A US-WIDE campaign by several pro-Israeli groups in the United States has produced what the ombudsman for National Public Radio described as unprecedented pressure to influence American media coverage of events in the Middle East. This might come as a shock to Arab audiences who have repeatedly seen their causes unfairly covered by many American media organisations. But these pro-Israeli lobbies believe the majority of US news organisations nurture a pro-Palestinian bias. The campaign aims at altering media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict through various techniques ranging from boycotting newspapers to sending protest letters and e-mails.
Pro-Israeli pressure groups have accused the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune, among others, of unfair reporting that favours Arabs.
“Is it possible that so many major American news organisations are getting this story wrong — that some sort of national media conspiracy is at work here?” asked the Washington Post ombudsman in an article. “That, of course, is not the case,” he said.
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
So, under Peter Costello's "Keeping Australia Safe" budget, it is going to cost more to treat the common cold but we will be able to do it in a safe and secure environment. Sounds good and plays well in the electorate, but not so. Not unless Australia and other Western nations show greater vision in formulating defence and foreign policy.
Broadly, Australia's policies in defence differ from those of the Bush administration only in the way we spell it. Australia is part of whatever the US is planning. The next announcement may be the invasion of Iraq and the deployment of up to 500,000 troops. It will make Afghanistan look like a walk in the park.
And while we might support the government's stand, and many of its budget plans for increases in defence spending are sensible, we need to know that under the umbrella of Western foreign policy Australia is now a more prominent target and until that policy changes, no budget can make us "safe".
In a dark legacy from the Sydney Olympics, Australia is now better prepared for a biological/chemical attack than any other country. But that defence is far from tested. While everything possible was done for the Games, a determined attack could not have been prevented.
Yes, there was a marked increase in the efficiency of intelligence services here and overseas, but who had ever heard of Martin Bryant before he slaughtered people in Tasmania? Intelligence systems will not normally detect the Martin Bryants any more than they will detect the dozens of teenagers around the world who are being taught to hate the US and the West (including Australia) to the point that they will strap on explosives and sacrifice themselves in despair and martyrdom.
BRITAIN is continuing to sell military hardware to suspect regimes and countries ravaged by war, corruption and poverty, a Mirror investigation reveals.
A third of Britain's Government-approved arms exports go to nations where there is a risk of provoking or prolonging conflict in defiance of EU codes of conduct.
Other countries which receive our arms are likely to pass them on to Britain's strategic enemies, says the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
To hide the extent of the scandal the Government shrouds the contents of arms consignments in secrecy, invokes the Official Secrets Act to stop MPs asking questions and hides behind confidentiality clauses.
It makes a mockery of New Labour's once vaunted claim to pursue an "ethical" foreign policy. Saferworld campaign group said: "The whole industry is shrouded in secrecy with manufacturers and politicians hiding behind phrases such as commercial sensitivity and classified information."
WASHINGTON, May 28 — British troops have deployed near the Pakistani border to stop al-Qaida and Taliban fighters from returning to Afghanistan, U.S. and British officials said Wednesday.
NEW DELHI: Pakistani analysts are of the view that both General Pervez Musharraf’s tough speech on Monday and external affairs minister Jaswant Singh’s reaction to it on Tuesday seem to suggest that India and Pakistan are negotiating behind closed doors and a deal has been struck.
Lahore-based Friday Times editor, Najam Sethi, told The Times of India, ‘‘Musharraf’s speech was aimed at three audiences — domestic, international and Indian... For India, his message was, if you are flexing muscles so are we, but I am sure he has given India behind-the-scenes concessions. He has decided to take steps on cross-border terror and the hawkish posturing is only meant for Pakistanis’’.
According to Iqbal Haider of the Pakistan People’s Party, Singh’s harsh reaction was disappointing. ‘‘The kind of aggressive posturing on Singh’s part can only be counter-productive. He (Singh) should have realised that Musharraf’s speech was essentially meant for the domestic audience. Musharraf has given every indication in his speech that he is ready to concede on the issue of cross-border terror and was not aggressive in his posturing at all. Singh’s reaction has not helped the de-escalation of the war phobia at all and he should have kept a window open for talks at Almaty,’’ he said.
Widespread congressional support is rooted in more than just a long-term relationship. It is traced to the power of the collective Jewish or pro-Israeli lobby, a well-organized, well-funded, extremely active, and extraordinarily connected group, according to political analysts.
"They are very savvy and sophisticated," said Richard Semiatin, a political science professor at American University. "They are extremely knowledgeable and some of the best lobbyists in the country when they get into congressional offices."
Indeed, the latest crisis in the Middle East, which has been punctuated by 20 months of Palestinian uprisings that resulted in dozens of homicide bombings and the subsequent ongoing occupation of disputed Palestinian territory, has only energized this Washington lobby. The group has been hosting near-daily organizational conferences, press events, op-eds, advertising campaigns, and rallies — all demanding that Arafat get control of his militant supporters and reform his corrupt Parliament.
"It's a little like the special forces teams who go in to fight in Afghanistan. They're on the ground, calling in bombers. The planes overhead are the pro-Israeli supporters across the country," who donate money to campaigns and send letters to Washington, said former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris. "It's a very effective model and basically unequaled in the Congress."
"The key to AIPAC's success is support for the only Western
Over the past couple of weeks, the Bush administration in Washington has sounded the alarm over possible new attacks by Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organisation. That's led to a heightened sense of urgency and preparedness across the United States. But not in Canada.
In fact, since September 11, many of the measures introduced by the Canadian government to beef up security at airports and border crossings, and anti-terror legislation as well as tougher immigration laws are not sitting all that well with many Canadians. For some, those measures are becoming a burden.
The Israeli far-right – always the best indicator of Israel's true intentions – is quite outspoken: its aim is to make Palestinian life unbearable to a point that they would rather get up and go. Asked about his conception of "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians, Minister of Tourism (Rabbi) Benny Eylon compared the "voluntary" element to that of a Jewish husband who refused a rabbinical order to divorce his wife. Since rabbinical court cannot undo the marriage without the husband's consent, it should use force – excommunicate the obstinate husband, slash him, jail him etc. – until he "voluntarily" agrees to divorce. This is how the Palestinians should be "voluntarily" made to leave. And obviously, as long as they do not leave – because they cannot or will not – they should be struggling to survive rather than resist their oppression.
When Ariel Sharon visited an agricultural high school outside Beersheva in the final phase of his campaign to become Israel's Prime Minister, he was met by 16-year-old Ilil Komey, whose father has suffered from shellshock in the wake of Israel's illegal 1984 invasion of Lebanon. In a scene recorded by Israeli national television , Ms. Komey pointed her finger at Israel's premier warhawk, and said:
"I think you sent my father into Lebanon. Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister."
GREAT NEWS!
While Ms. Komey's outrage may be righteous, her future as a political pundit seems cloudy, at best: if the polls are correct, it looks like Sharon – known as "the Bulldozer" for his policy (while minister of "infrastructure") of destroying Palestinian homes to make way for Israeli "settlements" – will flatten Ehud Barak and emerge at the head of the Israeli government at a crucial time in his nation's history. They tell a story about Sharon's early career that helps to put his expected election victory in perspective, and gives us an idea of what makes the incoming Prime Minister of Israel tick: As the head of "Unit 101," the notorious terrorist squad, Sharon and his fellow thugs were camped out on a kibbutz near the Syrian border, having been ordered not to make a move unless provoked. One day, Sharon ran into the headquarters, yelling "Great news! They've just killed the guard!"
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
BAND TAIMORE, Afghanistan (AP) -- Officials and elders from a sand-blown village deep in the deserts of southwestern Afghanistan expressed anger Sunday over a raid by U.S.-led coalition forces seeking Taliban or al-Qaida supporters.
Residents of Band Taimore said soldiers in four helicopters swooped down on their homes shortly after midnight Friday, blowing holes with explosives in the high walls that surround Afghan homes and throwing stun grenades inside. Some 50 men were taken away, they said.
The timing and details of the action matched an operation announced Friday by the U.S. military which said it had captured 50 people about 48 miles west of Kandahar -- roughly the location of Band Taimore. However, it did not name the location and said intelligence suggested a compound there was used to harbor senior al-Qaida and Taliban leaders -- a charge denied by the villagers.
VANCOUVER, B.C. -- Beneath a dark and foreboding sky, the largest demonstration seen in the Northwest since Seattle's WTO fireworks brought traffic to a halt Saturday in Canada's third-largest city.
It is unlikely, however, that the protest will slow the layoffs of public employees, closures of long-term care facilities or shutdowns of hospitals and courts being instituted by the ultraconservative government of B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell.
What Campbell calls "special interest groups" were in the streets -- Indian drummers, anti-poverty activists, burly longshoremen and construction workers, college students, greens and doctors frustrated by a fee dispute with the government.
But the march by up to 30,000 people may have led nowhere. With 77 of 79 seats in the provincial Legislature, Campbell's B.C. Liberal Party -- despite its name, a party of the political right -- can rule as a kind of elected dictatorship.
"I think that's dangerous because when you have legitimate democratic avenues of protest shut down, people get more and more disturbed. I think you'll see more and more unrest," George Heyman, president of the B.C. Government Employees Union, said as he marched.
Already there are signs of anger and unrest.
Campbell's constituency office was recently firebombed, and an incendiary device exploded early this month at a Vancouver school where his wife is vice principal.
It's time to challenge the premise behind White House efforts to delegitimize questions on everything from pre-9/11 screw-ups to Enron to the budget.
The premise is that we are at "war." The reality is that this is not a war. And if we're not in a war, everything about public discussion can be different. Indeed, the truest war we're in today may be the war to frame the debate, because the way debate gets framed goes far in determining its outcome.
Language matters. George Bush's invocations of war echo Churchill stiffening English spines during the Blitz. But we are not in such a war. In such a war an entire nation mobilizes against daily and massive threats to its survival. Or an entire nation puts comfort and family on hold and revamps its industrial system to support large-scale military action on foreign soil, as we did in World War II.
Bush has issued no such call for sacrifice, because none is required. The main civilian "sacrifice" of the post-9/11 age is an inconvenience -- longer security lines for the fraction of Americans who are regular air travelers. It would be preposterous to suggest we reorganize our entire economy to fight Al-Qaida.
Instead, we face a frightening new era in which terrorism, and the fight against terrorism, can be expected to be a permanent feature of American life. This is not the same as facing the full might of Nazi Germany, with tens of millions of mobilized citizens. It means facing the unconventional tactics and potentially devastating weaponry of a loosely organized network of several thousand people who want to kill us.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Kurds in northern Iraq have created a quasi-democratic, somewhat prosperous life under the protection of U.S. jets patrolling a no-fly zone and keeping Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s tanks away.
But faced with the question of whether that democracy could flower elsewhere in Iraq if the United States launched an invasion to topple Saddam, many Kurds are leery.
They worry that any U.S. military action in Iraq could just lead to a backlash against them by Saddam, who gassed Kurdish villages in the 1980s.
Even if Saddam were toppled, they could just end up with another dictator in Baghdad or — even worse — invasions by Iran or Turkey, said several who attended a meeting this weekend in Washington on prospects for democracy in Iraq.
Before they support any U.S. efforts to overthrow Saddam, the Kurds want guarantees that the United States would not stop until Saddam was overthrown, and that they would have a role in any future central Iraqi government, said Mahmood Osman, a Kurdish politician who lives in London.
"They cannot destroy all their gains, and give more sacrifices," he said at the conference, sponsored by the human rights group Freedom House and the Iraq Institute for Democracy, an organization based in Irbil in the Kurdish north of Iraq.
There's a lot about President Bush's manner, breezing through Europe and telling us all to pull our socks up, that makes you want to wipe the smile off his face. 'Iraq ought to be on the minds of the German people,' he said to a TV station in Berlin, 'because the Iraq government is a dangerous government.' Well, yes, but how exactly has Saddam's stance changed since this time last year when America was enjoying the first month's of George Bush's carefree unilateralism and Iraq was some way down the agenda?
Not much, is the answer. Saddam has probably acquired a little more weaponry but essentially his regime is as barbarous to its own people and as menacing to the outside world as it was last year. 'This is a government that has gassed its own people,' Bush added, pressing home the point. Indeed, but that was back in August 1988 when estimates of between 50,000 and 180,000 were killed in the final solution of the Kurdish question. At the time it raised only modest interest in the US media.
The President's lecture tour of Europe and Russia reminds us how little experience he has of foreign affairs and how recent is his discovery of the history and complexities of issues which have been unquestionably better covered and probably better understood in Europe than in the US. As if to underline this point, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff have used the Commander-in-Chief's absence from Washington to reveal their deep concerns about any attack on Iraq.
Europe may have its faults, as Bush and Colin Powell reminded us last week, but whatever our weaknesses of coordination, resolution and principle, it still seems mightily rich of Bush to expect us to go along with a policy General Tommy Franks, head of US Central Command, said would require at least 200,000 US troops and result in large casualties.
People who said they were glad George Bush was leading the American response to terrorist attack are choking on their words. Recent events confirm that the founders knew what they were doing when they provided for the president to be chosen by the voters, as Al Gore was, and not the Supreme Court, as Bush was.
(Those founders were smart cookies. They didn't use jargon like "market-driven" in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence either. Bush says we won't stop squeezing the Cubans until they adopt "market-driven" reforms. Apparently they'll have to turn their power plants over to Enron. If Bush demands "faith-based" reforms, they'll have to take Jerry Falwell.)
We know now that the Bush administration received numerous warnings of impending terrorist attacks, some arriving almost on the eve of the Sept. 11 disaster, and did next to nothing. Well, it did slip word to John Ashcroft, our faith-based attorney general, and Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft. Faith has its limitations. When Bill Clinton got a warning in 1999, he ordered an attack on Osama Bin Laden's training camp. Congressional Republicans accused him of picking on Osama for political reasons. Trent Lott hadn't developed an interest in national unity at the time.
After the airplanes struck the towers, Bush spent the rest of the day darting around the country, maintaining distance from the crash sites, ostensibly on the recommendation of security advisers. Bush's press secretary defended this behavior by saying terrorists had targeted the presidential plane. This was a lie, it turns out. There was no such targeting, at least none that our government knew of. Anyway, an army of security advisers couldn't have kept President Clinton from Ground Zero, and indeed former President Clinton showed up there before Bush did.
A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.
Conducted for FAIR by the media analysis firm Media Tenor, the study shows that the big three nightly news shows rely heavily on society's most powerful groups when they report the news of the day. More than one in four sources were politicians-- George W. Bush alone made up 9 percent of all sources-- versus a mere 3 percent for all non-governmental advocacy groups, the sources most likely to present an alternative view to the government's.
Even before the September 11 attacks, Republicans made up a full 68 percent of partisan sources (which surged to 87 percent after the attacks). These figures should dispel the myth of a liberal or pro-Democrat news bias, but don't necessarily prove a conservative or Republican slant. Rather, they reflect a strong tendency of the networks to turn to the party in power for information. Sixty-two percent of all partisan sources were administration officials; when these are set aside, the remaining partisan sources were 51 percent Republican and 48 percent Democrat, suggesting a strong advantage overall for the party that holds the White House.
Big business, too, was overrepresented. In a year in which the country lost 2.4 million jobs, corporate representatives appeared about 35 times more frequently than did union representatives, accounting for 7 percent of sources versus labor's 0.2 percent.
At first glance, the invitation many clergy and community leaders around the country received last April to attend conferences on "Faith-Based Initiatives For Family and Community Renewal" might have looked like it came from the Republican congressional leadership and the Bush administration.
The material, decorated with a drawing of the U.S. Capitol, noted that the events would include a satellite broadcast of a GOP-sponsored "faith-based summit" for clergy transmitted live from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and said that prominent congressional leaders and White House staffers would take part.
The flyer promised that the "cutting edge program" would "provide the latest information on innovative policies and programs from the Executive and Congressional leadership in Washington; and build alliances for faith-based services at the state and community level."
Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, the House Republican Conference Chairman, was issuing press releases noting that the GOP’s "faith-based" summit would be viewed by satellite at events in over 45 cities.
WASHINGTON, May 26 — An American intelligence assessment, completed this week as tensions between India and Pakistan intensified, warns that a full-scale nuclear exchange between the two rivals could kill up to 12 million people immediately and injure up to 7 million, Pentagon officials say.
Even a "more limited" nuclear war — as measured in number of warheads — would have cataclysmic results, overwhelming hospitals across Asia and requiring vast foreign assistance, particularly from the United States, to battle radioactive contamination, famine and disease, officials said.
"The humanitarian crisis that would result would be so great that every medical facility in the Middle East and Southwest Asia would be quickly overwhelmed," one Defense Department official said. "The American military would have no choice but go in and help with the victims and to clean up."
resident Bush showed little respect for history, and even less for the illuminating work done by presidential historians, when he issued an executive order last November making it significantly harder to gain access to a former president's official papers. Now a worthy bipartisan attempt to overturn that order is being stalled by the White House, which is scrambling to portray its new rules as a benign attempt to tidy up the system for releasing presidential records.
It is nothing of the sort. Mr. Bush's decree essentially repealed the presumption of public access at the heart of a proud post-Watergate reform — the Presidential Records Act of 1978. This bipartisan act established that a president's White House records are not his personal property but rather belong to the American people. Former presidents have leeway to withhold sensitive material for up to 12 years, including papers revealing the advice served up by White House aides. After that, a former president seeking to override an archivist's decision to release material must seek a court order.
I have to wonder at the astounding silence from those who frothed and rattled ceaselessly for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Isn't it inconsistent and blatantly dishonest not to be calling for an investigation of the sitting administration?
Let's see, the charges against William Jefferson Clinton were perjury, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. As far as I know, President Bush hasn't yet had the opportunity to lie under court oath but he surely has lied about his relationship with Kenneth Lay, the staggeringly rich poor boy of Enron infamy. At least three times he publicly denied knowing Ken Lay, the guy who donated the very jet that shuttled Bush around during his campaign. The guy for whom Bush interrupted his campaign so he could watch him toss the first pitch at Enron Field. Ken Lay, the man who ran the single largest corporate contributor to the Republican Party. Bush has acted like he never heard of the guy. Lay has publicly recalled differently. But that was just lying while under the oath of office and only to the press and the American people. Not the court. Besides, Bush is such a friendly guy and has given so many people cute nicknames, maybe he really doesn't remember calling him "Kenny Boy."
Dick Cheney has lied about national security matters when his Haliburton firm did trade with Iraq (now part of the so-called Axis-of-Evil, you might recall) after it was against federal law to do so. Whoops. Cheney's Haliburton paid $2 million for defrauding the government by inflating what the taxpayers had to pay for contract maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord in California. Very likely, that $2 million was less than Haliburton profited from the scheme. We trust him to protect our national interests over his and his friends' financial interests? His history shows that to be extremely foolish. But it is questionable that all of this meets the definition of perjury, so we'll leave perjury out of the immediate considerations and move on to the remaining charges.
Obstruction of justice. That sure sound like a serious charge. I think most Americans really want to believe that justice prevails in their country. While there are some embarrassments, we generally have a proud history in our efforts at being a just society. The obstruction of justice naturally galls us as Americans, as it should.
The written charges against Clinton began with the statement: "The president has misused and abused the office and impaired the administration of justice." In Clinton's case, the charges that he obstructed justice were mostly about his lying, giving misleading statements or encouraging others to do so on his behalf relating to the Paula Jones case