[APR-news] February 11-16, 2006

[AlternativePressReview]

Alternative Press Review - Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
www.altpr.org - February 11-16, 2006
"Magazine of the Year" -  2005 Press Action Award

"Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute 
rejection of authority." - Thomas H. Huxley, English biologist (1825 - 1895)

"You can't fight City Hall, but you can goddamn sure blow it up." - George 
Carlin

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060212174103791
Captain Planet Resurfaces As Leader Of Clandestine "Eco-Terrorist" Group

******
http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=599&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
The Pentagon's War on the Internet
By Mike Whitney

The Pentagon sees the internet in terms of a military adversary that poses a 
vital threat to its stated mission of global domination. This explains the 
confrontational language in the document which speaks of "fighting the net"; 
implying that the internet is the equivalent of "an enemy weapons system." 
The Defense Dept. places a high-value on controlling information. The new 
program illustrates their determination to establish the parameters of free 
speech.

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=597&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
TeenScreen Calls Physical Illness a Mental Disorder
by Kenneth W. Thomas

The symptoms of "mental illness" are real. Many of them can be caused by 
genuine physical illnesses and treated with medical (non-psychiatric) means. 
The diagnosis of a "mental disorder" generally means that the patient's 
symptoms will now be glossed over with dangerous mood and mind-altering 
drugs. Now TeenScreen is pushing these diagnoses into our schools, targeting 
children as young as nine years old. Our children deserve better treatment.

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=600&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Land of the Puppet People
By Manuel Valenzuela

We are trained to live to work, not work to live, sacrificing love of life 
for love for the Almighty dollar, becoming worker bees and soldier ants, 
selling our souls to the demons of capitalism in exchange for the happiness 
and stress-free lives of yesteryear, needing pharmaceutical drugs to escape 
the depression of our daily lives, willingly choosing to indebt our present 
and future in order to possess the vast array of adult toys marketed to 
manipulate our emotions, wrongly thinking this or that product will 
reincarnate lost happiness. America is the land of plenty, where waistlines 
expand, stress increases, mental problems grow, work hours increase and 
vehicles get bigger and bigger, a land addicted to the devil's excrement, 
like a heroin user injecting black gold into its ever thirsty veins, 
becoming a violent, warmongering junkie when the perpetual case of cold 
turkey arises.

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=598&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
This Ain't No Video Game: A Review of Jeffrey St. Clair's Grand Theft 
Pentagon
by Ron Jacobs

Once upon a time in America, there was a form of newspaper reporting known 
as muckraking. Some folks preferred to call this form of reporting 
"investigative reporting." No matter. Whatever it was called, the purpose of 
the reporting, the reporters, and the papers that ran the articles was to 
expose corruption, graft and just plain old evil in the echelons of 
government and big business.

******
Other articles of interest

http://eatthestate.org/10-12/AddressingActivists.htm
Addressing Activists
Namo Collective, Eat the State

In order to move forward in this discussion we need to abandon all hope that 
marches, political theater, potlucks, education, lobbying, e-petitions, and 
campaigning are useful. The only possibility of stopping this current 
military action is to engage in strategies and tactics that severely disrupt 
the war machine, the US economy, and the overall functioning of US society. 
We must begin with the realization that any and all tactics and strategies 
must be considered. Once this matter has been examined there is only one 
question remaining: Will each of us become involved and use whatever tactics 
and strategies are necessary, or will we refuse and continue to engage 
solely in conduct that serves little purpose other than making people feel 
better about themselves?

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/021406b_world_stories.shtml#0
Current Events
Kenneth Deffeyes, From the Wilderness

The Times reports that solar energy today supplies one percent of US 
electricity; the hope is to double that to 2 percent by the year 2025. By 
2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age.

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_508.shtml
The great tsunami, the giant wave that will change our lifestyles forever
Michael Payne, Online Journal

A long-predicted tsunami is heading toward the shores of America, a wave of 
incredible proportions, gathering momentum with each passing day. America 
has had many, many warnings of how this giant wave would develop, but these 
warnings have been totally ignored. Very soon our American society will 
experience an extremely painful awakening to the dark specter of "Peak Oil" 
as it looms on our horizon and then comes crashing down upon our nation. 
Peak Oil will result in drastic and dramatic changes to our society and our 
lifestyles, the likes of which we will find extremely difficult to 
comprehend.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11888.htm
Frog-marching the Media to the Gallows
Mike Whitney, ICH

No one knows better than the editors of the New York Times that Iran does 
not have nuclear weapons or a nuclear weapons program. The Times editors 
comb through mountains of information every day and have not yet produced 
even a shred of evidence to support their fraudulent claims. Nothing. So 
what's the game here? Is the Times willing to sacrifice what's left of its 
tattered credibility just to pave the way to another unprovoked war? It 
seems so.

http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/576/576_12_WitchHunt.shtml
The Horowitz witch-hunt list
Nicole Colson, Socialist Worker

A right-wing ideologue levels the charge that dangerous radicals have 
infiltrated college campuses across the U.S. in a plot to corrupt America's 
youth and undermine the U.S. government. It sounds like something straight 
out of the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. But this red-baiting is 
happening right now--as the latest project of 
ex-leftist-turned-rabid-right-winger David Horowitz.

http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/blum02152006/
How I Spent My 15 Minutes of Fame
William Blum, Press Action

Some hosts and many callers were clearly pained to hear me say that 
anti-American terrorists are retaliating against the harm done to their 
countries by US foreign policy, and are not just evil, mindless, madmen from 
another planet.[1] Many of them assumed, with lots of certainty and no good 
reason at all, that I was a supporter of the Democratic Party and they 
proceeded to attack Bill Clinton. When I pointed out that I was no fan at 
all of the Democrats or Clinton, they were usually confused into silence for 
a few moments before seamlessly jumping to some other piece of nonsense. 
They do not know that an entire alternative world exists above and beyond 
the Republicans and Democrats.

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=226
Shooting Whittington: the Least of Cheney's Crimes
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire

Cheney's war crimes have besmirched the public record for over a decade and 
a half-it was Cheney, as Secretary of War in the Bush Senior administration, 
who engineered and instigated a 43-day bombing campaign against Iraq (the 
most devastating concentrated bombing attack in history at the time), a 
blitzkrieg that targeted Iraqi electrical, water, and sewage treatment 
systems, resulting in massive civilian casualties, especially children, the 
elderly, and the sick, in short the most vulnerable of Iraqi society, a 
particularly horrendous war crime. "So, what did Cheney have to say about 
these choices of targets after the war, when there was no way to deny the 
deadly effects on civilians?" asked Robert Jensen, writing for the Fort 
Worth Star-Telegram. "Every Iraqi target was 'perfectly legitimate,' .

http://www.counterpunch.org/rajiva02132006.html
The Axis of Child Abusers
Lila Rajiva, CounterPunch

British Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens A video shown on BBC TV on 
February 11, 2006 shows British soldiers savagely beating and kicking 
unarmed Iraqi teenagers in an army compound. Officials at the Ministry of 
Defense are said to have investigated and established beyond doubt the 
authenticity of the video. Shot secretly "for fun" as a home movie from a 
rooftop in Basra in southern Iraq by a corporal and shown to friends at a 
home base in Europe, it was given to the News of the World later by an 
anonymous whistle blower.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060220/apter
Hey, Kids: Spying Is Fun!
Simon Maxwell Apter, The Nation

This Toys 'R' Us approach to spying is nothing new for the fifteen agencies 
that comprise the "intelligence community" of the US government, including 
the CIA, the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office. In 1997 President 
Bill Clinton mandated that all government agencies set aside virtual space 
on their websites for child-friendly material. Today, these sites serve as 
recruiting portals for America's youth.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=59774
Can You Say "Permanent Bases"? The American Press Can't
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

Since the invasion of Saddam's Iraq, those bases -- call them what you 
will -- have been at the heart of the Bush administration's "reconstruction" 
of the country. To this day, those Little Americas, with their KBR-lands, 
their Pizza Huts, their stop signs, and their miniature golf courses remain 
at the secret heart of Bush administration "reconstruction" policy. As long 
as KBR keeps building them, making their facilities ever more enduring (and 
ever more valuable), there can be no genuine "withdrawal" from Iraq, nor 
even an intention of doing so. Right now, despite the recent visits of a 
couple of reporters, those super-bases remain enswathed in a kind of policy 
silence. The Bush administration does not discuss them (other than to deny 
their permanency from time to time). No presidential speeches deal with 
them. No plans for them are debated in Congress. The opposition Democrats 
generally ignore them and the press -- with the exception of the odd 
columnist -- won't even put the words "base," "permanent," and "Iraq" in the 
same paragraph.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200602130008
Iran: the next war
John Pilger, The New Statesman

Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having 
subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a 
defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used 
the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane 
self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes? Perhaps 
he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a 
certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow 
disposition.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jscahill.php?articleid=8553
CNN Blames the Photos, Not the Torture
Jeremy Scahill, Antiwar.com

CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr should be given some kind of award 
for the most outrageously off-target reporting on the newly released photos 
and videos of U.S. torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 
Iraq.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m20626&hd=0&size=1&l=e
Who Will Possess Iraq's Oilfields?
Karen Button, Uruknet.info

Iraqis know full well that oil is the main reason for the US invasion and 
remains the central project in globalising Iraq's resources. In Crude 
Designs, a report published by the UK-based non-governmental organisation 
Platform and the US's Global Policy Institute, oil analyst Greg Muttitt says 
if current plans are approved, Iraqi's will "lose control of more than 85 
percent of their oil resources to foreign multinationals."

http://www.malcomlagauche.com/id1.html
THE FORGOTTEN TERRORIST ATTACK
Malcolm Lagauche, malcomlagauche.com

On the morning of February 14, 1991, when I turned the TV on to see the 
latest lies being told to the public about the U.S. bombing of Iraq, I saw a 
chaotic situation in Baghdad. The Amiryah bomb shelter had just been struck 
by two 2,000-pound superbombs. Information was sketchy, but it was evident 
that many people lost their lives.

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060215180623912
IS CHINA PREPARING FOR WAR? An Analysis of Recent Moves By China Which May 
Signal Intentions To Invade Russia
Mark W. Hughes, Infoshop News

China may be in the process of securing the first stages of infrastructure 
to transport the energy resources from Siberia, in anticipation of an actual 
military seizure of that territory a few years from now. Faced with peak 
oil, China must either fight the U.S. to take control of the oil supplies in 
the Middle East, a battle they could not win for several reasons (including 
the fact that their major advantage -- numerical superiority -- is negated 
because of the distances involved and the lack of adequate supply and 
logistical support necessary for such a major action, not to mention the 
ultimate likely use of nuclear weapons in such a confrontation); or they 
must go take a major supply of oil from someplace else. It will not be 
feasible for them to simply purchase it, because in a global peak oil crisis 
the supply and price and control of oil will be too problematic and 
uncertain for China to risk not obtaining all the oil it needs. The only 
real option China can probably see is to use their power to seize the oil 
they will require to remain functioning while the world runs out of energy.

******
NewsWire

http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.typepad.com/life_after_the_oil_crash_/2006/02/ken_deffeyes_by.html
Ken Deffeyes: "By 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age"

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-09-usa-rebuild_x.htm
Has the US Lost the Will to Rebuild After Tragedy?

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article344690.ece
Global warming passed the tipping point

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0210-07.htm
World at its warmest for a millennium

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0209_060209_warming.html
Current warming period longest in 1200 years

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/02/03/greenland.glacier.reut/index.html
Global warming boosting Greenland glacier flow

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Science/2006/02/14/1442809-cp.html
Startling Findings: polar ice melting at rate of 74,000 square kilometres 
each year - an area about the size of Lake Superior

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0211-08.htm
Bottled Water, A Natural Resource Taxing the World's Ecosystem

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,,1708375,00.html
America's master plan is to force GM on the world

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=9863
Northern China wetlands drying up

http://www.counterpunch.org/sandronsky02112006.html
US economy on ice

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/02/13/cndebt13.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2006/02/13/ixcitytop.html
UK: Personal debt larger than the entire output of the economy

http://hammeroftruth.com/2006/02/14/homeland-security-considers-bloggers-a-threat/
Homeland security considers bloggers a threat

http://prisonplanet.com/articles/february2006/140206bloggers.htm
Bush tags bloggers as terrorists

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2815
Bush Administration Spent $1.6B on 'Propaganda' Efforts

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021402125_pf.html
325,000 Names on Terror List

http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=124851
Librarians: Patriot Act has led to self-censorship

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2820
NBC Distorts Its Polling on Warrantless Wiretaps

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001995631
Nurse investigated for sedition after writing a letter to the editor

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ec414700-9bf4-11da-8baa-0000779e2340.html
US group implants electronic tags in workers

http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39156423,00.htm
UK "sleepwalking towards a surveillance state"

http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/1724591.php
Armed FBI gang of thugs invades homes of Puerto Rican activists

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-02/13/content_4175956.htm
Syria switches to Euro amid sanction threat

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1411290.cms
US plans massive terrorist attack against Iran

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/13/wiran13.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/13/ixworld.html
10,000 would die in planned US attack against Iran

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11883.htm
Revealed: The terror prison the US is helping build in Morocco

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D41E328A-DCF7-4227-96F1-DF888EE39601.htm
US 'let slip 9/11 hijacker 13 times'

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2036182,00.html
US terrorist organization fires top official for not sufficiently supporting 
American terrorist tactics

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,,1708162,00.html
UK soldiers videotaped brutally beating and kicking defenseless Iraqi kids

http://www.dawn.com/2006/02/11/int16.htm
An Iraqi town that is now a prison

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/021506_world_stories.shtml#3
Lights out Chicago: Electricity Fast

******
http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=81&page=1
Subscribe to Alternative Press Review magazine

To help support Alternative Press Review you can make donations online at 
the APR website (www.altpr.org), or send donations by mail to:

Alternative Press Review
PO Box 6245
Arlington, VA 22206