08
Aug
Letters, Items and Obits
Chuck O’Brien writes:
“Now we are being asked to believe that the narrowing of the freedom of speech will make us more secure. We are being asked to believe that we can only secure freedom by restricting it.
“Tony Blair wants to make the glorification of violence prosecutable. Certainly he is not intending for his own advocacy of preemptive war to be defined as violence glorification; nor surely, he does not expect the ‘regrettable’ acceptance of the police shooting a fleeing unarmed man five times in the head as being violence glorification. No, that is right thinking violence: it is defined by the government’s perception. Is it becoming illegal to challenge the government’s perception?
“Government actions leading to thousands and thousands of Iraqi ‘collateral damage’ dead are justifiable advocacy. Suicide car bombing is ‘violent extremism’. Suggestions that the “struggle with violent extremism” has two views of legitimacy are now to be considered cause for prosecution or deportation.
“What crazy, distorted view of freedom are Britain and the U.S. now defending — indeed even exporting? Are we now to believe that only half of the truth will still set us free?”
KHALID IS FREE
Dancewater writes:
“I have been off-line a bit, and behind on my reading of your blog.
“First, Khalid Jarrar, an Iraqi blogger who was picked up by the secret police in Iraq, has been released. The full story of his arrest and release is on his blog. (Limited computer access, so I can’t give you the site off hand.) I can’t tell you how relieved I am that Khalid is safe.
“Second, I follow what is going on in Iraq via ‘Today in Iraq’ blog and the Iraq Coalition Casualties website, and a several others like Yahoo News and Getty Images. Over at the Today in Iraq blog, there are several contributors from around the world and this group includes Iraqis and U.S. soldiers. We have come to the conclusion that ‘Jihad Unspun’ is totally unreliable.
“Third, Paul Harrington from California wrote about the innocent man killed in the London subway by the police. He had a couple of facts wrong. The ‘heavy coat’ was actually a jean jacket, and the police that told him to stop were undercover. It is not clear they identified themselves as police officers. They didn’t start chasing after him until after he headed into the subway station, and the victim of this shooting had been a recent victim of an armed robbery. He was also an electrician, and I would bet it was the electrician’s belt that made the police so suspicious.
“Last, I have to say that Jack Shultz from Canada expressed (very well) some ideas I have had on 9/11. I am not keeping up on all the ins and outs of that situation and investigations, but I have always felt that somebody should be fired for not doing their jobs properly… probably several somebodies. There is no doubt in my mind that there were people in the FBI and CIA who failed to do their jobs, who failed to connect the dots (or else they did connect the dots and the authorities failed to act on that information). And somebody should explain how come we have (supposedly) the best Air Force in the world, and they failed to protect us. Why are we spending so much money on them?
“And a big unanswered question in my mind: in the next horrible terrorist attack against the U.S., is the right wingers and so-called ‘Christian’ conservatives blame Clinton again?
“And how come I could figure out (back in 2002) that there wasn’t any nuclear WMDs in Iraq and this congress and Bush administration and corporate media could not? Am I really vastly more intellectually superior to all those people? How come no one got fired for that one?
“And how come no one got fired for the incredible bungling of the ‘post-war’ situation in Iraq?
“Boy, if I was that inept at my job, I for sure would get fired.”
THOUGHTS FOR PROGRESSIVES
Lynne Glasner writes:
“Just read something troublesome — blog readers might think about this: the good news is that Fitzpatrick seems to be actually doing his job; the bad news is 1— his job expires in Oct; and 2— if the impeachment movement grows (think Watergate, summer 73), remember presidential succession — we have to make sure the whole rotten bunch is indicted or we’ll have Cheney, DeLay or Frist as president. That scenario hardly seems worth the effort. If ‘there is to be a shakeup, it’s got to cover them all.’”
TELESUR
Jack Schultz writes anew from Canada, perhaps unaware of the coverage we have given to Telesur:
“There is a big media story that seems to be going unreported. Telesur was launched on July 24th, the 222nd birthday of Simon Bolivar. When I googled ‘commentary on Telesur’ practically nothing came up from the US press, except from Yahoo.com, but yet Connie Mack, Republican rep from Florida, described Telesur as ‘a threat to the United States that would undermine the balance of power in the western hemisphere and spread Chavez’s “anti-American, anti-freedom rhetoric.”‘ Yahoo News went on to say.
“Even before the content of Telesur’s programming has become clear, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment Wednesday authorizing Washington to create a station that would broadcast exclusively to Venezuela to ‘provide a consistently accurate, objective, and comprehensive source of news.’
“Strange to me that I find such few references in the US media when I google Telesur, which is described as a Latin American Al-Jazeera, and before it has even appeared, as an independent and dissident voice, it is seen as a threat to US national security.
“Telesur is a story which should be told, and widely known, and hopefully understood.”
WE MOURN THEIR PASSING
The New York Times reports this morning:
‘Peter Jennings, Urbane News Anchor, Dies at 67′
“Peter Jennings was one of the most urbane, well-traveled and recognizable journalists on American television.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/business/media/08jennings_obit.html?th&emc=th
Steve Zuckerman reports on the death of journalist Al Aronowitz:
“Al Aronowitz succumbed to cancer on Monday morning, August 1st. Widely known as ‘the Godfather of rock journalism,’ Al liked to joke that the 1960’s would not have been the same without him; after all, it was Al who introduced beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Bob Dylan, Dylan to the Beatles, and the Beatles to marijuana. And the rest, as they say, is history. The full story of this event — and details of Al’s close relationship with both Dylan and the Beatles — was told in the author’s recent book, Bob Dylan And The Beatles, Volume One of the Best of the Blacklisted Journalist.
“At the time of his father’s death, (his son) Joel was playing one of Aronowitz’s favorite albums for him — Miles Davis’ ‘Kind Of Blue.’ Joel said that Al took his final breath just as the track ‘Blue In Green’ was ending.”
www.globalentertainmentnetwork.com
Mail & Guardian: BUENA VISTA
“Ibrahim Ferrer, who achieved fame late in life as the singer of the Buena Vista Social Club, died on Saturday in Havana at the age of 78. Ferrer, known for his trademark cap and greying moustache, was a devotee of traditional styles of Cuban music such as ’son’ and ‘bolero.’”
BOOKS
DAVID SWANSON ON NORMAN SOLOMON
“Norman Solomon’s new book, ‘War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,’ opens with a disturbing prologue. The U.S. media has refused to give serious coverage to the Downing Street Memos on the grounds that they are ‘old news.’ In the initial pages of his book, and supplemented by the rest, Solomon makes a case that both outdoes and undoes that claim.
“Solomon outdoes the ‘old news’ claim by providing evidence that the Bush Administration’s campaign to take the country to war in Iraq on the basis of lies was remarkably similar to President Lyndon Johnson’s use of the media when he wanted to attack the Dominican Republic and Reagan’s when he was inclined to invade Grenada, not to mention Bush the First’s when Panama was his chosen victim. In fact, Solomon draws disturbing parallels to Johnson and Nixon’s lies about Vietnam, Reagan’s about Libya and Lebanon, Bush the First’s about the First Gulf War and about Haiti, Clinton’s about Haiti, Yugoslavia, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and Bush Jr.’s all too recent lies about Afghanistan. There just doesn’t seem to be anything new about a president taking this country to war on the basis of laughably bad lies that anyone who was paying attention never fell for.”
http://www.democrats.com/node/5582
MOVIETIME
THE TROUBLES WE’VE SEEN: A HISTORY OF JOURNALISM IN WARTIME
The great Marcel Ophuls’s lacerating and mordantly funny meditation on war and the reporting of war by Western media outlets, specifically the war in Bosnia. Featuring interviews with Slobodan Milosevic (before he was tried for war crimes), Christiane Amanpour, Walter Cronkite, John Burns, Martha Gellhorn and Bernard-Henri Lévy. Sun Aug 14: 2; Tue Aug 16: 2; Wed Aug 17: 3; Thu Aug 18: 6
http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/8
A TREAT: HOW TO MAKE VIDEOS
From Marty Pearlmutter
http://www.pipeline4media.com/clients2005/AOL/RAP%20VID.mpg
BAD NEWS
While I was away, I learned that our not-so-friendly hosting company took our site down because our traffic was way up. Thanks, guys. We are out of there.
GOOD NEWS
Will leave you with some good news: only 38% of the public in a recent poll supported the war.
Turn. Turn. Turn.
THE WONDERS OF WIKI
See my report and Rory O’Connor’s piece on this past weekend’s Wikimedia conference in Germany on Mediachannel today. Your responses welcome. (In an earlier version posted elsewhere, I confused Ward Cunningham with Ward Churchill, a demonstration that even news dissectors succumb to jet lag.)
Thanks to Mitch of Chicago Media Action for posting an entry in the Wikipedia about yours truly.
For some photos: http://flickr.com/photos/fuzheado/
Comments to: Dissector@mediachannel.org
London Terrorists Strike Against Iran: The 51st Anniversary of a CIA Coup
Farhat Quam Maquami
Islamic Terrorists and assassins hired and prepared by London’s British Intelligence Service were tools of British Imperialism in the Middle East. Iran was no exception. British Ambassador on Instruction from London nurtured Muslim Brotherhood and Faddayian Islam as their insurance policy for hegemony. In Iran, Navab Safavi, Khomienie, and Rafsanjani are among the most famous figures. Now that everybody is discussing London Faked Terror attack, it is better to discuss the real terror against Iran by the London based Islamic terrorists who were trained, financed and designed to terrorize Iranians 51 years ago.
A half-century ago, the US and UK engineered a spectacular act of terror against Iran. Not only did Western intelligence agencies obliterated Iran’s budding democracy, but their actions also resulted in thousands of Iranian patriots being killed by firing squads in the bloodbath that followed this act of terror. Looking from this real historical perspective the recent outcry about the London terror attack look nothing but a staged terror attack by the intelligent services to shape public opinion against innocent Muslims or Middle Eastern, cover up Tony Blaire’s bankrupt policy, improve his public image and enhance his prestige.
On August 19, 1953, CIA agents, with the blessing of corrupt mullahs, shamelessly arranged a terrorist coup to overthrow the democratically elected, secular government, of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. Their actions directly subverted a blossoming civic society and changed it into a dictatorial regime. It seems that every generation thereafter that carried Iranian aspirations for justice, freedom and real social change would also be hijacked by the CIA and its paid agents.
Five years ago, James Risen of the New York Times penned an excellent account of the terror coup. Among the materials he used to write his article was a previously secret report written in 1954 by one of the coup’s plotters. As Risen wrote, this report shows “how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran’s elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist.”
You can read Risen’s article by visiting www.globalpolicy.org (http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2000/0416ciairan.htm).
The size and scale of the terror coup’s plotters remains breathtaking, even today. The UK/US coup planners recruited thousands of Iranians to work as spies and thugs in support of this strike against democracy.
Iranian nationalists will be interested by Risen’s report, as it details Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s surprising initial reluctance to collaborate with the coup plotters.
As with many Cold War-era adventures, the US and UK justified their restoration of the Shah as part of their war against Communism. Of course, the Western powers cared little for the damage the terror coup would inflict on Iran’s culture, Iran’s national interest or the Iranian psyche.
The coup had its roots in a British showdown with Iran and the prize was Iran‘s oil industries. In 1951, Iran’s Parliament voted to nationalize the oil industry, and legislators backing the law elected its leading advocate, Dr. Mossadegh, as prime minister. Britain responded with threats and sanctions.
Dr. Mossadegh, a European-educated lawyer refused to back down. In meetings in November and December 1952, British intelligence officials initiated a plan for a joint US/UK terrorist operation to oust the elected prime minister.
Risen’s superb article details the intricate nature of the US/UK plot. Rather than rehash it all again here, readers should examine it for themselves.
The tragedy of 1953 can be boiled down to the following observation — If Dr. Mossadegh had used his considerable political capital to rouse the people to stand up and defend the country, the Western terror coup would never have succeeded. This is the unmistakable lesson of the New York Times’s report.
Today, a second confrontation looms between Iran and the West. For Iranian nationalists, the stakes could not be higher. This time around, the West has a new weapon to use against Iran – the one million opportunistic so-called “Persian-Americans” living mostly in the state of California. Many of these people would gladly volunteer to play the role of puppet-ruler in Teheran that Iyad Allawi is playing for the West in Baghdad. These hyphenated Iranians are eager to subjugate Iran once again to the whims of the Western powers.
All true Iranian nationalists must dedicate themselves to the following: rooting out those elements in the country’s leadership, like the Rafsanjani clique, which are using their privileged position to loot Iran’s wealth and transfer it to banks in Western countries such as Canada.
In 1953, Dr Mossadegh and the Iranian nationalists failed to thwart the coup because of their own indecisiveness. As a result, the country plunged into a nightmare of autocratic and arbitrary rule — a nightmare compounded by the events of 1979. The so-called Islamic Revolution was led by a clerical faction pivotal to the success of the 1953 coup.
In 2005, a similar failure to act may have much more terrible consequences. By familiarizing themselves with the true events of 1953, Iranian nationalists can find the courage to steel themselves for the struggle to come. We have to look at Ahmadi Nejad actions to determine who is pulling his strings. His tough talk would be an empty rhetoric if is not followed by arresting and bringing to trial all Rafsanjani family as “Corrupt on Earth” and “Warriors Against God.” If his government does not confront the corrupt practices of the perverted British an American Islamists it would prove to be another subterfuge on Iranians by the London Terrorists.
August 8th, 2005 at 10:25 am