Stephen Lendman

This writer's November 2009 article titled "Paid Lying: What Passes for Major Media Journalism" also discussed it in detail, accessed through THIS link.

It called major media journalism biased, irresponsible, and sensationalist - misreporting, distorting, exaggerating, misstating, or suppressing vital truths - serving state and corporate interests over the common good, including bankers controlling the nation's money, unpunished corruption at the highest levels, democracy for the select few, sham elections, a de facto one party state, imperial wars, occupation, and torture.

Harvard Report on Waterboarding

Prepared by Neal Desai, Andre Pineda, Majken Runquist and Mark Fusunyan, Harvard's JFK School of Government published their April 2010 Harvard Student Paper titled, "Torture at Times: Waterboarding in the Media," [.pdf] documenting how the practice was covered by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years - The New York Times (established in 1851), Los Angeles Times (established 1881), Wall Street Journal established 1889), and USA Today (established 1982, America's most widely circulated newspaper, why it was chosen for the study).

Waterboarding Defined

By any definition, it's torture, strictly prohibited under US and international law at all times, under all circumstances, with no allowed exceptions.

Yet the Bush administration defended it, saying it's used to train US service members to resist torture, when, in fact, training involves a cloth placed over their face one time (perhaps twice) for about 20 seconds, a love tap compared to detainee torture, using so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques.

It involves six or more 40-second "applications" in each two hour session, multiple ones daily, forcing water in detainees' mouths and noses for 12 minutes, repeated daily, sometimes for weeks.

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Robert Fisk

It is the season of grovelling.

Only a week after CNN's Octavia Nasr and the British ambassador to Beirut, Frances Guy, dared to suggest that Sayyed Hassan Fadlallah of Lebanon was a nice old chap rather than the super-terrorist the Americans have always claimed him to be, the grovelling began. First Ms Nasr, already fired by the grovelling CNN for her effrontery in calling Fadlallah a "giant", grovelled herself. Rather than tell the world what a cowardly outfit she had been working for, she announced that hers was "a simplistic comment and I'm sorry because it conveyed that I supported Fadlallah's life's work. That's not the case at all".

What is this garbage? Nasr never gave the impression that she supported "Fadlallah's life's work". She merely expressed her regret that the old boy was dead, adding - inaccurately - that he had been part of Hizbollah. I don't know what her pompous (and, of course, equally grovelling) "senior vice president" said to her when she was given her marching orders. But like victims of the Spanish Inquisition, Nasr actually ended up apologising for sins she had never even been accused of. Then within hours, British ambassador Guy began her own self-flagellation, expressing her regrets that she may have offended anyone (and we all know what that means) by her "personal attempt to offer some reflections of a figure who, while controversial, was also highly influential in Lebanon's history and who offered spiritual guidance to many Muslims in need".

I loved the "controversial" bit - the usual "fuck you" word for anyone you want to praise without incurring the wrath of, well, you know who. The Foreign Office itself took down poor Ms Guy's blogapop on old Fadlallah, thus proving - as Arab journalists leapt to point out this week - that while Britain proclaims the virtues of democracy and the free press to the grovelling newspaper owners and grotty emirs of the Middle East, it is the first to grovel when anything might offend you know who.

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Uri Avnery

Uri Avnery considers the current profile of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, which has become home to a large and growing number of vulgar fascists, racists and ignoramuses.

When I was first elected to the Knesset, I was appalled at what I found. I discovered that, with rare exceptions, the intellectual level of the debates was close to zero. They consisted mainly of strings of clichés of the most commonplace variety. During most of the debates, the plenum was almost empty. Most participants spoke vulgar Hebrew. When voting, many members had no idea what they were voting for or against, they just followed the party whip.

That was 1967, when the Knesset included members like Levy Eshkol and Pinchas Sapir, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin and Yohanan Bader, Meir Yaari and Yaakov Chazan, for whom today streets, highways and neighbourhoods are named.

In comparison to the present Knesset, that Knesset now looks like Plato’s Academy.

What frightened me more than anything else was the readiness of members to enact irresponsible laws for the sake of fleeting popularity, especially at times of mass hysteria. One of my first Knesset initiatives was to submit a bill which would have created a second chamber, a kind of Senate, composed of outstanding personalities, with the power to hold up the enactment of new laws and compel the Knesset to reconsider them after an interval. This, I hoped, would prevent laws being hastily adopted in an atmosphere of excitement.

The bill was not considered seriously, neither by the Knesset nor by the general public. The Knesset almost unanimously voted it down. (After some years, several of the members told me that they regretted their vote.) The newspapers nicknamed the proposed chamber “the House of Lords” and ridiculed it. Ha'aretz devoted a whole page of cartoons to the proposal, depicting me in the garb of a British peer.

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Stephen Lendman

In May 2005, then FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism, John Lewis, told a Senate panel that ecoterrorism is "one of today's most serious domestic terrorism threats," the 2001 USA Patriot Act creating the crime of "domestic terrorism," broadening the definition to apply to US citizens as well as aliens - henceforth, the Bureau dividing the crime into two categories, international and domestic, the latter changing dramatically in the past decade.

Then FBI's Domestic Terrorism Section Chief, James Jarboe, said two organizations are principally responsible: the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF), committing over 600 criminal acts since 1996, causing over $43 million in damage. Lewis cited over 1,100 acts since 1976, resulting in about $110 million in damages, and on June 30, 2008, the FBI used the same figure for over 2,000 crimes since 1979 - against "international corporations, lumber companies, animal testing facilities, genetic research firms," and other companies harming the environment or animals, defining the crime as follows:

"the use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature."

The FBI calls ELF and ALF 'loosely-organized movements whose adherents engage in crimes like arson, fire bombings, vandalism, intimidation, assaults, (and) stalking, etc."

On their web sites, ELF says its

"mission is to defend and protect the Earth for future generations by means of direct action," nonviolent civil disobedience it calls "the moral road," adhering to Hippocrates' dictum, to "do no harm."

ALF defines animal rights as

"the philosophy of allowing nonhuman animals to have the basic rights that all sentient beings desire: freedom to live a natural life, free from human exploitation, unnecessary pain and suffering, and premature death."

Direct action qualifies anyone for membership. No formal organizational structure exists.

Through surveillance, harassment, and infiltration, the FBI pursues suspects, "taking advantage of the 2006 revision to the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (ACTA)," a law the Center for Constitutional Rights calls:

unconstitutionally vague and overbroad in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments....because it criminalizes protected speech that causes an animal enterprise to lose profits or goodwill, and (uses) undefined terms, requiring guesswork to define their meaning and scope. Neither the AETA's overbreath nor its vagueness can be cured by the statute's rules of construction." Only rescinding the law can do it.

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