Our Captive Media

The unsinkable Bill Moyers.
In a 2003 interview with BuzzFlash.com,[13] Moyers said, “The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they’ve won.” He noted that “The rich are getting richer, which arguably wouldn’t matter if the rising tide lifted all boats.” Instead, however, “The inequality gap is the widest it’s been since 1929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water.” He added that as “the corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory,” access to political power has become “who gets what and who pays for it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Greenspan admits Iraq was about oil, as deaths put at 1.2m

Alan Greenspan, libertarian Republican and former controversial skipper of the Federal Reserve system, has finally found his voice to denounce George W Bush, albeit 1.2 millions lives (and still counting) too late…Thank you, Alan.

By Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters in New York
Sunday September 16, 2007
The Observer | GUARDIAN Unlimited [U.K.]

The man once regarded as the world’s most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was ‘largely’ about oil.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets. Read the rest of this entry »

The Iraq War As We See It—Seven U.S. Soldiers Speak

Dateline: Published on Sunday, August 19, 2007 by the International Herald Tribune

“Pacifying” Iraq has proved not just elusive but a costly nightmare with no end in sight. The truth on the ground that most American media continue to fudge about.

VIEWED FROM IRAQ at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is surreal.

Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. Read the rest of this entry »

Bin Laden is Right?

BY BRIAN BOGART
DATELINE: Information Clearinghouse 09/11/07 to whom we are indebted.

The Unwarranted Influence of America’s Global “Defense” Corporation

You know your country’s “democratic” leadership and rationale for war are in trouble when the anointed most-evil enemy makes more sense than they do.

Although for all we know Bin Laden’s “annual message to Americans” originated below Dick Cheney’s office where Bin Laden is living in luxury chained to a pool table, its contents ring with refreshing logic relative to what usually passes for truth in and around the White House. Read the rest of this entry »

HIDDEN WAGES OF WAR: How Many Dead? How Many Mad?

Flight carrying badly injured soldiers out of Iraq.

BY SHAYNE NELSON

The Iraq War’s “hidden casualties” is yet another scandalous instance of media malfunction which somehow favors the warmongers amongst us. This post challenges the accuracy of the official tallies. What would the world do without citizens’ journalism?

Back in the Seventies a French journalist told me a not-so-hard-to-believe tale of the Vietnam war, from his days as a war correspondent in Vietnam for the French newspaper Le Monde. He said that every evening during that conflict, a huge jet full of dying soldiers took off from Saigon, headed to Japan. He said that war correspondents in Saigon called it ‘The Flying Coffin,’ since most of the soldiers aboard the plane, though still alive, were so badly injured that most of them would soon be dead. Read the rest of this entry »

The politics of blind hatred: Who are the fanatics?

BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS Dateline: September 5, 2007

Embattled Rabbi Eric Yoffe—being antiwar and liberal he’s catching hell from the Neocons and the Israeli Lobby.

President Jimmy Carter was demonized for pointing out in his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, that there are actually two sides to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Distinguished American scholars, such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have suffered the same fate for documenting the excessive influence the Israel Lobby has on US foreign policy. Read the rest of this entry »

Ten Fallacies About the Violence in Iraq

The debate about whether Americans should stay or leave Iraq after four years of brutal occupation is surreal because it continues to be underwritten by enormous lies. Plain and simple, the US elites invaded Iraq to rob that nation at gunpoint of its major resource, oil, and all the current foot-dragging is simply to accommodate stateside politics to the ensuing debacle, while clinging to some “solution” that might provide a fig leaf for an indefinite US military presence in that region. The essay we reproduce below is an excellent dissection of the principal lies feeding the confusion, as usual with ample complicity on the part of the corporate media, which through shoddy work, or cynical collaboration, effectively prolongs the agony of Iraq. The evidence that the mass media are not doing their job is everywhere. Just consider for a moment the following astonishing facts—astonishing in their sheer obscenity when put in the context of so much want and misery in the world, and that most Americans never heard of them— collected by Doug Henwood for one of his remarkable essays, and published back in 2003:

“LIGHTNESS”

In the early days of the war, when things weren’t going so well for the “coalition,” it was said that the force was too light. But after the sandstorm cleared and the snipers were mowed down, that alleged lightness became a widely praised virtue. But that force was light only by American standards: 300,000 troops; an endless rain of Tomahawks, JDAMs, and MOABs; thousands of vehicles, from Humvees to Abrams tanks; hundreds of aircraft, from Apaches to B-1s; several flotillas of naval support - and enormous quantities of expensive petroleum products. It takes five gallons of fuel just to start an Abrams tank, and after that it gets a mile per gallon. And filling one up is no bargain. Though the military buys fuel at a wholesale price of 84¢ a gallon, after all the expenses of getting it to the front lines are added in, the final cost is about $150 a gallon. That’s a steal compared to Afghanistan, where fuel is helicoptered in, pushing the cost to $600/gallon. Rummy’s “lightness” is of the sort that only a $10 trillion economy can afford.

Wrap your mind around those little facts before you read the rest of the indictment.—Eds.
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BY JOHN TIRMAN, AlterNet
Posted on November 28, 2006, Printed on September 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/44771/ Read the rest of this entry »

The Myth of AQI (al-Qaeda Iraq)

CYRANO TOPICAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT: Auveline Robinson

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the perfect foil for a global system of fearmongering with the plutocracy as the only winner. (Wanted poster distributed by U.S. Army.)

BY ANDREW TIGHMAN Dateline: Sep 6, 2007

Fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq is the last big argument for keeping U.S.
troops in the country. But the military’s estimation of the threat is
alarmingly wrong. Meanwhile, as this report shows, the Bush administration continues to cynically play this hand, as it has turned the word “al-Qaeda” into a priceless propaganda asset.

Read the rest of this entry »

The War On Working Americans: Part II

BY STEPHEN LENDMAN Dateline 8-29-7

Peter Coors (standing), scion to family of reactionary tycoons that has distinguished itself for its antilabor practices and support for the most extreme rightwing politicians in the land. He ran for a seat as Colorado’s senator, but lost to Dem Ken Salazar

See Part I at https://bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=241 on this same site.

This article was written to assess the state of working America in the run-up to Labor Day, 2007. Organized labor today is severely weakened following decades of government and business duplicity to crush it.

Part I reviewed the labor movement’s rise in the 19th century and subsequent decline post-WW II and especially in the last three decades. Hope arose for some change in the Democrat-led 100th Congress. A weak effort emerged, but Senate Republicans killed it. Read the rest of this entry »

Bye-Bye Baghdad

BY “ANONYMOUS” | Topical research associate: Auveline Robinson
As published on 8.17.07 by fraternal site, Truthdig


Bloodbath is not a metaphor in Iraq, thanks to the Cheney/Bush war.

Editor’s Note: The author of this article is a contractor who has lived and worked in Baghdad. His identity is known to Truthdig’s editors, but he has written anonymously in order to offer an uncensored account.

I have been living and working in Baghdad for the past 16 months and will be leaving next week for good. I am one of those overpaid Department of Defense contractors, or, as some would call me, a “war profiteer.” Yes, I have profited. I am out of debt and have money saved. But it has cost me. I am a changed man. I have become hardened. I almost feel like a zombie. Read the rest of this entry »