It’s therefore pretty depressing seeing MSNBC host Chris Matthews talking about the glories of cable TV to challenge official power:
As Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting show, it’s a constant theme of mainstream journalism that America is never the aggressor always the victim.
As if.
“Optics!” hissed the NATO summit staffer. “Jesus Christ, optics!”
He was right to panic. It was Sunday evening, 6 sharp, the end of the first day of the NATO summit in Chicago. A swarm of global press was gathered around the convention hall’s lone display, a slick industry-sponsored video exhibit of NATO’s ballistic missile defense system. Any minute, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and his entourage would come sweeping out of a nearby tunnel for a tour the installation. It was the last photo op of the day.
There was just one problem. The televisions lining Rasmussen’s entrance path were turned to CNN and looping fresh footage of Chicago police raining nightsticks down on the skulls of protesters. The waiting press was glued to the screens, pointing and murmuring about the violence in a dozen languages. Also drawing attention was a very public huddle by NATO staff. “Shut off the damn TVs!” one of them said. “The optics might be worse if we shut them off now,” said another. But it was too late. Before a decision on the TVs could be reached, Rassmussen entered the hall trailed by a gaggle of attaches and military men. The world’s cameras snapped away.
It reveals much about NATO and the media coverage of the Chicago summit that images of protest are “bad optics,” but not what came next. What came next was this: Rasmussen received a guided tour of the missile defense exhibit not by senior NATO military officials, nor by the scientists developing the technology, but by senior executives from Raytheon and Thales, two of the program’s leading private contractors. Under the gaze of the world’s media, the three men strolled through the bright illuminated walls surrounding a life-size interceptor missile. Each was titled for aspects of the system — “Potential Future Capabilities,” “Interceptor Systems,” “Land and Sea-based Sensors” — and contained photos of the technologies in action. Below each photo was the logo of the company holding the contract. Raytheon and Lockheed were most common, followed by Boeing and the French firms MBDA, Thales and Astrium.
“If you are looking for a case study on defense industrial interests shaping NATO policy, missile defense is a good place to start,” says Ian Davis, the London-based director of NATO Watch and the organizer of a recent NATO shadow summit in Washington, D.C.
Standing not far from me and watching with pride was Linda Stanfel of Sterling Strategies, a boutique public relations agency contracted by the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency to promote missile defense. Stanfel was very proud of the installation, which she had put together with contributions from the system’s contractors. While waiting for Rasmussen’s arrival, I overheard her chatting with Raytheon vice president for business development Thomas Vecchiolla. “Back in the 1980s [the Pentagon] used to spend all this money on disaster management, correcting everything the press got wrong about missile defense,” she said. “This is the kind of thing we need to be doing more of.” She was upset that Northrop Grumman had declined to contribute to the installation. “They’re the only ones who don’t seem to get it,” she said with a frown. But the joke was on anyone but Northrop Grumman, who left Chicago with a $1.7 billion deal to lead the 13-nation team producing a new Alliance Ground Surveillance System.
Yet more evidence that the American Congress is a) divorced from Middle East reality and b) damn keen to do the bidding of the most extreme Zionist and racist ideas by the Israel lobby (via The Cable):
Thirty U.S. senators will vote today over whether there really are 5 million Palestinian “refugees” or just around 30,000 — a hot-button issue that has already become the subject of a vigorous international debate involving Israel and its Arab neighbors.
When the Senate Appropriations Committee takes up the fiscal 2013 State Department and foreign operations appropriations bill today, senators will vote on an amendment crafted by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) that would require the State Department to report on how many of the millions of people currently supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) are actually people who were physically displaced from their homes in Israel or the occupied territories, and how many are descendants of original refugees.
The amendment is just a reporting requirement and doesn’t change the way the United States classifies refugees or how it gives more than $250 million annually to UNRWA, about a quarter of the agency’s budget. But a battle is already raging behind the scenes over what it might mean if the State Department started separating original Palestinian refugees from their descendants, and opponents of the Kirk amendment fear the end goal is to cut off U.N. aid to millions of Palestinians.
Iraqi maternity hospitals are seeing a new born trend: children given “neutral” names that don’t reveal their family’s religious or political affiliations. Because in Iraq, having the wrong name in the wrong place can still get you killed.
On a Tuesday in mid-May the office at the entrance to the Salam Hospital in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul is full of people. This is the office where births are registered and it’s located next to the delivery and operating rooms, near the main entrance.
A male clerk there is doing his routine work: he receives forms on which new born babies’ times of birth, sex, fathers and intended names are written. And this clerk has noticed a significant trend: parents are giving their newborns names that don’t give away which sect of Islam their family belongs to, Shiite or Sunni Muslim.
They’re calling their children names that are either neutral – so it’s impossible to say whether the child’s family is Shiite or Sunni – or they’re being christened with totally new monikers that have no such history, the clerk says. “And people are giving their newborns names I’ve never heard about before,” the clerk points out, “like Inaq and Qasim.”
Sure, it took an extra year or so, but Northrop Grumman has finally penciled in the first flight of the giant surveillance airship it’s building for the U.S. Army. The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle — a football-field-size, helium-filled robot blimp fitted with sensors and data-links — should take to the air over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the first or second week of June. K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop’s director of Army programs, crows: ”We’re about to fly the thing!”
It’s fair to say Northrop and the Army are crossing their collective fingers for the flight to actually take place, and smoothly. Giant airships promise huge benefits — namely, low cost and long flight times — but it’s proved incredibly hard to build and equip the massive blimps with military-grade sensors and communications … and fill them with helium.
The Air Force’s highly computerized (and potenitally missile-armed) Blue Devil 2 airship recently ran into integration problems, forcing the flying branch to cancel a planned test run in Afghanistan. (Although the service had never been too hot on airships in the first place.) The Navy meanwhile grounded its much smaller MZ-3A research blimp for a lack of work until the Army paid to take it over. The LEMV seemed to be losing air, too, as Northrop and the Army repeatedly delayed its first flight and planned combat deployment originally slated for the end of 2011.
During last week’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, before my PEN lecture on free speech, I was interviewed by ABC TV News about the growing threat to our freedoms in the West, as governments and private companies monitor and collect our digital details:
This is remarkable. Returned US army vets giving back their medals of honour near this week’s NATO conference in Chicago. Powerful, poignant and the kind of voices almost never heard in the mainstream media. Much easier and safer to interview generals (hello ABC TV’s 7.30 last night) about a war in Afghanistan that they’ve ruined from day one.
ASH WOOLSON: No NATO, no war!
VETERANS: No NATO, no war!
ASH WOOLSON: We don’t work for you no more!
VETERANS: We don’t work for you no more!
ASH WOOLSON: N-A-T-O!
VETERANS: N-A-T-O!
ASH WOOLSON: We don’t kill for you no more!
VETERANS: We don’t kill for you no more!
ALEJANDRO VILLATORO: At this time, one by one, veterans of the wars of NATO will walk up on stage. They will tell us why they chose to return their medals to NATO. I urge you to honor them by listening to their stories. Nowhere else will you hear from so many who fought these wars about their journey from fighting a war to demanding peace. Some of us killed innocents. Some of us helped in continuing these wars from home. Some of us watched our friends die. Some of us are not here, because we took our own lives. We did not get the care promised to us by our government. All of us watched failed policies turn into bloodshed. Listen to us, hear us, and think: was any of this worth it?
CROWD: No!
ALEJANDRO VILLATORO: Do these medals thank us for a job well done?
CROWD: No!
ALEJANDRO VILLATORO: Do they mask lies, corruption, and abuse of young men and women who swore to defend their country?
CROWD: Yes!
ALEJANDRO VILLATORO: We tear off this mask. Hear us.
IRIS FELICIANO: My name is Iris Feliciano. I served in the Marine Corps. And in January of 2002, I deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. And I want to tell the folks behind us, in these enclosed walls, where they build more policies based on lies and fear, that we no longer stand for them. We no longer stand for their lies, their failed policies and these unjust wars. Bring our troops home and end the war now. They can have these back.
GREG MILLER: My name is Greg Miller. I’m a veteran of the United States Army infantry with service in Iraq 2009. The military hands out cheap tokens like this to soldiers, servicemembers, in an attempt to fill the void where their conscience used to be once they indoctrinate it out of you. But that didn’t work on me, so I’m here to return my Global War on Terrorism Medal and my National Defense Medal, because they’re both lies.
SCOTT KIMBALL: My name is Scott Kimball. I’m an Iraq war vet. And I’m turning in these medals today for the people of Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, and all victims of occupation across the world. And also, for all the servicemembers and veterans who are against these wars, you are not alone!
CHRISTOPHER MAY: My name is Christopher May. I left the Army as a conscientious objector. We were told that these medals represented, you know, democracy and justice and hope and change for the world. These medals represent a failure on behalf of the leaders of NATO to accurately represent the will of their own people. It represents a failure on the leaders of NATO to do what’s right by the disenfranchised people of this world. Instead of helping them, they take advantage of them, and they’re making things worse. I will not be a part of that anymore. These medals don’t mean anything to me, and they can have them back.
ASH WOOLSON: My name is Ash Woolson. I was a sergeant. I was in Iraq in ’03, and what I saw there crushed me. I don’t want us to suffer this again, and I don’t want our children to suffer this again, and so I’m giving these back!
MAGGIE MARTIN: My name is Maggie Martin. I was a sergeant in the Army. I did two tours in Iraq. No amount of medals, ribbons or flags can cover the amount of human suffering caused by these wars. We don’t want this garbage. We want our human rights. We want our right to heal.
JACOB CRAWFORD: I’m Jacob Crawford. I went to Iraq and Afghanistan. And when they gave me these medals, I knew they were meaningless. I only regret not starting to speak up about how silly the war is sooner. I’m giving these back. Free Bradley Manning!
JASON HURD: My name is Jason Hurd. I spent 10 years in the United States Army as a combat medic. I deployed to Baghdad in 2004. I’m here to return my Global War on Terrorism Service Medal in solidarity with the people of Iraq and the people of Afghanistan. I am deeply sorry for the destruction that we have caused in those countries and around the globe. I am proud to stand on this stage with my fellow veterans and my Afghan sisters. These were lies. I’m giving them back.
STEVEN LUNN: My name is Steven Lunn [phon.]. I’m a two-time Iraq combat veteran. This medal I’m dedicating to the children of Iraq that no longer have fathers and mothers.
That’s what a good, autocratic ally does for America; remain dictatorial while “fighting terrorism”. The New York Review of Books:
The United States is quietly being drawn into an escalating conflict in Yemen. Following the discovery earlier this month of a new bomb plot aimed at American airliners, the US government has been aiming drones at alleged members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) at an unprecedented rate. Last week, US and Yemeni officials revealed that US special operations forces are on the ground in Yemen and that more may be on the way. Meanwhile AQAP, the Yemen-based organization now regarded by some officials as one of the principal terrorist threats to the United States, has stepped up attacks around the country, including asuicide bombing in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, on Monday, that killed at least sixty people.
The new conflict may be as much about Saudi Arabia, the longtime US ally and Yemen’s northern neighbor, as it is about Yemen. To its continuing embarrassment, Saudi Arabia has long been known as the country that produced Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers. In recent years, the Saudi government has done much to reverse that image, in part by dramatically beefing up its own counterterrorism credentials and by becoming one of Washington’s key backers in the war against Al Qaeda. And yet, as I learned during a visit to Riyadh and other Saudi cities this month, it has struggled to contain another reality: that many members of AQAP are Saudi nationals who have relocated to Yemen, where they have been able to operate in relative freedom.
…
What seems clear is that Saudi Arabia has become a key backer—and at times coordinator—of the accelerating US drone war and special operations offensive in Yemen, partly for its own security interests. Interior Ministry officials in Riyadh speak enthusiastically about the US drone program, and on May 12, drone strikes allegedly killed some eleven AQAP suspects, two of them Saudi nationals. (It is worth noting, following the controversial killing of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki, that Saudi Arabia does not appear to have many qualms about killing its own citizens in Yemen.)
Perhaps most important for the Saudi government, a successful counterterrorism policy carries enormous political value amid the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Even more than democratization or regime change in the region, the Saudi rulers seem to fear instability and unpredictability: though they have reluctantly supported the transition of power in Yemen, they are particularly nervous about the kind of extremism that has emerged in neighboring countries like Iraq, Yemen, and now Syria, when uprisings turn into violent conflict or authority breaks down entirely—places where Saudi jihadists have often found new causes. “Syria will be tempting to al-Qaeda,” Abdulrahman Alhadaq, a Saudi counter terrorism official, said in a briefing in Riyadh. “We need to avoid another Iraq.”
A book I co-edited with Jeff Sparrow, Left Turn, is about to launch.
One of the contributors, Rodney Croome, a strong advocate of gay marriage, has written a powerful piece in ABC’s The Drum about this issue:
The American civil rights movement was a colourful but hollow distraction from the far more important issue of America’s war in Vietnam, and that is why presidents Kennedy and Johnson supported it.
If you find this statement trite, offensive and wrong then you may react the same way when you read John Pilger’s analysis of Barack Obama’s support for same-sex marriage.
Pilger believes the Obama administration is attempting to divert attention from wars abroad and wealth disparity at home, and raise more money from Hollywood, by endorsing marriage equality.
He has no evidence for these links. His analysis also doesn’t explain why Obama took so long to “evolve” on the issue and seems to have been moved to act by an unscripted endorsement of the issue by Joe Biden.
Nor does Pilger allow for the fact that a cause can be right even if the motives of some of its supporters are less than pure, or just not the same as his.
Pilger would probably respond by saying my comparison between black civil rights and same-sex marriage is unfair because, in his words, the latter is about “lifestyle liberalism”.
Such a casual dismissal of marriage equality is not just because Pilger doesn’t believe marriage matters much. He believes marriage is part of the problem: “The rights historically associated with marriage are those of property: capitalism itself,” he writes.
“Bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right.”
Pilger’s same-sex marriage blind spot is not uncommon among left-wingers his age. Many older lefties retain an outdated view of marriage as an instrument of male domination over women, the middle class’s domination over workers, and God’s domination over us all.
They refuse to see that the institution has been reformed, at least in the West, so that women, workers and non-believers now have much more autonomy to decide how, when and if they wed, how they conduct their marriage (including whether or not they have kids), and if and when their marriage will end.
They refuse to acknowledge that it is precisely this change which has made same-sex marriage an issue: now that marriage is a choice for the majority, it makes sense to ask why it isn’t a choice for the minority.
…
Why can’t John Pilger see any of this? Is it just his distaste for marriage?
In his use of the phrases like “lifestyle liberalism” and “bourgeois acceptability”, I hear echoes of the old left’s suspicion of homosexuals. To those who held this suspicion, gays were too prone to being flippant sentimentalists, fawning courtiers, and fascist closet-cases. We were too soft, too easily co-opted or just too different to be part of a movement that demanded solidarity.
Suspicion of gays paralleled a similar, older suspicion of Jews, and it saw members of both groups being accepted within the Left only if they showed extraordinary commitment (Pilger’s WikiLeaking hero, Bradley Manning, being a case in point).
…
Rodney Croome AM is the campaign director of Australian Marriage Equality and the co-author of Why v Why: gay marriage. He has contributed an essay on the Left and marriage equality to ‘Left Turn: Political Essays for the New Left’, edited by Antony Loewenstein and Jeff Sparrow (MUP), out June 1.
