Les Roberts
The Ugly Truth

Imagine that the New York Times revealed that five Senators were known to be taking bribes from a particular corporation. Some days later the Washington Post runs a story saying they had independent sources suggesting that four Senators were taking bribes from that same corporation but goes on to state that this was nothing new as the story was already covered, neglecting to mention that three of the four names were different than those previously reported by the Times. This is hard to imagine because eight named Senators in a scandal is not the same as five named Senators, and because healthy competition between papers would tend to point out the information missed by a rival. Yet, this is, at least numerically, what happened following the October 22nd, 2010 release of the Iraq War Logs by WikiLeaks.

The release which supposedly included over 391,000 classified DoD reports described violent events after 2003 including 109,000 deaths, the majority (66,000) being Iraqi civilians. At the time of the release, the most commonly cited figure for civilian casualties came from Iraqbodycount.org (IBC), a group based in England that compiles press and other descriptions of killings in Iraq. In late October, IBC estimated the civilian war death tally to be about 104,000. Virtually all authorities, including IBC themselves, acknowledge that this count must be incomplete, although the fraction missed is debated. The press coverage of the Iraq War Logs release tended to focus on the crude consistency between the number recorded by WikiLeaks, 66,000 since the start of 2004, and the roughly 104,000 recorded deaths from Iraqbodycount since March of 2003. The Washington Post even ran an editorial entitled, “WikiLeaks’s leaks mostly confirm earlier Iraq reporting” concluding that the Iraq War Log reports revealed nothing new.

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Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

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John Pilger
John Pilger's ZSpace Page

"The heroic Bradley Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Julian Assange will “end up being tortured in a high security American prison” are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?"

As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.

But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other”. Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy”. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.

The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia’s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.

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Stephen Lendman

America's major media never met an imperial war it didn't love and promote, never mind how lawless, mindless, destructive and counterproductive.

Despite Washington already bogged down in two losing ones, Obama's heading for another on Libya, the media pack in the lead clamoring for it, perhaps by "shock and awe," supplemented by special forces death squads on the ground recruiting, inciting, and arming opposition elements.

Notably favoring intervention, a New York Times February 24 editorial headlined, "Stopping Qaddafi," saying:

Unless he's stopped, he'll "slaughter hundreds or even thousands of his own people in his desperation to hang on to power."

Where's the Times outrage over millions Washington slaughtered, hundreds more killed daily, its ties to global despots, its funding and support for Israeli brutality against Palestinians, and its imperial insanity to achieve unchallengeable global dominance, no matter how many corpses it takes to do it.

Nonetheless, the Times hailed Libyan courage, asking for more Western support, implying the belligerent kind. "Colonel Qaddafi and his henchmen have to be told in credible and very specific terms the price they will pay for any more killing. They need to start paying now. (The) longer the world temporizes, the more people die."

On February 28, the Times editorial headlined, "Qaddafi's Crimes and Fantasies," saying:

[His] "crimes continue to mount. Rebel commanders said (his) warplanes bombed rebel-controlled areas in the eastern part of the country." However, Russian satellite imagery showed no bombing evidence or destruction on the ground. So much for The Times or other major media credibility, reporting the same unverified accounts.

On March 8, the Times headlined, "Washington's Options on Libya," saying:

"....some way must be found to support Libya's uprising and stop (Gaddafi) from slaughtering his people....It would be a disaster if (he) managed to cling to power by butchering his own people."

Indisputably, Gaddafi is a despot, but he didn't initiate conflict. Western powers did, sending in covert intelligence and special forces to incite, arm and support it.

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Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

The aftermath of Arab Revolutions; will it create a change of perception and a breakthrough of understanding amongst the Western Left?

The progressive and liberal left in the West find it hard to fathom an amalgamation between religion and politics. For them, religion and politics simply do not mix. As a person who have lived most of her adult life in the West, it is somehow uncomplicated to grasp why the secular left has arrived and got stuck in this cul-de-sac, in their way of thinking, in terms of looking-at and perceiving the world, fragmented, disconnected and boxed in.

The background of those who advocate this separation has its roots mostly in the Judaeo-Christian heritage; they have carried an understandable luggage of suspicion, hatred and contempt towards religion. In their history religions were used as tools of oppression, control, backwardness, division, and suppression of human freedom and intellect, something that we as Muslims didn’t experience.

The hierarchical system within the Church gives very little power and freedom of thinking to the individual at the bottom of the “pecking order”. The collusion of the Church for example with extremely violent and oppressive establishments is witnessed even today. The inexplicable wealth of the church hierarchy leaves those at the bottom of the socioeconomic structure feeling alienated and disfranchised.

As for the Judaic heritage, just a scratch at the surface would divulge an incredible amount of racist elements within the Talmudic texts that would surely put off anyone with the slightest sense of justice, respect to human dignity and human equality.

What the Left fails to appreciate however, is the entirely distinct reality, history and experience of religion for people in the Middle East.

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