THE GREAT ESCAPE

FIGHTING RACISM

WORLD PRESS FREEDOM

It is May 4th. Before we delve into the latest military scandal involving poorly trained reservists and National Guard members, let us take a walk down memory lane and remember Kent State. If you don’t know the reference, find out. I remember Allison Krause.

When American hostage Tom Hamill walked away from his captivity in Iraq, it was big news all day (as it is again this morning as he “decompresses” at a US military base in Germany). Alas, the US government won’t be able to walk away as easily from Iraq what with scandal, resistance, and criticism growing from within and without.

ONLY RACISTS OPPOSE THE BUSHISTS

Before any more bad news, here’s the good news. We now have a new rationale for the US invasion of Iraq. Forget finding WMD’s or fighting terrorists. Let us now all sing We Shall Overcome because this is now a war against racism. You heard it here second. President Bush is now such an anti-racist that he feels entitled to race bait all critics of his policy. Now hear this:

The Center for Social Progress reports him saying Friday:

“‘There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern…I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.’ Neither President Bush nor Press Secretary Scott McClellan commented on exactly who the people are who supposedly think that. The phrase ‘ours’ to mean ‘white’ is also offensive, given that the Census reports a quarter of people in the United States are other than white.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57791-2004Apr30.html

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS OUTRAGE?

Ok, fellow Klan members, here’s some news I missed. It seems that the Pentagon knew all about the abuses at that prison in Iraq MONTHS ago and did didley squat about them

The NY Times reports today: “Army Punishes 7 With Reprimands for Prison Abuse: The officers received penalties that most likely will end their military careers, although they were not demoted or discharged.”

Last night, ABC’s Nightline featured interviews with Iraqis who had been in those photos. “The US may not be able to recover from this scandal,” reported John Donvan. The photographs and victims of abuse are all over the Muslim world. ABC’s military consultant Anthony Cordesman predicted that more Americans will die in response to this, as rage and retaliation is inspired by the stories and the images especially because of indications that women were raped and brutalized. It was reported that two of the soldiers being tried were correctional officers in American prisons. One was reminded of the case of the Haitian American Abner Louima who was assaulted anally in a Brooklyn police precinct. This same practice is alleged to have occurred in Iraq. The chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcolm X once said in another context. Last night The Muslim Leader Louis Farrakhan was on C-SPAN and cited Malcolm as he connected the many dots between abuse in Iraq and abuse here at home. It was hard to disagree with him this time.

Nightline also featured an interview with the US Army Reserve General Janis Karpinski who was in charge of the prison. She brought her lawyer along and put up a brave front. She admitted responsibility, denied culpability and then shifted the blame to military intelligence officials. Defense lawyers were also heard from. How high up the military chain of command will this rebound? “It is a larger question” said one of the lawyers interviewed by Nightline. Yes it is. “There are ‘multiple collateral issues of political significance’” said the defense lawyer Translation: HEADS WILL ROLL. Forget now about winning hearts and minds. Rumsfeld and company have done it now, done what has never been done before unified the entire Muslim world. Against the United States!

As Rod Stewart sings: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/iraqis_tortured/

On reactions in Iraq:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1208408,00.html

THE REAL RACISM

A fellow blogger, xymphora explores the meaning of all this more deeply, writing yesterday:

“That picture, that iconic picture of the torture victim standing on the box, Christ-like, with a hood from a Spanish Easter procession or the KKK, with the backlighting and the wires hanging down like in an old science fiction movie, that picture is the representation of the new American Empire, the symbol that the whole world now identifies with the Evil of the United States of America. They should send the Statue of Liberty back to France — the values she represented are no longer American values — and replace it with a model of this Iraqi prisoner. I wonder if he is still alive, and what state he is in. Do you think they might find it in their stony hearts to let him out of prison?”

“As Robert Fisk quite properly points out, this mistreatment is a product of years of systematic anti-Arab racism (of course, the whole attack on Iraq, the idea that it was morally acceptable to apply ’shock and awe’ to innocent civilians, is a product of the same racism). The knuckle-dragging hillbillies who so enthusiastically participated in the torture aren’t very far removed from their lynch mob ancestors who so easily did the same thing to American blacks. They pathetically claim they can’t be held accountable because they didn’t have sufficient training in the niceties of the Geneva Convention. Do they mean to argue that they actually thought it was acceptable to humiliate, torture, rape and murder prisoners of war?”

“The United States is in full damage-control mode, with everyone saying they are suitably appalled. Of course, they have known about this for months, and have done absolutely nothing about it, so their claims of being disgusted ring rather hollow now. Various human rights groups have been complaining since last summer about the deplorable treatment afforded to prisoners picked up by the United States, and nothing has been done about it. Prisoners are often arrested for purely arbitrary reasons, jailed indefinitely with no access to legal counsel, and their relatives aren’t even informed of where they are being held. If American officials were really concerned, they would start by emptying those prisons.”

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

The Christian Science Monitor is now quoting Mediachannel in reporting that “CBS broke the story last Wednesday when it aired the photos. But it turns out that CBS had access to the pictures two week before it aired them, but had been asked not by Ge. Myers not to broadcast the story because of ‘tension on the ground’ in Iraq. MediaChannel.org reports that it was only when CBS was concerned that someone else was about the break the story that it did its 60 Minutes II report.”

http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=D4EFEDA0D2E5E7E1EEA0ADA0E2F9ECE9EEE5

FREEDOM THE PRESS.1

The Daily Mirror in London is defending the photos it has published of outrages by British forces against Iraqis after some in the military called them a hoax. Says the paper editorially: “The Mirror has no doubt that the photographs are genuine and the story they tell is as real as it is horrifying. Others, with their own vested interests are determined they are cruel fakes.” Insists the Mirror: “the incident did happen”.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/tm_objectid%3D14199634%26method%3Dfull%26siteid%3D50143%26headline%3Dshame-of-abuse-by-brit-troops-name_page.html

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.2

The media system that the US put in place inside Iraq seems to be cracking apart along with its credibility, as AP reports:

“BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) The head of a U.S.-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and said Monday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication.”

On a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were “celebrating the end of a nightmare we have suffered from for months…We want independence. They (the Americans) refuse.”

Al-Sabah was set up by U.S. officials with funding from the Pentagon soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein last year. Since its first issue in July, many Iraqis have considered it the mouthpiece of the U.S.-led coalition, along with the U.S.-funded television station Al-Iraqiya.

Zayer said almost the entire staff left the paper along with him and that they were launching a new paper called Al-Sabah Al-Jedid (”The New Morning”), which would begin publishing Tuesday. Zayer had sought to break Al-Sabah away from the Iraqi Media Network, which groups the paper, Al-Iraqiya and a number of radio stations and is run by Harris Inc., a Florida-based communications company that won a $96 million Pentagon contract in January to develop the media…

“We had a project to create a free media in Iraq,” Zayer said of the founding of Al-Sabah. “They are trying to control us. We are being suffocated.”

on Freedom of the Press for World Press Day yesterday, check out this cartoon in Al Jazeera:

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0EE30E43-B137-417C-9FA4-E629E849E7DC.htm

Paul Krugman, as usual, spotlights the US economic politics in Iraq that have generated a good part of the calamity there. His charge: “Making Iraq a showpiece for the administration’s economic doctrines has helped undermine the transition to democracy.”

FREEDOM TO IGNORE THE NEWS

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting surveyed the coverage of the April 25th woman’s march on Washington that drew as many as a million marchers to Washington, one of the largest demonstrations ever. How was it covered?

“A Nexis search of the week surrounding the women’s march found a total of six stories from the broadcast networks (not counting incidental mentions of the march): CBS ran one story the day of the march and two the next morning; NBC ran two stories and ABC only one, all on April 25. CNN, as a 24-hour cable news outlet, gave more extensive coverage to the event, running several reports on Sunday. But even CNN failed to treat the march as the historic occasion that it was, running just a small handful of brief march-related stories on Saturday and Monday.

“Other cable news outlets focused not on the march itself but on abortion opponents, a few hundred of whom held a counter-protest at the march. Of three Fox News stories found on Nexis related to the march, two focused on anti-abortion activists (Special Report with Brit Hume, Hannity & Colmes, 4/22/04). Special Report examined anti-abortion opposition to the National Education Association’s endorsement of the march — a story that MSNBC also covered in that network’s only march report found in the Nexis database.?”

http://www.fair.org/activism/womens-march-networks.html

UNDIPLOMATICThe Mail and Guardian reports: “Fifty-three former United States diplomats on Tuesday accuse the White House of sacrificing America’s credibility in the Arab world — and the safety of its diplomats and soldiers — because of the Bush administration’s support for the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon.”

THE SECRECY STATE

The National Security Archive reports: “The U.S. government classified more than 14 million new national security secrets last year, up from 11 million in the previous year and 8 million the year before, according to the new annual report to President Bush from the oversight office for the national security secrecy system. Dated 31 March 2004 and made publicly available last week, the report provides the Information Security Oversight Office’s best estimate of the rising tide of secrecy, and also warns that “Allowing information that will not cause damage to national security to remain in the classification system, or to enter the system in the first instance, places all classified information at needless increased risk.”

http://www.nsarchive.org

DEMOCRACY ON HOLD IN HONG KONG

Freedom of the media and other freedoms are at risk in Hong Kong according to AFP:

“China’s decision to delay greater democracy in Hong Kong appears to be the result of deep-seated concerns about national stability, security and preserving economic prosperity. Analysts say Beijing is worried full democracy in Hong Kong could threaten everything from China’s economic growth to the success of the 2008 Olympics.”

“Some suggest this is why China highest lawmaking body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, recently ruled that the territory’s residents could not directly elect their next leader in 2007. Furthermore, Hong Kong people will not be allowed to directly elect their entire legislature in 2008.”

YOUR LETTERS:

Note to letter writers — please, fewer diatribes and more media focused analysis.

Neb writes: “Clearly, the ‘war president’, the ‘commander-in-chief’ and his advisors are culpable for what our troops are doing to Iraqis. But it isn’t just our troops? who are torturing these people, we have ‘outsourced’ these illegal activities to Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. I can’t imagine why we didn’t give our good friend Pakistan, some of this business.”

WHERE DOES THE ABUSE COME FROM?

Mary Ann Benavides says “Thanks for all you do!”

“I realized once the news broke of the abuse of Iraqi “suspects” in prison, that for months and months now I have been distressed every time the news presents our GI’s taking prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan. They put bags over their heads and write numbers of the backs of their necks. They refer to the bags as hoods, but who would buy such a ‘hood’ unless the KKK? And who put numbers on prisoners but the Nazis?”

“In my view the humiliation and dehumanization of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (honestly, I have not seen this done by our military or police here at home before the Bush wars) begins a process which then can allow young soldiers to progress to other forms of humiliation and abuse.”

“We do not put hoods on suspects here at home. We don’t ‘book’ people using magic marker on their neck. And we certainly would protest if we were shown photos of such behavior if our own service personnel were taken prisoner.”

“This is another example of reporters simply providing the footage. And I have to include myself in being complicit in this till now as a viewer.”

“My concerns go deeper. As a psychologist I am familiar with two sets of experiments, which if not known by the military, should be known. Stanley Milgram, years ago, did experiments in which students (at Yale?) were asked to shock other students in a ‘learning experiment.’ Even when the subjects (actually confederates) appeared to scream and writhe in pain, very few students refused to follow the orders to give shocks! Zimbardo did experiments where he asked students to play the roles of guards and prisoners. After very little time the guards began to abuse and mistreat the prisoners, who naturally became uncooperative as well.”

“Shouldn’t these experiments tell us how vulnerable young people are? Should they not be a mandatory part of the military training? Should all young people not be trained to resist the impulse to demean, humiliate, or dehumanize a prisoner?”

“This has me deeply disturbed! I have contacted my elected representatives about stopping the use of bags on heads and writing on necks. Stopping abuse is not sufficient. Preserving the humanity and dignity of anyone should be our starting place.”

?we gotta bring about big time restructuring, instead of becoming triumphalist anti-warriors only. Or forget it and, as so many on the ‘left’ did after Viet Nam, flee into some decadent crapfest of self-congratulation and business-as-usual for the poor. Same prob for South Africa, I gather. The Dan Hamburg factor — local former Demo congressman turned green, former poverty bureaucrat, not capable of conflict; he was in South Africa in some ‘helping’ capacity, probably selling out the poor as here — probably. Liberal goose-steppers R Us?”

Wendi writes from Oregon City:

“Missed you. Glad you’re back. I have a southern Africa (Botswana) specific topic to share with you, and almost sent it last week but postponed it for later. Figured you were over-busy. And besides, the planets have run adverse the whole month of April, and continue until this full moon gets out of the way tomorrow, which all flommoxed against good stable reliable communications.”

“You write today ‘the news flows in,’ from which I infer a flood.”

“That’s MY issue. The continuous onslaught of scandal after scandal keeping new crimes crowding out the old could not serve Rove better. Mud can be washed off with new mud, just as well as cleansing water.”

“We?no, THEY — I am tired of being accomplice in American name to this hitlerian cast running this country and all citizens’ names down into infamy; THEY are not WE — ?they are torturing and murdering humans because they lied about what they were doing there; and they are there because they lied about WMD, and they lied about Iraq because they wanted to move on from Afghan, and they were in Afghan because they lied to us about who was there to go get, and they were out to get them because they lied to us who mailed the lethal anthrax letters, and they lied to us about who was involved in nine one one?.” Wendi goes on to ask for a debate about 911. I am reading David Ray Griffin’s provocative “The New Pearl Harbor” and hope to write more about all this soon.

Bev Landeman writes: “dissector, I am a fairly recent subscriber to your notes….would like a bit more information about you and your current world in South Africa. I have a granddaughter married to a young man from Malawi, making us a coffee and cream family tree as they now have twin boys and a beautiful year old girl. I would be interested in more information from you on your observations of South Africa….who can be relied on for relief and also in Iraq.”

“I am old enough to remember exactly where I was standing the day Pearl Harbour was bombed?having been interested in all of the news from an early age, because of my father’s interest. I went back to school at age 50 for Political Science and Art?and my first class of Contemporary Political Ideas was like a whirlwind in time as I looked around at the students and realized most of them had not even been around for the Vietnam War, much less, Korean, and World War 11.”

“Tough to feel like an antique. I have been printing out your news and using the back of the papers to write letters to my friends abroad and my relatives in Europe?in particular, Sweden. I have been there often, and find our current image in the world very discouraging?.”

BLOGS BLOCKED

In the UK, our friend Paul O Hanlon tries to send some of my blogs to members of the British Parliament but finds that they are being blocked. He wrotes from Glasgow:

“The mother of all Parliaments in keeping with its tradition of freedom of speech has blocked your blog that I forwarded to my MP. Not to worry, I have forwarded it successfully to around 100 on my list including about 20 journalists, TV programs, Human Rights organisations like Amnesty International, Stop the War (Britain), New Yorkers say no to War and Peaceful Tomorrows. Keep up your excellent work Meester Schechter and I will distribute it widely.”

Here is what the mother of democracy said:

“INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT”

“Message subject: NEWS DISSECTOR MAY 3: THE GULAG THAT IS IRAQ”

“This is to advise you that your email has been blocked and will be deleted by the Houses of Parliament in due course since we believe it has inappropriate content. The intended recipient has not received the email. In the event that you believe the email has been blocked incorrectly please contact the intended recipient directly to discuss its release.”

OBIT IF YOU MISSED IT

Mary Ellen Churchill sends along from San Francisco: an “actual obituary published in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans on 10/2/2003:”

“Word has been received that Gertrude M. Jones, 81, passed away on August 25, 2003, under the loving care of the nursing aides of Heritage Manor of Mandeville, Louisiana. Her husband Warren K. Jones predeceased her. Two daughters survive her as well as four grandchildren and three great grandchildren. Funeral services were held in Louisville, KY. Memorial gifts may be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George W. Bush from office.”

My former one-time radio colleague on Beantown, WCOZ’s Jim Cameron noted my presence on CBS News on Saturday night. “Good for you showing up on CBS the other night about the Nightline blackout. Who’d have imagined! Your coverage of late in the newsletter has been great.”

Finally, Andrew Stone sends in an interesting piece of online art:

http://www.johnwyles.com/archives/2004/04/25/george_bush_mosaic.php

I rarely have a sense of closure these days as I can barely get through all the items, arguments and information sent my way. Thanks to all who send in news. Help us make this work more visible. Write: dissector@mediachannel.org, And beware the Sasser virus.