[APR-news] November 6, 2006

Mon Nov 6 09:09:28 PST 2006

Alternative Press Review - Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream
www.altpr.org - November 6, 2006

"I don't vote. Two reasons. First of all it's meaningless; this country was 
bought and sold a long time ago. Secondly, I believe if you vote, you have 
no right to complain. People like to twist that around - they say, 'If you 
don't vote, you have no right to complain', but where's the logic in that? 
If you vote and you elect dishonest, incompetent people into office who 
screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused 
the problem; you voted them in; you have no right to complain. I, on the 
other hand, who did not vote, who in fact did not even leave the house on 
election day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done and 
have every right to complain about the mess you created that I had nothing 
to do with." -- George Carlin

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http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=670&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Ask Not For Whom the Wall is Built (It's Built For You)
by Zbignew Zingh

For whom did the U.S. build the prison camp at Guantanamo? Although it is a 
concentration camp for the unlawfully detained, it is also a psychological 
tool: its existence reminds non-Americans anywhere that Uncle Sam has the 
power to kidnap them, fly them around the world, torture them and forget 
about them, should they get "out of line." But Guantanamo was built for 
someone else, too. It was built for you and me.

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=671&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
All you need is love (...and a small, well-trained army)
By Mickey Z.

In her excellent 1995 book, "Bridge of Courage," Jennifer Harbury quotes a 
Guatemalan freedom fighter named Gabriel, responding to a plea to embrace 
non-violent resistance: "In my country child malnutrition is close to 85 
percent. Ten percent of all children will be dead before the age of five, 
and this is only the number actually reported to government agencies. Close 
to 70 percent of our people are functionally illiterate. There is almost no 
industry in our country-you need land to survive. Less than 3 percent of our 
landowners own over 65 percent of our lands. In the last fifteen years or 
so, there have been over 150,000 political murders and disappearances... 
Don't talk to me about Gandhi; he wouldn't have survived a week here. There 
was a peaceful movement for progress here, once. They were crushed. We were 
crushed. For Gandhi's method to work, there must be a government capable of 
shame. We lack that here." Repeat after me: We lack that here.

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Other articles of interest

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0611/ethics.html
My Response to The Digital Journalist
Josh Wolf, Digital Journalist

At best, the suggestion of narrowly defining who qualifies as a protected 
journalist will result in an elite class of professionals who work for 
mainstream media outlets, while reporters for the alternative press would be 
given no choice but to practice their craft without a net. More likely, I 
anticipate that this approach would establish a state-sanctioned journalist 
license, and anyone would be subject to having [his or] her license revoked 
should [he or] she stray from the party line. At worst, independent voices 
could be subject to prosecution for practicing journalism without a license. 
The First Amendment was not written to protect the Hearst Corporation and 
its thousands of employees, although it certainly should. When the Founding 
Fathers set out to guarantee a free press they really did seek to protect 
independent journalists and pamphleteers, such as Thomas Paine and his 
Common Sense.

http://www.prwatch.org/node/5404
NBC Rejects Chicks: What's Up With That?
Sasha Rae, PR Watch

The Dixie Chicks, that is. This isn't the first time that big media 
companies have barred them from the airwaves, but it is the first time that 
NBC and the new CW network have. It appears that once again the Dixie Chicks 
have exhibited public disapproval of the Bush administration and once again 
the media have answered by censoring them. This bodes ill for the future of 
free speech, at least what's left of it in America.

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=3&ar=67#rdrl
Should decent people subscribe to The Progressive?
Norman Finkelstein, normanfinkelstein.com

I requested from Progressive editor-in-chief Mathew Rothschild the evidence 
to support these allegations or a retraction and an apology. I also reminded 
him that I come up for tenure this year at a midwestern university and that 
these statements from a respected midwestern publication can cause me great 
harm. Many people have written Rothschild. In the replies of his that have 
been cc'd to me, he's repeatedly stated that: 1) he carefully checked the 
facts before writing the letter, 2) Conniff did not intend any harm with her 
remarks on my tenure case, and 3) he has no regrets about what she said or 
what he wrote. He also does not dispute that, on his reasoning, Raul 
Hilberg, the world's leading authority on the Nazi holocaust, is a Holocaust 
minimizer, and that my deceased mother, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, 
Maidanek concentration camp, two slave-labor camps, and lost her entire 
family during the Nazi holocaust, was also a Holocaust minimizer.

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=639
Neocons Make Excuses for Mass Murder
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire

I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war," 
whines Perle, unable to accept his role in massive war crimes, a bloody 
attainment close to rivaling the crimes of the Nazis (all told, with Bush 
Senior and Bubba Clinton on the mass murder roster, more than 3 million 
Iraqis have died, and an incalculable number of others, mostly helpless 
children, will die horrible deaths for the indeterminable future as depleted 
uranium takes its ghastly toll). For his participation, Perle should face a 
tribunal and then a firing squad-but then so should the traitor Bush, his 
old man, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Clinton, and the neocons numbered above.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov06/Petersen04.htm
The Reciprocity Principle: Questions That Need to be Asked
Kim Petersen, Dissident Voice

If a country had attacked the US for refusing to relinquish its massive 
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and murdered 655,000 Americas, would 
Americans not be horrified? Considering that since the US-led aggression 
launched on 20 March 2003, 650,000 more people have died in Iraq than 
Americans died on 9-11, the answer must be "yes." But to draw an equivalent 
comparison, taking into account the 26,783,383 people in Iraq and the 
298,444,215 people in the US (July 2006 estimates from the CIA Factbook), 
the equivalent number of American civilians murdered by such an attack would 
be 7,298,591! When Madeleine Albright opined that the deaths of over a half 
million Iraqi children was a price "worth it" to pursue the US "national 
interest" in Iraq, what would she have replied if sanctions had caused the 
deaths of over a half million US children (the Iraqi deaths being 
approximately equivalent to 5.5 million US children)? Would she have been so 
callous?

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15493.htm
Blood and money
John Pilger, Information Clearing House

On 17 October, President Bush signed a bill that legalised torture and 
kidnapping and in effect repealed the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus. The 
CIA can now legally abduct people and "render" them to secret prisons in 
countries where they are likely to be tortured. Evidence extracted under 
torture is now permissible in "military commissions"; people can be 
sentenced to death based on testimony beaten out of witnesses. You are now 
guilty until confirmed guilty. And you are a "terrorist" if you commit what 
George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, called "thoughtcrimes". Bush has 
revived the prerogatives of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs: the power of 
unrestricted lawlessness. "America can be proud," said Senator Lindsey 
Graham, one of the bill's promoters, who stood with other congressmen, 
clapping as Bush signed away the American constitution and the essence of 
American democracy.

http://umkahlil.blogspot.com/2006/11/unbearable-darkness-of-being.html
The Unbearable Darkness of Being A Palestinian Untermensch
Umkahlil

The "cool" Zionists (that's an example of an oxymoron) whose blogs are the 
latest in Israel's hasbara get indignant when one uses Nazi analogies for 
Zionists. They also get all huffy when one says Israel has no right to exist 
as a Jewish state and bat off their stock mantra: Why can't Jews have their 
own state when everyone else does, disregarding that the Jews stole 
Palestine from its indigenous inhabitants, and then lied and covered up the 
atrocities committed. Actually, since the Zionist onslaught has been ongoing 
for one hundred plus years now, perhaps comparison to Nazis, who perpetuated 
evil for a much shorter duration than the Zionists, is not entirely 
accurate. Zionists do compete with Nazis in their views on untermenschen. 
Jewish supremacism is every bit as toxic as Nazi notions of German 
superiority. What else explains the malicious barbarism of these bigoted 
immigrants toward the land's indigenous inhabitants?

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=11348
This was a guilty verdict on America as well
Robert Fisk, ZNet

So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he 
committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America 
knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the 
British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the 
White House's words, another "great day for Iraq".

http://www.uruknet.biz/?s1=1&p=28041&s2=06
Bush's Carnival of Blood
Mike Whitney, Uruknet

How are we supposed to feel now that we know that Saddam will be hanged for 
his crimes? Elated? Energized? Jubilant? Will it wash away the oceans of 
blood that Bush generated with his misguided and tragic war? The 
administration clings to the foolish notion that killing Saddam will somehow 
justify their unprovoked invasion and slaughter of 650,000 Iraqis. It won't.

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#116274961239136314
When All Else Fails...
Riverbend, Baghdad Burning

. Execute the dictator. It's that simple. When American troops are being 
killed by the dozen, when the country you are occupying is threatening to 
break up into smaller countries, when you have militias and death squads 
roaming the streets and you've put a group of Mullahs in power--execute the 
dictator.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20061105&articleId=3716
Low Intensity Nuclear War: NATO War Crimes in the Balkans
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research

The bombing of Yugoslavia is best described as a "low intensity nuclear war" 
using toxic radioactive shells and missiles. Amply documented, the 
radioactive fall-out potentially puts millions of people at risk throughout 
the Balkans. In March 1999, NATO launched the air raids invoking broad 
humanitarian principles and ideals. NATO had "come to the rescue" of ethnic 
Albanian Kosovars on the grounds they were being massacred by Serb forces. 
The forensic reports by the FBI and Europol confirm that the massacres did 
not occur. In a cruel irony, Albanian Kosovar civilians are among the main 
victims of DU radiation.

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NewsWire

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1103-24.htm
Air America's ABC Blacklist

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15504.htm
Homeland Security Tightens Grip on International Travel

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/2676
Saddam's Conviction: One War Criminal Down, Three to Go (Bush, Cheney and 
Blair)

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/cameras-show-army-recruiters-misleading/20061103145309990002?ncid=NWS00010000000001
Cameras show Army recruiters lying to students

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=640
CIA Torture Down the Memory Hole

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1103-09.htm
98 Percent of Cluster Bomb Victims are Civilians

http://www.uruknet.biz/?s1=1&p=27993&s2=05
Number of dead in Gaza reaching historic levels

http://peace4palestine-housewife4palestine.blogspot.com/2006/11/iof-used-internationally-banned.html
Internationally-Banned Weapons Being Used to Murder Palestinians

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blogs/voices.php/2006/11/04/p11946
Jewish terrorists 'shoot at anything that moves'

http://desertpeace.blogspot.com/2006/11/we-are-witnessing-final-solution-in.html
We are witnessing the 'final solution' in Gaza

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2006/Update60.htm
Exploding U.S. Grain Demand for Automotive Fuel Threatens World Food 
Security and Political Stability

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6114250.stm
Greenhouse gases hit record high

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1938476,00.html
Protesters occupy Britain's second largest coal-fired power station, cut 
amount of electricity being generated by half

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