicit human testing, in a network of labs located across multiple nations, the bulk of which operated in Ukraine. The claims were met with a blanket denial in the West, which repeatedly dismissed them as “Russian propaganda.”
This abruptly changed the past week when US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that her department had identified more than 120 US-funded biological laboratories in 30 countries, with over a third of them located in Ukraine. The agency is now working to “identify where these labs are, what pathogens they contain, and what ‘research’ is being conducted to end dangerous gain-of-function research that threatens the health and wellbeing of the American people and the world,” according to Gabbard.
RT looks back at the timeline of the biolabs saga and the US denial of its existence until now. … continue
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