You'll know what we want you to know

Here is a great piece by Rep. Bernie Sanders (who once called himself a Socialist, though I think he's sticking to "Independent" these days) about the corporate control of the media, and some of the problems that control has contributed to or brought about. Something to think about the next time you're watching the evening news.

posted by Michael Curry at 3:41 PM

How to reduce terrorism

The Mercury News has an opinion piece (seems to be a theme today) which provides a good summary of how the Bush administration's strategy for fighting terrorism is misguided. It's definitely worth a read.

posted by Michael Curry at 3:20 PM

Greens out to destroy liberals?

There's a rather ludicrous opinion piece I found, which more or less accuses the Greens of purposely sabotaging Democrats by running candidates. It seems to completely ignore the fact that the Greens actually believe in something, and have positions which differ from those of the Democrats, and instead assumes that all of the people who devote time, money and energy to the Green Party are doing so out of some desire to be spoilers. Feh. I suppose it's easier to ignore the flaws in the Democratic Party (especially the gap between supposed principles and any action), and just point the finger at the Greens, than it is to face what the Democrats have become over the last couple of decades.

posted by Michael Curry at 3:02 PM

So maybe he wasn't about to nuke D.C. after all

On Wednesday, both people in the Bush adminstration and law enforcement officials admitted that Attorney General John Ashcroft's remarks about Jose Padilla were exaggerated. Is anyone really surprised by this? The whole reason for announcing this arrest in the first place was to try and distract attention away from the pre-9/11 screw-ups in the FBI and CIA, so Ashcroft (who has always been willing to twist the truth) made it sound as important as he could. Read the USA Today article about it here.

posted by Michael Curry at 2:42 PM

Plutocracy and Politics

There was an interesting op-ed piece [registration required] in the New York Times this week which summarized some of the arguments made in Kevin Phillips's 'Wealth and Democracy': A Political History of the American Rich. Mainly it talks about the appalling concentration of wealth in the US, and the lack of desire to do anything about it. From what I've read elsewhere, the book itself isn't one of Mr. Phillips's best, but the op-ed piece is worth a quick read.

posted by Michael Curry at 2:21 PM

Plots, plans and panics

While searching around the web for more information about the story that CBS.com changed, I found this well-written UK perspective on the USA's anti-terror strategy at The Guardian. It's well worth a read.

posted by Michael Curry at 8:35 PM

More on alleged terrorist Jose Padilla

Here is a CNN.com story about what Padilla's lawyer thinks of his detainment as an 'enemy combatant,' and the rights he has lost because of it.

And yes, I did save a copy of the story in case CNN decided to change or remove it.

posted by Michael Curry at 8:14 PM

The corporate media and 'patriotism'

This evening I had an eyeopening experience involving the American corporate media. I stopped by a site called antiwar.com, and saw a headline that read "US Backs Off 'Dirty Bomber' Charges." It linked to a story at CBSNews.com, so I went to read the whole thing for myself. While there was indeed a story about Jose Padilla there, it didn't contain anything about the US backing off on the charges. I thought that was rather strange. [Note: The link from antiwar.com is now gone, after I alerted the editor of that site to the change in content.]

A short time later I got today's issue of Undernews, and in it (in addition to what I quoted earlier) there was the following:

||| CBS - U.S. officials are backing away from assertions that a man arrested last month in Chicago was plotting a 'dirty' bomb attack on the United States, CBS Correspondent Jim Stewart reports. U.S. officials now admit they're not sure what American-born Abdullah al Muhajir's plans were when he returned to the U.S. last month. And any plot, including possibly exploding a radiation bomb in Washington D.C., was in the "initial planning stages." But given what he'd trained for in Afghanistan, they expected the worst. "He researched nuclear weapons and received training in wiring explosives while in Pakistan, and he was instructed to return to the United States to conduct reconnaissance operations for al Qaeda,'' said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
. . . . . . "He had indicated some knowledge of Washington, D.C., but I want to emphasize again that there was not an actual plan. We stopped this man in the initial planning stages,'' said Wolfowitz. That was echoed by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who also said the plan to explode a dirty bomb had not gotten past the planning stages.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/06/10/attack/main511671.shtml

None of that material that Sam Smith quoted now appears in the CBS story, so apparently someone at CBSNews.com went back and rewrote it so that it no longer spends time emphasizing how Jose Padilla didn't have an "actual plan." In fact, if you go to CBSNews.com and enter "Wolfowitz" in the Search function, the first article on the results list is the original article (as you can see from the summary). If you click on it though, you get sent to the new article. We'll see if they remember to fix the search results too.

Now, I had already been wanting to write something about this whole case this evening, talking about how Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al Muhajir, was being deprived of the rights of due process that he, as an American citizen, is guaranteed by the Constitution. I was going to point out, as others have, that the reason the government had decided to now declare him an 'enemy combatant' was because that after a month they still didn't have the evidence to be able to charge him in normal criminal court.

Apparently, not only is the US government willing to do whatever it needs to in order to show that it's fighting the war on terror, but CBS is carefully avoiding implying that the great and good government is ever, ever wrong in it's prosecution of that war.

posted by Michael Curry at 7:52 PM

Sam Smith, again

Okay, I don't want to turn this blog into nothing but a bunch of Sam Smith quotes, but today's issue of Undernews had something by him that I thought was absolutely great:

FINAL THOUGHTS

Your editor woke up this morning to find in his Washington Post a map of the damage that a radiologically dirty bomb would do if it exploded at a certain location in downtown DC. The area of serious damage came within five blocks of my house.

The dividing line between a policy issue and a crisis is personal proximity and frankly I'm getting a little pissed off. While I realize that one has little control over such matters, I still feel it grossly unfair that I should die because of the arrogance, stupidity, and desire to prove himself to his father of a nepotized preppie Yale frat boy in conspiracy with a megalomaniacal Israeli war criminal. Besides, such a contingency is not covered by my Blue Cross.

Just to be on the safe side, however, I have written a codicil to my will in case others survive the current insanity better than I. It goes like this:

"I do hereby declare, make and publish this as the First Codicil to my Last Will and Testament.

"FIRST, being of sound mind (at least until the nerve gas attack), should I die a victim of the Bush war on whatever, I urge my heirs, assigns, and anyone else who is interested to regard George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Ariel Sharon - just for starters - as major co-conspirators in my death. Their reckless and despicable behavior placed their puerile political ambitions over simple safety and decency. They wrongly regarded the sanctity of their grandiose policies as more important than the peace of tranquility of my 'hood. Like many Washingtonians, I would have much have preferred being the citizen of a serene and happy city than of a cruel and mindless empire.

"SECOND, though I may have died at the hands of a Muslim or Muslims, I hold no anger towards their religion or culture. People who have been screwed for as long as they have sometimes do stupid things out of desperation especially when a country as big and powerful as America declares de facto war against them. And I still, somewhat naively I suppose, expect graduates of Yale to act with more maturity and sense than, say, a member of a Chicago latino street gang. In any case, I urge my heirs, assigns and others to continue eating at Middle Eastern restaurants, to say something friendly to a Palestinian being harassed at the airport, and to buy a hot dog from the Egyptian vendor around the corner from my office if you happen to be in the vicinity.

"THIRD, should any commentator or journalist be so brazen as to use my death as an example of why we should continue the war against Muslims or whatever, I give my heirs, assigns, and others explicit permission to call him or her a "lousy, rotten, low-down sonofabitch" and such other language as would not be permitted in court. This especially applies to Bill O'Reilly, Steve Emerson, Michael Kelly and most of those writing op eds for the Washington Post and New York Times.

"FOURTH, I urge you to join with others to bring our land back to its senses, to end policies that are brutal and self-destructive such as our treatment of Palestine and the embargo against Iraq, and make America once again a place that is admired rather than hated.

"FIFTH, remember not to drink the beer in the refrigerator until it has been decontaminated." - SAM SMITH

posted by Michael Curry at 7:07 PM

Making the world safe... for drug lords

The UN's drug control office estimates that this year opium production in Afghanistan will be about 3000 tons, way up from last year's yield of merely 300 tons (most of that from the areas held by our erstwhile allies the Northern Alliance) after the Taliban government banned opium production.

Read more here.

posted by Michael Curry at 9:32 PM

Ship of fools

From today's issue of Sam Smith's excellent Undernews.

SHIP OF FOOLS

THE SHIP OF STATE these days is a vessel full of fools, steered by an administration engaged in the reckless endangerment of its citizens as a servile and sycophantic media cheers it on.

Less obvious in Washington, however, is the almost total lack of voices of calm and care. Once, such voices belonged to people sometimes referred to as 'wise heads." They weren't really that wise at all; but they did help sometimes to keep the ship off the rocks.

In normal times, they were negative forces, restricting political, social and economic progress in the name of the status quo. They weren't even necessarily particularly honorable, for they included hustlers like Clark Clifford.

Their main virtue was that they periodically kept presidents and other politicians from making us all victims of their foolishness. This didn't require wisdom so much as simply the respected advocacy of traditional establishment ways.

But something strange has happened. America's establishment is no longer traditional. Many of its lawyers are not keepers of precedent at all, but wildcat litigators treating every social concept and value as just one more new well of legal opportunity. Its politicians rise from mounds of selfish cash rather than from complex and deep-rooted constituencies. Its academics and journalists have joined the cult of celebrity. Its business people have adopted the ways of gamblers and bootleggers rather than of producers and their accountants have destroyed the evidence. In short, the establishment class no longer cares all that much about the status quo, in part because in a derivative reality you are either climbing over someone else or you're dead.

So if you seek, in the midst of the present madness, some non-heretical voices saying, "hey, slow down," or "think again" you won't find them. And without that, even the normally heretical voices become more cautious and quiet until the silence is deafening. - SAM SMITH

posted by Michael Curry at 8:06 PM