VICTORY FOR THE PRESS IN WATADA CASE

RELEASE: Government Drops Two Charges Against Lt. Ehren Watada

Agreement Knocks Two Years off Max Sentence;
Reporters Do Not Have to Testify

FORT LEWIS, WA—The government agreed to drop two charges carrying a maximum of two years jail time against Lt. Ehren Watada in exchange for not forcing subpoenaed reporters to testify.

“By agreeing beforehand to all of the facts the government would ask of the subpoenaed reporters, Lt. Watada shielded these journalists from the heavy handedness of the government,” said Eric Seitz, lead attorney for Lt. Watada. “While we don’t think any charges should have filed at all for simply exercising free speech, we are pleased with the government’s willingness to reduce Lt. Watada’s potential sentence by two years.”

Lt. Ehren Watada refused deployment to Iraq on the grounds that the war is illegal. He offered to serve instead in Afghanistan, but that proposal was rejected by the Army. He is currently awaiting a court-martial, which begins February 5th. Lt.Watada now faces a maximum of four years in prison.

NYT: AIR AMERICA SOLD TO NY REAL ESTATE MOGUL

Air America Radio, the liberal network that filed for bankruptcy protection in October, said yesterday that it had reached a tentative agreement to be acquired by Stephen L. Green, the chairman of a real estate investment trust specializing in office buildings.

Mr. Green, the chairman and founder of the SL Green Realty Corporation, is no stranger to Air America. He has been providing interim financing to help the network meet current costs, and his brother, Mark Green, the former New York City public advocate and past candidate for mayor and state attorney general, has frequently been the host of programs on Air America.

Mark Green said yesterday that the sale would usher in a new phase for Air America, focused on digital content distribution like Internet programs and podcasts in addition to radio.

FAIR ON SUNDAY SHOW COVERAGE

”One day after an anti-war rally in Washington, D.C. attracted a crowd estimated at 100,000 by the Los Angeles Times, the networks’ Sunday morning talk shows remained mostly unaffected by the expression of broad opposition to the war, keeping their discussions confined to the narrow spectrum of Beltway elites.

US Plans To ‘Fight The Net’ Revealed

By Adam Brookes

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/185/52/

Mike Whitney challenges Robert Fisk: (RAIN): Why Fisk is wrong about Lebanon

“This is how the conflict began in Lebanon. Outbreaks of sectarian hatred, appeals for restraint, promises of aid from Western and Arab nations and a total refusal to understand that this is how civil wars begin”. Robert Fisk, “World ignores Signs of Civil War in Lebanon” UK Independent 1-27-07

01/28/07 “ICHBlog” — – Robert Fisk is all wrong about Lebanon. The country is not on the brink of another “civil war”, but has been subsumed in an “imperial war” engineered in Tel Aviv and Washington. He’s also mistaken in thinking that the Paris 3 Conference is designed to “save” Lebanon from the mountain of debt which piled up after Israel’s destructive 34 day war. The real purpose of the $7.6 billion in loans is to shackle Lebanon to the international lending institutions that are demanding additional taxes on the poor, more privatization of state-run industries, and restructuring the economy to meet the requirements of the global banking elite. According to a recent article by Chris Marsden in countercurrents:

“Only a fraction of the loans will be spent on reconstruction projects. Most will go towards servicing Lebanon’s short-term debt and therefore back into the coffers of the imperialist governments and financial institutions, while leaving Lebanon’s long-term debts to climb even higher. The rest will go into paying the Lebanese army (and security services) in order to suppress the opposition in the Shia areas in the south of the country. And, once again, any money given will be made conditional on the government implementing the reforms demanded by the IMF and World Bank.

PALESTINIAN FILMS ON LINE

Gilad Atzmon writes about Bonsoir, a Palestinian film site:

A few days ago I learned about Bonsoir. It is a web site maintained by a young Palestinian post-graduate student in Leeds. The site is a must see, it is an on-line Palestinian film library archive, a sort of ‘Palestinian You Tube’. The person who created the site is Akram Awad, who has gathered in a section called Palorama, an impressive collection of live stream audiovisual materials concerning Palestine…

Three days ago I wrote to Mr. Awad to tell him how impressed I was with his site. Last night he wrote back. Apparently, without drawing attention to his case, the young exiled Palestinian student is under fire.

See: http://www.akramawad.com/

NEW BLOG ON JOHN MCCAIN BY ANOTHER SCHECHTER

He spells his name differently—no relation:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cliff-schecter/step-off-the-
doubletalk_b_39879.html

THE “DAVOS MEN” SPEAKETH ON THE MOUNTAINTOP

Bill Gates predicts Internet to revolutionize TV in 5 years:

The internet is set to revolutionize television within five years, due to an explosion of online video content and the merging of PCs and TV sets, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said on Saturday.

In the years ahead, more and more viewers will hanker after the flexibility offered by online video and abandon conventional broadcast television, with its fixed program slots and advertisements that interrupt shows, Gates told business leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.

Advertisers are already racing to adapt their strategies to the growing power of the web, and more and more promotional cash is tipped to migrate from television to websites in future.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2007-01-27T220225Z_01_L27910975_RTRIDST_0_TECH-DAVOS-INTERNET-TV-DC.XML&WTmodLoc
- Reuters

FROM THE NEWS HOUNDS WHO MONITOR FOX NEWS

Deborah: Mike Gallagher joined Julie Banderas on Big Story to smear the Peace Rally in D.C. Gallagher jumped in with a hateful tirade against Jane Fonda that was obviously a ploy to make the memorable event in D.C. all about Fonda and Hollywood rather than the true feelings of the American majority.

http://tinyurl.com/2b79ul

PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST BITES THE BIG ONE

More than 130 independent publishers across the country were hurled into financial crisis on Dec. 29 with the bankruptcy of the parent company of Publishers Group West, the Berkeley firm that distributes books from much of the small press world. Among them are more than two dozen Bay Area publishers whose works range from Dave Eggers’ novels and Deepak Chopra’s inspirational writings to business books, Buddhist books and the “Here Comes the Guide” wedding planning book. The bankruptcy hit these small presses at the worst possible time — when Publishers Group West was holding onto its sales revenues from the three months before Christmas, its most profitable time of the year.

At the time of the bankruptcy filing, the company owed nearly $1 million to Amber-Allen, a San Rafael publisher of personal growth books such as the best-selling “The Four Agreements,” by Don Miguel Ruiz. It owed $600,000 to McSweeney’s Books, the San Francisco press started by Eggers. . .

The bankruptcy threatens the survival of many of these small presses. This week, a potential white knight appeared in the form of Perseus Books Group, a New York company that is offering to pay the book publishers 70 cents on every dollar they are owed. But the bailout is far from certain.. .

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/01/27/MNG9DNQ8TM1.DTL

COMMENTARIES: IS THE WEST OVER?

From An IHT op-ed by Anatol Lieven titled “The end of the West as we know it”:

For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.”

The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report’s recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.

If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/28/opinion/edlieven.php

Funny but the NY Times Business section carried a similar piece by free market booster Ben Stein expressing similar fears:

Empires come and go. Economic systems come and go. There is no heavenly guarantee that capitalism will last forever as we know it.

It’s built on man’s notion that he can trust his neighbor with his money, and that if the neighbor misbehaves, the law will chase him and catch him, and that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom, that even the nobles get properly handled (Bob Dylan again) once they have been caught.

If that trust disappears — if the system is no longer a system for the ordinary citizen but only for the tough guys — how much longer can the miracle last?

EACH day’s newspaper, it seems, brings more tidings of unrestrained selfishness and self-dealing and rafts of powerful people saying it’s good for us to be robbed if only we truly understood the system.

The problem is, we’re getting to understand it all too well.

And there is no one in Washington — absolutely no one — to help.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/business/yourmoney/28every.html?_r=1&oref=slogin