[APR-news] APR -- November 26-27, 2005

Mon Nov 28 03:33:26 GMT 2005

Alternative Press Review - Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
www.altpr.org
November 26-27, 2005

"To sit there and say that your only role, once we go to war, is stand on
the street corner, wave the flag, and shout support for the president,
you're no better than the Germans who supported Hitler, or people who
support any brutal dictatorship." - Scott Ritter

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http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=534&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Open letter to Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan
By Gabriele Zamparini

The point is not how the Pentagon calls the WP in its own official
documents. The point is - as I believe even children have understood by
now - that the Pentagon's officials know perfectly well that the WP can be
used as a chemical weapon, since not only did they accept that document, not
only did they classify it but, more important, the Pentagon had always
refused to admit that WP was used as a weapon in Fallujah or in other parts
of Iraq by the US forces.

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=535&mode=nocomments&order=0&thold=0
Interview with Scott Ritter
By Tom Klammer

[T]he media, especially the mainstream media, has an inability or an
unwillingness to take on authority. It's not about reporting the news
anymore. This is about a business. And this is a business that not only has
economic ties to government, meaning that you don't want to speak out
against those who pay your bills, but this is a business that realizes that
the major news is generated by the government, and access to this news
requires access to those who are generating the event, meaning that if you
are a reporter, you get your headline, you get your front page story, you
get your leading story on the evening news when you have access to a
government official who's willing to talk off the record and give you a nice
little tidbit.

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Other articles of interest

http://www.observer.com/pageone_coverstory1.asp
While We Were Sleeping: Where Was the Media Between Invasion and Murtha?
Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner, NY Observer

Government regulation has spread over the battlefield, limiting mobility and
access. Where Vietnam correspondents could hop a chopper to combat zones at
will, Iraq reporters need to sign eight-page sheaves of rules and are pinned
to single units. Health-care privacy law is invoked to keep reporters away
from the wounded. Corporate security restrictions likewise stifle reporting.

http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=55&p=18210&s2=28
Anticipating a Terrorist Attack on Congress
Mike Whitney, uruknet.info

 The "due process" provisions of the Bill of Rights has been summarily
removed by the 4th Circuit Court in its recent Jose Padilla ruling which
allows the president to arbitrarily imprison an American citizen
"indefinitely" without charging him with a crime. The long-standing
"presumption of innocence", habeas corpus, and inalienable rights were
quietly rescinded without as much as a whimper from the American people. At
the same time Bush has put "a broad swath of the FBI" under his direct
control by creating the National Security Service (aka; the "New SS")? This
is the first time we've had a "secret police" in our 200 year history. It
will be run exclusively by the president and beyond the range of
congressional oversight.

http://jack-dalton.blogspot.com/2005/11/he-dared-to-challange-power-and_26.html
He Dared to Challenge Power and the Official Consensus: Part One
Jack Dalton, Jack's "Straight Speak"

This much I know: we cannot continue to allow good people like Kevin
Benderman to be sent to prison for refusing to be a participant in illegal
wars, as we know this one to be. Especially when you consider that many of
those making the "rules" that send people of conscience like Kevin to prison
are under indictments-criminals sending honest men to prison. Really makes a
lot of sense does it not??

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20051127152228926
Eat Local Organic Food and Abate Global Starvation
Sakuntala Narasimhan, Infoshop News

Although Gandhi is remembered for his espousal of non-violence as an
effective strategy for conflict resolution, his philosophy covered a much
wider canvas and included a vision of development based on small,
self-sufficient communities that grew their own food, in a sustainable model
with decision-making vested at the grassroots level. The same idea of local
self-sufficiency, particularly in food, is the central theme of the
Worldwatch Institute's publication titled "Eat Here", which describes the
enormous environmental price that modern societies pay, in terms of
transport costs (and the pollution that millions of trucks and lorries
cause, leading to widespread increases in respiratory illnesses around the
world), the tons of chemical preservatives that get added to food products
to prevent spoilage in transit across long distances, and the health costs
that the community ends up paying under this global supermarket pattern of
development.

http://www.clamormagazine.org/issues/35/media.shtml
Google Noose
Brian Dominick, Clamor Magazine

Ingenious innovations are not always good ideas, at least in the long run,
and corporations can typically be found at the forefront along the path to
ironic counter-productivity. Early adoption of cellular technology saddled
the US with an expensive, clumsy mobile phone system inferior to those
employed throughout Europe and much of the Third World. High-speed Internet
over TV cable or enhanced telephone wires gave way to monopoly dependence
that left our broadband access far slower and many times as expensive as
that available in most other countries. Likewise, as consolidation of
Internet technologies continues and intellectual property claims become more
pervasive, the relatively level playing field once promised by the so-called
"Information Superhighway" remains at once elusive and threatened.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1132960211791&call_pageid=970599119419
Fascism then. Fascism now?
Paul Bigioni, Toronto Star

When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm
troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic
and political process that leads to the nightmare.

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NewsWire

http://electroniciraq.net/news/2202.shtml
Federation of Journalists accuses US over killing Al-Jazeera reporter

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1127-01.htm
Why is the world's most powerful man so worried about a TV station?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112600857.html
Pentagon expanding its domestic spying activities

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20051127052634153
Workplace surveillance: Your cell phone could bust you

http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news3/latimes164.html
Europe in uproar over CIA operations

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1132786213137&call_pageid=970599119419
Vietnam vets aid new deserter cohort

http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=9867
American anger at an all time high

http://www.forbes.com/work/feeds/afx/2005/11/25/afx2354167.html
US ran Guantanamo-style gulag in Kosovo

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/27/wirq27.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/27/ixworld.html
'Trophy' video shows contractors in Baghdad randomly shooting Iraqi
civilians

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff11262005.html
Long list of US war crimes keeps growing

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/651/651p12b.htm
Evidence of US involvement in assassination of Venezuelan state prosecutor
Danilo Anderson who was leading the investigation into the participants of
the April 2002 military coup

http://ainfos.ca/ainfos33247.html
World's first Starbucks strike spreads to 10 stores

http://www.planetark.com/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=33652
Can "Tipping Points" Accelerate Global Warming?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/26/AR2005112600355_pf.html
Rise in Deadly Storms Has Researchers Worried About Future: 2005 racked up
more storm deaths and destruction than the previous 10 years - combined

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1515141.htm
Real oil crisis: In just a century, we've allowed our lives to become
entirely dependent on cheap oil

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051122/ap_on_go_ot/natural_gas
Demand for natural gas outpaces supply

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=3&ObjectID=10356771
UK gas becomes world's most costly fuel as the country runs out of North Sea
supplies

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/24/91922/766
Supply crunch: Good chance some will freeze this winter

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