John Pilger
johnpilger.com

We deceive ourselves in thinking that the Beeb has a left-wing bias. The corporation is in thrall to the same interests as Rupert Murdoch’s New Corp and the saviour of Iraq, Tony Blair.

Britain is said to be approaching its Berlusconi Moment. That is to say, if Rupert Murdoch wins control of Sky he will command half the television and newspaper market and threaten what is known as public service broadcasting. Although the alarm is ringing, it is unlikely that any government will stop him while his court is packed with politicians of all parties.

The problem with this and other Murdoch scares is that, while one cannot doubt their gravity, they deflect from an unrecognised and more insidious threat to honest information. For all his power, Murdoch’s media is not respectable. Take the current colonial wars. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox Television is almost cartoon-like in its warmongering. It is the august, tombstone New York Times, “the greatest newspaper in the world”, and others such as the once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability to the lies and moral contortions of the “war on terror”, now recat as “perpetual war”.

In Britain, the liberal Observer performed this task in making respectable Tony Blair’s deceptions on Iraq. More importantly, so did the BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of one maverick reporter’s attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier, the BBC took Blair’s sophistry and lies on Iraq at face value.

This was made clear in studies by Cardiff University and the German-based Media Tenor. The BBC’s coverage, said the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly “sympathetic to the government’s case”. According to Media Tenor, a mere two per cent of BBC news in the build-up to the invasion permitted anti-war voices to be heard. Compared with the main American networks, only CBS was more pro-war.

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Rick Rozoff
Stop NATO

Latvian troops stand at attention beside a NATO radar installation.

With the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe from 1999-2009, the U.S.-led military alliance has grown by 75 percent, from 16 to 28 members.

By 2009 all former non-Soviet Warsaw Pact member states had been incorporated into NATO, the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) being absorbed with its merger into the Federal Republic in 1990. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO in 1999 and Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia in 2004. Albania, which suspended participation in the Warsaw Pact six years after its founding, in 1961, was brought into the Alliance last year.

The 2004 expansion included seven nations in all, the three mentioned above, the first former Yugoslav republic, Slovenia, and the first former Soviet republics: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Immediately upon their accession, the United States began to employ the new members’ territory for military bases, troop deployments, air patrols and the initial stages of a continent-wide anti-ballistic missile system beyond already existing NATO plans for the bloc’s Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence Programme.

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Jack D. Douglas

I watched an interview with Bob Woodward about his new book, Obama's Wars. It was mostly inside-dopsterish Woodward at his worst. But at the end a young anchor asked him what the U.S. attacks in Pakistan were going to produce in the near future. He smiled in his all-knowing and impish way, said he could not really say [of course], but "I think you should strap yourself in!" Translation: you ain't seen nothing yet, so hang on Sloopy and fasten your seatbelt for a wild ride ahead.

This time he was right. In the last few days since then the U.S. has openly attacked Pakistan twice and today the enraged and humiliated Pakistani military shut the vital U.S. supply lines from the Pakistani ports into Afghanistan. Supplies are the carotid and aorta of U.S. and Nato forces in Afghanistan where they are already losing the nine-year-old war.

I doubt the Pakistanis will actually launch military attacks on the U.S. at this point. But they are showing they mean business. They don't plan to be another victim of American imperialism any more than they already have been. They are not a defenseless Cambodia or Afghanistan the U.S. can bomb into the stone age without serious fighting.

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Alan Caruba
Warning Signs

If I had engaged in activities that involved fleecing the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom of billions in public funds in the name of “climate research”, and it was found that I had manipulated the data to advance the “global warming” hoax, wouldn’t I be facing charges of fraud?

Or if the universities for which I worked had benefited from receiving those public funds had conducted hearings that exonerated me, wouldn’t those institutions be considered accessories to the alleged crime?

This is the case today for the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and Pennsylvania State University in America. If the CRU is above suspicion, why did the U.S. Department of Energy suspend funds for it in July citing scientific doubts raised by the Climategate revelations last November?

Leaked emails between the principal players, CRU’s Phil Jones and Penn State’s Michael Mann, documented their dismay over the fact that the overall temperatures of the Earth were not increasing and colluded to suppress any expression of global warming skepticism in respected science journals.

Indeed, one of Mr. Jones emails admitted that he had “deleted loads of emails” to avoid being exposed lest someone bring a Freedom of Information Act request. In July a Wall Street Journal commentary by Patrick J. Michaels, a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, noted that at the heart of the yet unresolved issues are “professional misconduct, data manipulation, and the jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data.”

A newspaper serving the area where Penn State is located published an article on July 12, 2010 by Louis Lombardi reporting that it had “cleared Mann of any wrongdoing” but that “the university was in no position to investigate one of its own or, stated differently, to investigate itself. Over the years, Mann had brought in millions of dollars for the university through his research. For the university to come to any other conclusion than that he acted appropriately would be an admission that the university has been fleecing those who gave the money.”

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Anna Baltzer writing from Lopez, Colombia, Live from Palestine

A teenager sits above the Toez Indigenous Reserve at dusk. Her
community has been repeatedly threatened with displacement by
the Colombian government.

These words are not of a Palestinian farmer but of Justo Conda, governor of Lopez Adentro Indigenous Reserve in southwestern Colombia, whose community was repeatedly threatened with displacement under former president Alvaro Uribe Velez. Uribe, recently appointed by the United Nations to investigate Israel's fatal attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, has a notoriously horrific track record on human rights. Less explored are the clear parallels between his government's mistreatment of indigenous peoples of Colombia and Israel's abuses of the indigenous people of Palestine.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Colombia has one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world, numbering as many as 4.9 million. According to the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement more than 286,000 Colombians were uprooted from their land in 2009 alone. Approximately ten percent of the Colombian population has suffered forced displacement, many of them indigenous communities, afro-Colombian descendants of former slaves, and campesinos (farmers).

Like Israel, Colombia is the largest recipient of US military aid in its hemisphere. Six billion US tax-dollars over the past ten years have placed Colombia third in the world for US military assistance, after Israel and Egypt. Armed with US weapons and political backing, Uribe's government and other armed actors have forced out millions through extrajudicial assassinations and terror tactics, clearing the way for the exploitation of natural resources by the government and multinational companies. Always in the name of security and the "War on Terror," Colombian soldiers have burned villages, ransacked homes and destroyed the livelihoods of communities who have taken the radical decision of staying on their own land.

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Hanan Chehata
Middle East Monitor

EDL's Roberta Moore. The Zionist Federation’s Jonathan Hoffman (right)

The increasingly cosy relationship between the extremist, racist EDL movement and the ultra-racist Zionist movement in the UK is becoming more and more visible with each passing demonstration that they attend. It is now a common sight to see a mass of Israeli flags at an EDL rally and a mob of EDL members at a pro-Israel rally. This is an association which is at once revealing as to the true nature of the Zionist movement whilst also a source, one would assume, of much distress and embarrassment to right minded Jews who would blanch at such a self-defeating and counter-productive association.

For their part, the EDL clearly scrape the bottom of the barrel for members. It is hardly a thinking man's organisation. Typically comprised of thugs and louts it is scarcely a group that any sane individual would be proud to be a member of; and yet hundreds of Zionists have signed up to be a part of the new EDL "Jewish Division". This includes individuals such as Roberta Moore, who makes a habit of inciting hatred against Muslims while running around with an Israeli flag tied around her neck like a cape. Exposing her ignorance with statements such as "Islam is not a religion but a cult" she does seem to fit the EDL's low criteria for membership. The foul vitriol she spewed at one recent EDL rally not only betrayed her ignorance of Islam but her desire to incite hatred against more than 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide.

This is nothing knew and many have been forced recently to openly recant their spurious statements about Islam and Muslim organisations. Take for instance, the apology issued by The Spectator last week following Stephen Pollard's grossly absurd statement that Islam Expo is a racist, fascist and genocidal organisation! When challenged in court he claimed the remark was unintentional. Justice was served in this instance and Islam Expo won their case against The Spectator including an apology, legal costs and damages.

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