Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society

Bradley Manning with sister Casey, 2006.

When I hear someone say that soldiers “defend our freedom,” my immediate response is to gag. I think the last time American soldiers actually fought for the freedom of Americans was probably the Revolutionary War — or maybe the War of 1812, if you want to be generous. Every war since then has been for nothing but to uphold a system of power, and to make the rich folks even richer.

But I can think of one exception. If there’s a soldier anywhere in the world who’s fought and suffered for my freedom, it’s Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning is frequently portrayed, among the knuckle-draggers on right-wing message boards, as some sort of spoiled brat or ingrate, acting on an adolescent whim. But that’s not quite what happened, according to Johann Hari (“The under-appreciated heroes of 2010,” The Independent, Dec. 24).

Manning, like many young soldiers, joined up in the naive belief that he was defending the freedom of his fellow Americans. When he got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders “to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America’s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.” The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such “crimes” as writing “scholarly critiques” of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government. When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning “was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.”

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Stephen Lendman

As if on cue, major media reports hailed "the Comeback Kid." In Obama's December 22 press conference, Reuters' Caren Bohan asked:

"You racked up a lot of wins in the last few weeks that a lot of people thought would be difficult to come by. Are you ready to call yourself the 'comeback kid?' "

CBS News anchor Katie Couric gushed about how "the president isn't calling himself the 'comeback kid,' but some other folks are."

From ABC News came Jake Tapper offering "congratulations," and George Stephanopoulos saying:

"The president takes a victory lap. How the Christmas season became what he called a 'season of progress.' Will it continue in the new year?"

New York Times writer Michael Shear added:

"But Mr. Obama rejected an opportunity to gloat about the success of the past several weeks by declaring himself the 'comeback kid,' telling a reporter that the results are 'not a victory for me. It's a victory for the American people."

A chorus of other media reports echoed the same sentiment, including USA Today citing a "political rebound," the Christian Science Monitor praising his notable legislative and other victories, and the Los Angeles Times hailing "image-altering successes."

Even hard-right Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer titled his December 17 article, "The new comeback kid," saying:

"Obama had a bad November," taking a midterm election "shellack(ing)....Now, with his stunning tax deal, (he's) back....His comeback is already a year ahead of Clinton's."

On December 21, Nation magazine writer Ari Berman headlined, "Is Obama Really the New Comeback Kid," saying:

"Obama's presidency didn't end after the midterm election and it hasn't been revived during the lame duck session of Congress....Let's hold off, please, from anointing Obama the comeback kid until we know what the full extent of that 'comeback' actually entails."

Nonetheless, Christmas came early for Obama, never mind two years delivering lumps of coal for American workers and promises for worse ahead, what media hype won't explain.

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Paul Craig Roberts
Vdare

Anyone who doesn’t believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com, Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) "no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state," turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making "anti-American comments."

The media have segued into the police attitude, which regards insistence on civil liberties and references to the Constitution as signs of extremism, especially when the Constitution is invoked in defense of dissent or privacy or placarded on a bumper sticker. President George W. Bush set the scene when he declared: "you are with us or against us."

Bush’s words demonstrate a frightening decline in our government’s respect for dissent since the presidency of John F. Kennedy. In a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association in 1961, President Kennedy said:

"No president should fear public scrutiny of his program, for from that scrutiny comes understanding, and from that understanding comes support or opposition; and both are necessary. . . . Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed, and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian law makers once decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment."

The press is not protected, Kennedy told the newspaper publishers, in order that it can amuse and entertain, emphasize the trivial, or simply tell the public what it wants to hear. The press is protected so that it can find and report facts and, thus, inform, arouse "and sometimes even anger public opinion."

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Danny Schechter
disinformation

Helen Thomas meeting students from Maxwell
School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in
Washington D.C. (Photo: rachaelvoorhees)

Our Media Experienced A Few Highs and Many Lows in 2010; None As Disgraceful As The Vitriol Against Helen Thomas

In 1960, I co-founded a student magazine at Cornell University called Dialogue. I was a wannabe journalist, fixated on emulating the courageous media personalities of the times, from Edward R. Murrow to a distinctive figure I came to admire at presidential press conferences, a wire service reporter named Helen Thomas.

In recent years, my faith in the power of dialogue in politics has been severely tested—as, no doubt has hers—in an age where diatribes and calculated demonization chills debate and exchanges of opposing views.

Once you are labeled and stereotyped, especially if you are denounced as an anti-Semite, you are relegated to the fringes, pronounced a hater beyond redemption, even beyond explanation.

You have been assigned a scarlet letter as visible as the Star of David the Nazis made Jews wear.

My career path took me from covering civil rights activism in the streets to later working in the suites of network power. I went from the underground press to rock and roll radio to TV reporting and producing at CNN and ABC.

As a member in good standing of an activist generation, I saw myself more as an outsider in contrast to Helen’s distinctive credentials as an insider, as a White House bureau chief and later as the dean of the White House Correspondents Association.

Yet, beneath her establishment credentials and status, she was always an outsider too—one of nine children born to a family of Lebanese immigrants in Winchester Kentucky, who despite their Middle East origins, were Christians in the Greek Orthodox Church.

She became a pioneering woman, a modern day Helen of Troy, who broke the glass ceiling, infiltrating the clubby, mostly male, inside the beltway world of big egos and self-important media prima donnas, most supplicants to power, not challengers of it.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 24, Mondoweiss co-editor Adam Horowitz wrote:

"Israeli military kills 20-year old Gazan for herding animals too close to buffer zone."

On December 23, Israeli forces shot and killed Salama Abu Harhish without warning while herding sheep and goats in Beit Lahya. Civilized nations don't murder nonviolent civilians in cold blood, this time leaving a widow and day-old unnamed baby.

What "democracy" thrives on violence, spurns peace, and wages preemptive wars like Cast Lead? Besides America, only Israel, a global menace like its Washington paymaster/partner, together with Britain the real axis of evil.

December 28 was Cast Lead's second anniversary, a three week continuing onslaught. Against Palestine, Israel's wars never end. The 2008-09 horror evoked memories of Franklin Roosevelt's December 8, 1941 moment, telling a joint session of Congress:

"Yesterday, December 7,1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that Nation, (and) look(ed) toward maintain(ing it) in the Pacific....I ask that the Congress declare that....a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire."

Historical analysis exposed America's real intent, its desire for war, its foreknowledge of the attack, its tracking of the Japanese fleet across the Pacific but not warning Pearl Harbor's commander to ensure surprise and public anger, and Roosevelt's imperial aims. Nonetheless, his powerful words expressed outrage about any nation attacking another preemptively, even if goaded to do it.

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Khalid Amayreh

The Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip two years ago, which lasted for three weeks, was pornographically criminal and graphically genocidal. Israel knowingly and deliberately targeted innocent civilians, including children, using state-of-the-art machines of death.

Entire families were simply exterminated at the pretext that a member was involved with the resistance. Homes, hospitals, mosques and other public buildings were obliterated. Even terrified and thoroughly terrorized people raising white banners were mercilessly riddled with bullets.

The sheer criminality of the Israeli army gave the impression that Israeli soldiers were probably trying to mimic Old Testament savagery by murdering men, women, and children, and by destroying and annihilating all that breathe!!

The genocidal onslaught on Gaza is sufficient to render Israel an illegitimate state. No state under the sun, Jewish or otherwise, should behave in such a nefarious manner and remain legitimate.

Don't mention the holocaust. In the final analysis, since when did Israel have the right to utilize one holocaust in order to commit another? Or use it as red herring to divert attention from its genocidal atrocities against its victims?

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David Walsh
WSWS

The Nation magazine in the US, with its publication of “The Case of Julian Assange” by columnist Katha Pollitt (posted December 22, 2010), has joined the right-wing campaign against WikiLeaks co-founder Assange, a campaign directed by the highest levels of the American state.

The sexual assault charges against Assange in Sweden are part of an orchestrated effort to divert public attention from the content of the WikiLeaks exposures—the duplicity, hypocrisy and criminality of American and world imperialism—and bury the important revelations in a pile of scandalous garbage. Pollitt has eagerly lent a hand to that effort.

Such a development was predictable, given the history of the journalist and the publication, but that does not make it any less reprehensible… or educational. The arguments employed by Pollitt shed further light on the politically rotten character of contemporary feminism and identity politics generally.

Pollitt has written for the Nation, one of the principal voices of American left liberalism, since 1980 and has had a column in the publication since 1995.

In her recent piece on Assange, Pollitt’s modus operandi is to remove the sex charges from their political context—the determined effort to destroy WikiLeaks and its founder—and assert that defenders of Assange are insensitive to rape and sexual violence against women. This is hardly a new, or persuasive, ploy.

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Stephen Lendman

On December 24, Ecuador became the fifth Latin American country to recognize "the Palestine state as free and independent within its borders since 1967." An accompanying statement said:

"Sadly, the Middle East continues to face wars and violent events that have led to the death of many innocent people, a situation contrary to the humane and pacifist position established by the Ecuadorian Constitution. This recognition is meant to reinforce the valid and legitimate wish of the Palestin(ian) people to have their own free and independent state." Having it is "fundamental to achieve the peaceful co-existence of the nations in the region through dialogue and mediation."

On December 23, Uruguay said it planned to join Argentina, Brazil and Bolivia in granting recognition, though would formerly do so in January 2011.

Though largely symbolic, growing recognition flies in the face of a unanimous December 16 House resolution opposing unilaterally declared independence, urging Palestinians to:

"cease all efforts at circumventing the negotiating process, including efforts to gain recognition of a Palestinian state from other nations within the United Nations, and in other international forums prior to achievement of a final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians....and calls upon foreign governments not to extend such recognition."

It also asked the White House to

"deny recognition to any unilaterally declared Palestinian state and veto any resolution by the United Nations Security Council to establish or recognize a Palestinian state outside of an agreement negotiated by the two parties."

EU nations said they'll act when "appropriate," meaning not until Washington and Israel approve.

Never mind that Israel and America don't negotiate. They demand, imposing their will unilaterally when denied, often by force. Both countries also deplore peace. They prevent it by provoked conflict, blamed on governments they oppose, even democratically elected ones.

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Paul Craig Roberts
Vdare

'Police State' -a government that seeks to intimidate and sup-
press political opposition by means of police (flickr)

"Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors." ~ Lewis H. Lapham

The year 2011 will bring Americans a larger and more intrusive police state, more unemployment and home foreclosures, no economic recovery, more disregard by the US government of US law, international law, the Constitution, and truth, more suspicion and distrust from allies, more hostility from the rest of the world, and new heights of media sycophancy.

2011 is shaping up as the terminal year for American democracy. The Republican Party has degenerated into a party of Brownshirts, and voter frustrations with the worsening economic crisis and military occupations gone awry are likely to bring Republicans to power in 2012. With them would come their doctrines of executive primacy over Congress, the judiciary, law, and the Constitution and America’s rightful hegemony over the world.

If not already obvious, 2010 has made clear that the US government does not care a whit for the opinions of citizens. The TSA is unequivocal that it will reach no accommodation with Americans other than the violations of their persons that it imposes by its unaccountable power. As for public opposition to war, the Associated Press reported on December 16 that "Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the U.S. can’t let public opinion sway its commitment to Afghanistan." Gates stated bluntly what has been known for some time: the idea is passé that government in a democracy serves the will of the people. If this quaint notion is still found in civics books, it will soon be edited out.

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Vincent Di Stefano

In early January 2009, two lone voices braved the Australian media to offer a differing view to that given by Government spokespersons regarding Operation Cast Lead, the 22-day assault of Israel on Gaza that began on December 27th 2008. The first was that of Greens Leader, Senator Bob Brown. He urged Julia Gillard to speak out against the "violent and disproportionate action by Israeli leaders." More pointed were the comments of Julia Irwin, Federal MP for the NSW seat of Fowler. In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, she used metaphor to draw our attention to the travesty that was occurring in Gaza:

"It all reminds me of an old story from the days of the Roman Empire. The emperor Nero was upset that his prized lions were being distressed by Christians, who ran away from them in the Colloseum. Nero ordered that at the next circus, a Christian was to be buried up to his neck in the sand to make things easier for the lions. When the lions entered the ring, the biggest and the meanest saw the hapless condemned, swaggered over and stood astride the Christian’s head, roaring for approval from the crowd. At that moment, the Christian craned his neck and bit off the lion’s testicles. The crowd was shocked. "Fight fair! Fight fair!" they yelled."

Israel’s attack upon Gaza was met with a curious indifference by most of the so-called leaders of Western nations. As acting Prime Minister of Australia at the time, the ill-informed Julia Gillard refused to criticise, let alone condemn the actions of Israel. Supposedly speaking on behalf of the Australian people, she said: "Australia recognises the right of Israel to defend itself." That comment was made on the third of January 2009, by which time it was widely known that 430 Gazans had already been killed and 2,300 wounded in 750 individual strikes carried out by air and by sea over the previous five days.

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Stephen Lendman

On April 20, an initial explosion, then a larger one ignited BP's Deepwater Horizon platform. For over a day it burned before sinking, killing 11 crew members, releasing thousands of barrels of oil daily, and causing the greatest ever environmental disaster - criminal malfeasance by any standard.

Years from now, its full impact will be known, but already hundreds of thousands of people are harmed, local economies gravely impacted, and large parts of the Gulf contaminated by toxic hydrocarbons and dispersants, making seafood absolutely unsafe to eat.

Obama, administration officials, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and BP executives lied, claiming most oil disappeared, 96% of Gulf waters were safe and reopened, and seafood was safe to eat. False, according to mounting evidence confirming:

● layers of oil residue contaminating several thousand square miles of seafloor;
● elevated hydrocarbon levels in Gulf residents' blood, suggesting an epidemic of future illnesses, including cancer and others as lethal;
● massive dispersants use prevented clean-up by skimming;
● no practical way now to clean up spilled oil; and
● dispersants bioaccumulate, making oil toxins more bioavailable to sealife, easier to absorb, and more harmful if ingested.

The effects will linger for decades, maybe generations, making critics wonder if willful intent was involved, given evidence, including:

● Washington and BP complicity in misreporting, coverup and denying the disaster's severity from start to capping to the most recent disturbing findings;
● virtual confirmation of the greatest ever environmental crime, contaminating large portions of the Gulf; destroying basic food chain elements that are building blocks for fisheries, birds, sea turtles and mammal populations; polluting coastal shorelines; and causing a massive public health problem with no federal aid to inform and mitigate;
● irreparable harm to the lives and livelihoods of potentially millions of Gulf residents; and
● BP's history of violations, exposing the industry's worst safety, maintenance, and environmental record, yet nearly always able to escape with small fines, penalties and settlements; no prosecutions; no pressure to operate responsibly; and no curtailment of government-let contracts, so no reason not to continue business as usual.

Yet after BP declared the Macondo well dead last September, the event died with it, disappearing from major media reports that were complicit with BP and Obama officials by misreporting it from the start.

No wonder critics ask: was Macondo's blowout accidental or willful? Was deliberate sabotage involved? Were the Obama administration and BP complicit in the greatest ever environmental crime with enormous global consequences? If so, why?

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Chris Floyd
Empire Burlesque

Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man -- one of its own soldiers -- whom it has incarcerated but not indicted. He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes -- all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.

His name is Bradley Manning. He is 23 years old. The "crime" he is accused of committing is releasing video evidence of an American atrocity committed years ago in Iraq: the murder of Iraqi civilians by helicopter gunships. Under the American system of jurisprudence, of course, he is considered innocent until proven guilty of this heinous 'crime' of truth-telling. He has not been tried or convicted of this charge, or any other crime.

Yet tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, in the United States of America, under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, 23-year-old Bradley Manning is being subjected to same tortures routinely inflicted on other unindicted, untried captives of the militarist state.

Journalist Andy Worthington, who has been one of the most thorough and assiduous chroniclers of the modern American gulag, has noted the parallels between the treatment imposed on Manning and that doled out to earlier prisoners of the bizarre, lawless limbo concocted by the American war machine for those who threaten -- or are perceived to threaten -- its ever-expanding, ever-more corrupt operations around the world. Worthington states that the conditions of Manning's imprisonment

bear a marked and chilling resemblance to the conditions in which a handful of US citizens and residents were held as “enemy combatants” under the Bush administration. The key elements here are the elements of profound isolation and suffering ... not just the solitary confinement, with no other human being for company, but also the refusal to allow Manning to have a pillow, sheets, or any access to the outside world through the reporting of current affairs.

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Mohammed Rabah Suliman
Mondoweiss

For the first time in twenty-two days the Earth woke up without a start. Even though the sky was spotted with a few randomly dispersed clouds, it was was bereft of the disturbing tones of the overhead drones which had now disappeared. The earth had woken peacefully, peacefully enough not to bear with the frighteningly gigantic burden of a new bomb to be dropped onto her surface bestowing on her some savagely massive shake. Peacefully enough not to endure the deafeningly immense sound of another bomb tearing down through its stratums. The earth had woken peacefully enough not to feign warm-heartedness as she embraces a new lifeless body laid into her deepness, and peacefully enough not to feel the insufferable pain of watching herself fight a losing battle against a huge bulldozer mercilessly extirpating a new sapling that had just issued from her sand. The earth had woken peacefully, and peace obviously had known its way through the countless bullets, rockets, mortars and bombs which had been horrifyingly raining on this part of the earth, and, it seemed, it had finally been able to guide itself through the jet-black darkness of the multiple graves. Peace, as far as one could tell, had flown out from the bottomless earth up to the very heights of the sky where the soaring birds could finally replace the awful scene of mighty jets and warplanes.

It, however, seemed to have been only yesterday. Life hasn’t yet acquired any sense of itself being a life to be joyously lived, cherished, appreciated… It is rather a life to be passed through disinterestedly, the winner of which is that who is plagued with the least amount of harm, stress, anger and humiliation. The presence of a war in my life has always been a needed source of underlying power and a paradoxically eye-opening experience to persist with my life and persevere its sardonically ruthless occurrences. Recalling its particularities has always made me think how playful and emotionlessly indifferent to mortifying injustice I was. Indeed, I was domesticated to accept it without even being conscious of the demeaning world I lived in, or even noticing the mere fact that I was subjected to a terribly base injustice. That was how I used to be before, and even during, the war that took place.

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Stephen Lendman

[Part I] Part II concludes an assessment of Obama's year two.

"After nearly two years in office, Obama's been shameful, destructive, and criminal, sacrificing popular interests when most needed, pursuing an agenda heading America for tyranny and ruin unless stopped."

Lessons from the Gulf

The aftermath of last April's Deepwater Horizon disaster left Big Oil again triumphant, thanks to the Obama administration's close industry ties, conspiring with BP in the greatest ever environmental crime. At the time, Public Citizen's Tyson Slocum said BP has "the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in America."

It's been cited numerous times for willful negligence, shoddy maintenance, environmental crimes, neglecting worker safety rules, manipulating energy markets, and making a mockery of good industry practice in a business devoid of standards and ethics.

It'll be years before the full extent of damage is known. However, it's already clear that BP turned much of America's Gulf into a toxic wasteland. Independent scientists confirmed the disaster, citing fouled waters, beaches, marshes and wildlife, the extent and level of toxicity extremely hazardous to human, fauna, and flora life and sustainability.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) warned that hydrocarbon/dispersants contamination "direct(ly) threat(ens) human health from inhalation or dermal contact." Millions have been exposed. A future public health disaster looms. An epidemic of diseases are expected, some potentially lethal like cancer.

Administration-BP complicity caused it, followed by coverup and denial, when independent research showed most oil remains. It still does. Moreover, Corexit dispersants increased toxicity manyfold. As a result, seafood is contaminated and unsafe. Vast areas of the Gulf and shorelines are hazardous to human health. The seabed is covered with an oily fluid. Oil and gas leaks continue unabated. Dispersants spraying continues. The Gulf's Loop Current has been disrupted, weakening the Gulf Stream. Global waters and weather patterns have been affected, perhaps catastrophically.

The long-term human, wildlife, and environmental harm potential is vast and serious. The disaster effects are increasing, not diminishing. A chain reaction of unpredictable phenomena may cause droughts, floods, crop failures, and global food shortages. Already many illnesses have occurred. Massive fish kills continue, and life along Gulf coastal areas may be threatened for decades.

The administration's response: On August 14, Obama gave the all-clear, saying oil no longer is flowing, and "as a result of the cleanup effort, beaches all along the Gulf Coast are clean and safe and open for business."

He lied as he always does willfully and repeatedly on all administration policies - foreign and domestic, war and peace, human health, welfare and safety, and everything of public concern, defrauding and betraying Americans, what he does best.

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Alex Lantier
WSWS

With a brief Christmas Day editorial, “Banks and WikiLeaks,” the New York Times editorial page finally broke its silence on the official campaign targeting WikiLeaks, the news site that has published leaked US diplomatic cables. The Times did so, however, only to give its backhanded support for the campaign, led by the Obama administration, against WikiLeaks.

The Times has maintained a complete silence in the face of the threats of prosecution against the website, which have escalated in the wake of the leak of hundreds of thousands of State Department documents. It has said nothing about the calls for Julian Assange—the organization’s founder—to be arrested, declared an enemy combatant and even assassinated.

Its first editorial on the persecution of WikiLeaks came at the bottom of the editorial page on Saturday. This obscure position itself highlights the newspaper’s tacit support for the campaign against WikiLeaks.

Acknowledging that WikiLeaks “has not been convicted of a crime,” the Times writes that “the financial industry is trying to shut it down.” It cites the decision by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, and Bank of America to refuse to process transactions and donations involving WikiLeaks.

The editorial makes clear, however, that the Times has no principled objections to this attack on democratic rights and freedom of the press—which essentially amounts to a threat by US banks to strangle any news organization that falls afoul of Washington. Indeed, the New York Times apparently believes the banks should have such powers.

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