[APR-news] December 9-12, 2005

Mon Dec 12 21:57:37 GMT 2005

Alternative Press Review - Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
www.altpr.org - December 9-12, 2005

http://www.xmasresistance.org/links/
Boycott Christmas!

http://targetwto.revolt.org/
Target WTO: Derail, Dismantle, Destroy!

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http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=551&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
TORTURE AND WHITE PHOSPHORUS
By John Chuckman

One thing history surely does tell us is that nothing is more dangerous than
Condeleezza's tendency to speak in sweeping, virtually meaningless
generalizations about the people she regards as foes. Every war of
aggression, every wave of state terror, every deadly fanatical cause has
used just such terms. People are described with de-humanized slogans, making
them easy to hate and abuse. We should all go on a personal terror alert
when powerful figures talk this way.

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Other articles of interest

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/120905.html
U.S. Journalism's Shameful Anniversary
Robert Parry, Consortium News

Webb's suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los
Angeles Times one more opportunity to set matters right, to revisit the 
CIA's
admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability on the Reagan-Bush
officials implicated in protecting the contra crimes. But all that followed
Gary Webb's death was more trashing of Gary Webb. The Los Angeles Times ran
a graceless obituary that treated Webb like a low-life criminal, rather than
a journalist who took on a tough story and paid a high price. The Times
obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12102005.html
All the News That's Fit to Buy
Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch

The Bush era has brought a robust simplicity to the business of news
management: where possible, buy journalists to turn out favorable stories
and, as far as hostiles are concerned, if you think you can get away with
it, shoot them or blow them up. As with much else in the Bush era, the
novelty lies in the openness with which these strategies have been
conducted.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/120805C.shtml
Rumsfeld's Handshake Deal with Saddam: History out of Media Bounds
Norman Solomon, Truthout

Full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad were restored 11
months after Rumsfeld's December 1983 visit with Saddam. He went on to use
poison gas later in the decade, actions which scarcely harmed relations with
the Reagan administration. As the most senior US official to visit Iraq in
six years, Rumsfeld had served as Reagan's point man for warming relations
with Saddam. In 1984, the administration engineered the sale to Baghdad of
45 ostensibly civilian-use Bell 214ST helicopters. Saddam's military found
them quite useful for attacking Kurdish civilians with poison gas in 1988,
according to US intelligence sources. "In response to the gassing,"
journalist Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, "sweeping sanctions were
unanimously passed by the US Senate that would have denied Iraq access to
most US technology. The measure was killed by the White House."

http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/73163
Memo: On fragging Rumsfeld (unclassified)
To: U.S. Generals in Iraq and Pentagon
By jouna, iraq-war.ru

As all the higher U.S. officers know, the latest 'plans' of the Secretary of
Defense Mr. Rumsfeld, 'aerial war', '70 mobile brigades', 'arab auxiliaries'
are as sufficient in handling the present situation in Iraq as the resources
he offered for the operation Iraqi Freedom, a mission accomplished according
to his spokesman, Mr. Bush in May 2, 2003. These ad hoc 'plans' - like
others he has not yet even invented - are throwing the U.S. Armed Forces to
the same black hole der Führer precipitated the German armies during WWII.
In these circumstances, I ask you a simple question: why don't you just frag
him in order to prevent this?

http://www.uruknet.com/?s1=1&p=18598&s2=11
An Honorary Degree in Child Sacrifice? Madeleine Albright and US Foreign
Policy
John Ryan, uruknet.info

An examination of Albright's career is instructive since it reveals
significant features of American foreign policy which are not widely known,
even by people on the left. Albright played a particularly unsavory role in
Rwanda, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and East Timor. Disturbingly, few people realize
that Clinton's policies resulted in a far greater number of deaths in Iraq
than have occurred during the current Bush administration's assault on that
country. Even more disturbing is that Clinton's so-called "humanitarian
bombing" of Yugoslavia was supported by a large sector of people on the
left  who were totally misled largely by clever American propaganda.
Interestingly, an examination of Albright's career brings all this to light.

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/12/united-states-is-psychopath.html
The United States is a psychopath
Xymphora

The United States has always been involved in attacking sovereign countries.
Iraq is novel only in the fact that it was done out in the open, in blatant
contravention of international law (rather than covert contravention of
international law).

http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_2791.shtml
Comply and Submit -- Or Die
William Norman Grigg, Senior Editor, The New American

Assuming that McClellan's assessment is correct, and the summary execution
of Mr. Alpizar by the tax-fattened drones grandly styled "air marshals" was
carried out according to federal "protocols," we no longer need to wonder
whether terrorist sleeper cells continue to infest American commercial
flights.

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2005/12/11/stories/2005121100030100.htm
The triumph of anarchism
Shelley Walia, The Hindu

An essay supporting the anarchist philosophy at the age of 10; hours spent
at the bookshops on Manhattan's 4th Avenue engaged in anti-authoritarian
polemics; and then a life time spent in analysing what ails international
relations in the context of the widespread infringement of human rights and
the numerous wrongs which fester our society. Indeed, Chomsky deserves the
recent vote that ranks him above Umberto Eco or Howard Zinn as the most
important intellectual today, an intellectual who is an effective
counterweight and an independent critic of the State.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/mcca-d09.shtml
John McCain in Ann Arbor: a cowardly evasion on US war crimes
Barry Grey, WSWS

This evasion revealed the hypocritical essence of McCain's democratic
retensions-and not only McCain's, but those of the entire political
establishment, supporters and critics of the Bush administration,
Republicans and Democrats alike. They are all implicated in a war based on
lies, carried out in defiance of international law, against a country that
had neither attacked nor threatened to attack the United States. This is,
under the definition laid down at Nuremburg, a war crime. It is the crime
for which Nazi civilian and military leaders were hung, and others
imprisoned.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8221
The 'Real' McCain
Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com

There is a maniacal quality to McCain's bluster, and Camille Paglia captured
it pretty accurately when she wrote: "The TV camera does not lie. . It
exposed McCain over time as a seething nest of proto-fascist impulses."

http://www.malcomlagauche.com/id1.html
A THOUSAND NINE ELEVENS
Malcom Lagauche, malcomlagauche.com

If Ms. King were true to her philosophy, she should be decrying the innocent
people who have been killed in Iraq since 1991 at the hands of three U.S.
administrations, both Democrat and Republican. And, if she read only a few
newspapers, even the propagandistic pro-Bush ones, she would realize that
the 19 martyrs were not attacking a "Free America," but an imperialistic
America that had caused havoc in the Arab and Muslim world. Since August 2,
1990, the U.S. has killed almost three million Iraqis. The first Gulf War,
the encompassing embargo and the current fiasco combine for between 2.5
million and three million deaths. In other words, Iraq has suffered ONE
THOUSAND nine-elevens.

http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=8d891240a3f58e424911b89ee2891842
Look Homeward for Proof of Prison Torture
Dwight Abbott, New America Media

More than a year since the brutal treatment of prisoners inside Abu Ghraib
was exposed, the Washington Post has reported that the CIA has been
operating a secret system of "black site" interrogation centers in eight
foreign countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Thailand. Fact is,
you don't have to go far, not to Thailand or Afghanistan, to find a "black
site" that appears "beyond the reach of U.S. law." Get in your car, drive
around the state of California, and you will drive by dozens of these
sites -- the prisons, jails and Youth Authority detention centers that dot
the rural landscape. As in all black sites, each successfully defies the law
every day, and is rarely held accountable.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11271.htm
The US has used torture for decades. All that's new is the openness about it
Naomi Klein, ICH

It is not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they
blame abuses on "a few bad apples". A startling number of torture's most
prominent opponents keep telling us that the idea of torturing prisoners
first occurred to US officials on September 11 2001, at which point the
methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the
sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until
that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its
humanity intact. The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry
Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing in
Newsweek on the need to ban torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner
of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from
our enemies ... that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace
ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them". It is a
stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the
CIA had launched the Phoenix programme and, as McCoy writes, "its agents
were operating 40 interrogation centres in South Vietnam that killed more
than 20,000 suspects and tortured thousands more."

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_318.shtml
Biopiracy and GMOs: Fate of Iraq's agriculture
Ghali Hassan, Online Journal

While the Iraqi people are struggling to end the U.S. military Occupation
and its associated violence, the fate of their food sources and agricultural
heritage is being looted behind closed doors. Unless the colonisation of
Iraq ends, the U.S. Occupation of Iraq will continue to have lasting and
disastrous effects on Iraq's economy and Iraq's ability to feed its people.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1387081
The Psychology of Global Warming: Alarm-ist Versus Alarm-ing
Bill Blakemore, ABC News

The vast majority of credible climate scientists -- well over 95 percent,
according to specialists in assessing scientists' opinions -- agree that the
average temperatures of the oceans, the land surface of the planet and the
lower atmosphere have been climbing at an accelerating rate. The same
specialists say that nearly as many scientists agree that manmade greenhouse
gas emissions are a significant factor -- and a good many say the only
significant factor -- in the dangerous global warming now under way. If 95
of the world's best, most experienced experts in child well-being were to
tell you that your child was under lethal attack -- and with dramatic signs
already visible if you only look -- would you say, "I think I'll wait until
the other five experts are convinced before I do anything about it?"

http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/gordon12092005/
Murder in Jerusalem
By Neve Gordon and Yigal Bronner, Press Action

This racism is inextricably linked to Israel's repetition compulsion, which
transforms the victim into the aggressor. A Palestinian is killed and
immediately he is described as violent; the police beat a Palestinian and
he, not they, is portrayed as brutal; Israel occupies and represses the
Palestinian people, but they are to blame. Thus, it is no surprise that
after Samir Dari was shot in the back from just a few yards away the police
instantly claimed that he was trying to run them over. It is almost as if
lying has become an involuntary reflex for the authorities. But in order for
the culture of deceit to be effective it needs the assistance of the culture
of dissimulation and suppression.

http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/131659/index.php
OPEN LETTER TO THE COMMUNITY - FROM CAFÉ MAWONAJ
Concei, DC Indymedia

Just at a time when we are reaching maturity and opening up another Mawonaj
in New Orleans, our foundation gets hit! It's like someone has pulled out
the rug from underneath our feet. What hurts even more is to know that
someone is behind the fire.

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NewsWire

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MAD20051212&articleId=1448
Choking the Internet: How much longer will your favorite sites be on line?

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2764
Study finds C-SPAN's Washington Journal skewing rightward, favoring
Republican and right-of-center interview subjects by considerable margins

http://www.spacewar.com/2005/051207214022.a69ol9de.html
US military continues to pay to plant stories in Iraq despite probe

http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1312739&secid=1
Peaceful protesters at anti-war rally were put into FBI terror database

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article331782.ece
Acts of defiance against war turned ordinary people into criminals

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11285.htm
Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article332161.ece
A casualty of free speech

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article332149.ece
Blair's Britain 2005 - where peaceful protest can be costly

http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,69732,00.html
Workplace privacy: You have none

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=15182
Berlusconi channel withdraws Iraq video

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/12/11/creationism.professor.ap/index.html
Creationism critic forced to resign

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/08/AR2005120802122.html
Speak Spanish in school, get suspended

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10398375/
US feared jet attacks years before 9/11

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2005/091205miamiincident.htm
Miami Bomb Incident Looks Suspicious: Eyewitness says Alpizar never
mentioned bomb, passengers were more afraid of Air Marshals putting guns to
their heads

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/shot-d09.shtml
The brutal state killing of Rigoberto Alpizar: Washington's "war on
terrorism" comes home

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051208/pl_afp/usswedenattackstravel
US terror watchlist 80,000 names long

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.rendition09dec09,1,937314.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true
US leaders using Pinochet's playbook

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1920074,00.html
Israel readies forces for strike on nuclear Iran

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3281142
Bolivia may be next thorn in Washington's side

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1391080
China seals town, hunts down protest organizers after police murder of
several protesters

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=47344
Venezuelan security forces reveal phone-tap details in foiled conspiracy to
assassinate Hugo Chavez

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/12/10/235211/21
Latin America's oil production past its peak

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051208/iraq_oil.html?.v=2
Iraq Headed for Even Less Oil Production in 2005 After a Dismal '04

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2005-12-08-gas-prices_x.htm
Gas prices on upswing that could top $3 by spring

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/121105Z.shtml
Death of an American city

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051210/NATION/512100408
1300 children still missing after Katrina

http://www.terradaily.com/news/food-05r.html
French court acquitted 49 activists who destroyed GM plants after ruling
their actions were justified

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=globalNews&storyID=2005-12-09T102914Z_01_HO937658_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-WHO.xml
Ecosystem changes a threat to human health

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1209-05.htm
Great Lakes Headed for Catastrophic 'Ecological Collapse'

http://www.terradaily.com/news/climate-05zzzzzzy.html
Global warming could slash flows of rivers around Mediterranean basin,
Amazonia and US Midwest, a phenomenon that could have resounding impacts on
cities and agriculture

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4508964.stm
Greenland glacier races to ocean: Scientists monitoring fastest moving
glacier on the planet; losing mass extremely fast

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=9438
Scientists say fissure could be new ocean

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/1922/System_v_The_System
System of a Down has a #1 album and a new campaign to recognize the Armenian
Genocide

http://www.fxstreet.com/nou/noticies/afx/noticia.asp?pv_noticia=1134079259-f05e0f08-45206
US debt expands at fastest clip in 18 years

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