new since…

1. Hillary Clinton scored a surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary yesterday in the race for the nomination of the Not Very Democratic party. John McCain won the primary of the Banana Republican party.
2. The corporate media “objective” spinmeisters wet themselves in their eagerness to declare the monumental nature of this change in momentum and how it totally transforms the Not Very Democratic race. These are the same paragons of wisdom far beyond what us ordinary grovelling readers could hope to know who, until shortly before the Iowa caucus, had repeatedly proclaimed Clinton’s invincibility — and then, in the few days between Iowa and New Hampshire, proclaimed Obama’s invincibility. As John Edwards tartly noted, 98% of the public has yet to be heard from — but even 2% is a lot more of the population than is represented by those with content-producing jobs in the corporate media, let alone, more importantly, the owners and sponsors of said media.
3. There is reasonable room to doubt that the New Hampshire results are actually correct, although there is as yet not sufficient evidence to conclude one way or another whether the primary was stolen for (not necessarily by) Clinton.
4. Philip Agee, a hero of the fight against the American national security state, has died at the age of 72.

A meditation on Zionism and anti-Semitism

ZIONISM

Zionism is a political philosophy that demands that Jewish people have their own state. Not their own homeland–their own state. The usual argument that most other major ethnicities have their own states is flatly false. Most major ethnicities have their own homelands, but not their states. The difference is not trivial. Even states that (unlike Israel) are overwhelmingly dominated by a single ethnicity are not defined by that ethnicity, at least not legally. Poland, for example, is not the state of the Polish people but a state of its citizens, the vast majority of whom happen to be Poles. The Republic of Poland IS defined by the Polish language and other aspects of Polish culture, but it is not defined as a state constituted by Poles.

Even Germany, with its racist laws about obtaining citizenship that allow people with German ancestry from centuries ago to quickly become citizens while excluding many second-generation Turks, is defined, as a nation, in terms of its citizens, not in terms of a Volk. However you become a citizen, once you get there, you’re as much a part of the state as anyone else. For that matter, the United Kingdom, while it has an established church and is defined as an Anglican state, is not defined as a state of Anglicans.

Zionism is, thus, exceptional in the modern world in its demand for a state bound to a people. That demand is intrinsically a recipe for discrimination–not just belief in being a “chosen people” and suchnot, but outright political distinction on a tribal/religious basis as the underlying national principle. Those who consistently oppose any such discrimination are therefore compelled to be anti-Zionists, even if they have sympathy for the idea of a Jewish homeland, because the Zionist ideal (and present-day reality) of a state defined by its Jewishness is inherently discriminatory.

The nonsensical conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism thus inverts the actual situation: it is pro-Zionism that is unsustainable without prejudice. That is not to say that all Zionists have a pro-Jewish or anti-Arab prejudice, for many of them are simply ignorant or confused about what’s involved; but no informed, honest argument for Zionism can avoid being an argument for prejudice. While many Americans realize this quite clearly, it is still very difficult to say so loudly and publicly in this country without serious repercussions for yourself, due to the activities of censorship squads of self-appointed American guardians of Israel, along with the monolithic position of the Beltway establishment.

I well remember, while serving on the station board of KPFA radio, manning the phones during a pledge drive. When Dennis Bernstein’s Flashpoints, the highest-pledging locally produced show on KPFA, came on, suddenly a roomful of mostly quiet phones lit up. And very soon, along came the disruptors. People would call in and start going on about how they objected to Bernstein’s treatment of Israel and his Palestinian-friendly position. Mind you, this was not a comment line: the number in question was only supposed to be used for pledging. I told as much to the disruptor whose call I fielded and quickly hung up, but other volunteers got bogged down arguing. Disruptors would ask the phone volunteers for their own opinions of Flashpoint‘s Middle East coverage in an obviously deliberate attempt to prolong the conversations. The result of tying up these lines was to quite possibly create some busy signals and perhaps lose some pledges, since nearly all the phones were in use once Dennis got into his groove.

This sort of thing had been going on for a while at KPFA. I’d heard about it before, although this was my first direct experience of it. Obviously, there was a concerted campaign by some ultra-pro-Israel folks with too much time on their hands to disrupt our pledge drives at this oldest listener-sponsored station. The sheer level of contempt for free speech–and even for the very bougeois concept of freedom of association, which gives you the right to hang out with the kind of people you like and give them money for any (legal) causes you like, no matter how dubious others find them–says much, not only about Zionism itself, but of the breakdown of any sense of fair play that has been so apparent in American political discourse for the past twenty years.

Fortunately, most of the political left in this country is hip to this issue. In fact, Israel/Palestine relations form a useful litmus test for separating the anti-establishment progressives from the pro-Democratic-Party liberals. If you tune in, as I do, to a lot of left discourse, what you hear is miles apart from the clamped-down establishment take on this issue, not only in the corporate media but even in academia. Finkelstein, Walt, and Mearsheimer are not the only academics who have suffered retaliation for Israel-critical views; Noam Chomsky, for example, has been punished as much over the years on this issue as for all his other heresies combined. Even someone as widely respected as Jimmy Carter opened himself up for instant vilification the minute he understated the sad truth of the Holy Land situation in his gentle, forgiving voice.

On the American left, we hear lots about this kind of censorship, and we talk lots about the vacuum it creates, but we don’t actually experience that vacuum–because, fortunately, our own discourse is quite different. We strongly condemn the purveyors of both Zionist propaganda and Israeli state terror; the former consequently gains little foothold in our midst, even when it comes from otherwise left-leaning sources. (Granted, this is only true on the left, not in establishment-liberal venues.)

ANTI-SEMITISM

It has to be said, though, that when REAL anti-Semitism rears its ugly head–an occurence considerably more common than many seem to realize–if it is interspersed with otherwise left-leaning comments, our responses are not so clear. It is true that many of us condemn it as vigilantly and forthrightly as we would Zionism, if not more so. It is also true that enough of us express a certain level of uneasiness or even partial sympathy as to create a certain ambiguity in our communal reaction. This is precisely what “left anti-Semites” (the term strikes me as a contradiction) plug into and exploit. Not that they’re popular. It is unambiguous that leftists don’t like to have to listen to them and wish they would tone it down; but it a matter of some uncertainty whether this is due to discomfort or outright rejection.

Just today I happened upon an unmoderated posting on opednews.com, a high-traffic progressive website with an unusually high tolerance for differences of opinion, for which I myself have been known to pen articles. I took a look at it after noticing it was by Seattle writer Jay Esbe, whose quite openly anti-Semitic proclivities I had already encountered in a previous debate on the site. The piece, Everything you know is wrong, meanders through the obligatory shots at Bush & Co. before finding its true target, the Jews, e.g.:

Here, on this site, the term “Zionism” is frowned upon –currently-. Prior to simply being frowned upon, the site’s Jewish owner Read the rest of this entry »

Today we officially mourn Empire’s Heroes Day.

I mourn all who die senselessly, and with special sadness those killed in politically motivated massacres, including our own 9/11. But overall, few of the victims of political slaughter are Americans. In the past fifteen years, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, for example, have suffered far worse than anything that has happened to us since at least World War II. Hundreds of times more people died in the Rwandan genocide than in 9/11. Are Rwandans’ lives less precious than Americans’?

Among those Americans who do die senseless, violent deaths, over 40,000 a year are killed by motor vehicles. A comparable number are killed by guns, whether by murder, suicide, or accident. Over 14,000 are murdered here each year. That’s over 80,000 victims since the far-more-mourned 3,000 of 9/11.

Are we asked to change our whole way of life because of gun or car deaths? We haven’t given up driving. Then why give up civil liberties? We don’t exactly “wage a war” on small-time murderers. Then why a “war on terror”?

The victims of this war are the same dark-skinned people whose deaths we ignore in order to sacralize our own, far less numerous ones. Even anti-war rhetoric suffers from this fault. We have lost close to 4,000 in Iraq? The Iraqis have lost hundreds of thousands. Despite valiant estimates, a more precise number is not really available, because, after all, “we don’t do body counts.”

Although most Americans would disagree with this no-count policy if they realized it existed, that doesn’t necessarily mean that most truly object to it. A substantial minority of Americans quite openly don’t care about “their” lives. Others want very much to believe they care, without actually doing or even thinking much about it. For them, it would be discomfiting to know the true scope of the slaughter we are causing. Both of these factions are happy not to know. Since the days when we waged primitive biological warfare on our own continent’s natives with our Old World diseases, Americans have been part of an imperial project.

Today is the #1 day to celebrate how horrible it was that we lost those 3,000 lives, HERE — unbelievably — in America itself, Land of the Fortress, home of global dominance. Well, it WAS horrible. Unbelievably, gobstoppingly horrible. I only wish it ranked high among the list of massacres in human history. If only, if only. It doesn’t even come close to the top hundred.

If only killing 3,000 civilians and turning lower Manhattan into a toxic dust storm really WERE the defining atrocity in human history, not only would history be cheerier, but we could legitimately treat 9/11 as the decisive event of our times. We would still have no right to kill thousands of other, mostly equally innocent people to avenge it, but we could honestly argue that it changed everything.

But it was NOT high in the history of atrocities, and it did NOT change everything. What changed everything wasn’t 9/11 itself but the quasi-religious spin that was put upon it. Like the chronicles of the Old Testament, the events of that day are no longer to be treated as an empirical sequence subject to open-ended historical debate, but as a sacred narrative. As James Meigs wrote in Popular Mechanics, “We as a society accept the basic premise that a group of Islamist terrorists hijacked four airplanes and turned them into weapons against us.” In other words, what happened is not a matter of individual opinion but a collective catechism that only outsiders to our society could reject.

With the enshrinement of this dogma, 9/11 was made into a religious epiphany (its purpose to wake us to the evil around us), the dead into martyrs, and the “war on terror” into a holy war. Real people died on that day, not holy martyrs, and many of their loved ones question the consecrated account of how their loss occurred. But it was not the real events of 9/11 that brought about the “war on terror,” on whose altar so many have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our new national religion, adopted in its wake, did that. Thus the Ann Coulters of the world can slime the real people while righteously demanding that wars be fought in the name of national victimhood.

Funny how it took 9/11 to make all this happen. Why don’t we speak of the Rwandan genocide as the event that “changed everything”? Unfortunately, there are only two possible answers:

1) That event killed only blacks.

2) That event did not happen in the heart of the Holy Empire.

For those who think ALL human life is precious, that ALL people deserve the fullest protection possible against violence of any kind, there is no alternative to opposing an Empire that holds life as cheap as ours has, not just under Bush but across its history, from Native Americans to Filipinos to Japanese to Vietnamese to East Timorese to Angolans to Guatemalans to Iraqis. It follows that the Empire cannot sanction such universal compassion. High-minded talk, yes, as long as everyone knows it’s only for show. When the metal hits the road, or the napalm hits the flesh, everyone knows it’s only the American lives that are treated as sacred.

To dissent from this position is unpatriotic. I am not being ironic here. It really is — because if your homeland is an empire, you cannot be a patriot of a non-empire. You can care deeply about its people and future, but you cannot Defend the Nation without defending the empire.

Our nation IS an empire, whether we like to admit it or not. By now most people in the world realize that our empire is a disaster. Here’s hoping, on the sixth anniversary of the greatest psy-op of our time, that in six more years most Americans will have woken up too.

Graphic by Tim Hollis

Heyoka Magazine says,

THE WAR GAME
is a 1965 television film on nuclear war. Written, directed, and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC’s The Wednesday Play strand, its depiction of the impact of Soviet nuclear attack on Britain caused dismay within the BBC and in government and was banned for 20 years. It was scheduled for transmission on August 6, 1966 (the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack) but was not transmitted until 1985, the corporation publicly stating that “the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting”. It was widely viewed before its BBC debut on video and in art-house cinemas, often using prints provided by Watkins. The film won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1966.

The War Game is available from Amazon, but you can watch it online right now. It’s horrifying and, unfortunately, a must-see. Calmly, without histrionics, it shows some of the various effects that, AT A MINIMUM, we should expect from a nuclear war–an event that, with the proliferation of nuclear capabilities, may actually be a greater danger now than it was during the Cold War.

The Amazon page shows clearly that the battle to silence such knowledge is far from over. “The War Game is a fictional, worst-case-scenario,” the supposedly neutral plot synopsis begins. Wrong and wrong. It is not a fiction at all, but an extrapolation of what might happen in the future should a nuclear war break out, as the narration makes clear throughout. It doesn’t follow any one person but shows a series of different events, all based on the impacts of firestorms in Europe and actual atomic bombs in Japan. Far from a worst-case scenario, it was probably an overoptimistic scenario, even back in 1966, when the bombs weren’t as powerful. The real-life firestorms it’s based on cannot compare to nuclear war. (Note: the plot synopsis for some reason does not always show up on the Amazon page; sometimes, sometimes not.)

Also, the Amazon reviewer’s comment, “Subtlety isn’t Watkins’s suit” is exceptionally idiotic–I suppose he was hoping for a film about the SUBTLE EFFECTS of nuclear war? This reviewer also refers to “the film’s blunt antiestablishment politics,” which isn’t entirely wrong, but isn’t entirely right, either. Apart from one moment in which survivors express the sentiment that the British civil defense system didn’t do any good, the politics of this film are essentially in the scientific facts and historical events on which it’s based. This is a bit like Bill O’Reilly: you can’t trust the facts, because they have an antiestablishment bias.

The real political stance of the film is sufficiently given in this: it refuses to twist facts to suit the Masters of War. “Do so,” say the hawks. “Do so, but to a moderate degree,” say the moderates. “Do so just enough to make support for the military clear,” say the pro-establishment doves. Only the “extremists” of the anti-war cause actually want the facts to be given straight.

If the position that facts speak for themselves without any politics involved is inadequate, it’s not just because some sort of framing structure is required to present and indeed comprehend facts–the framing structure required to arrive at this film’s position is basically the establishment’s own. More crucially, it’s because, in the face of massive, relentless, and predictable political pressure, only a strongly-held political position can cause you to hold on to the truth, no matter how clearly it may present itself. Only in this sense does this film, which stays faithfully within the format of its assignment and of the BBC’s style, take a political stand.

Documentaries that enact possible future (or past) scenarios are hardly unprecedented, yet Amazon’s plot synopsis reiterates, “Although it won an Oscar for Best Documentary, it is fiction.” The people who voted it the Oscar had better political judgment than whoever wrote that. I doubt, in fact, that its horrifying nature was the real reason it wasn’t aired. As Amazon’s reaction shows, the unwillingness to know the true magnitude of what the world faces should these weapons ever be used is alive and well today.

This film is soberly and unsensationalistically done, based on solid research. It’s a dry BBC documentary, and at the same time extremely powerful. The presentation is cool and relentless. It’s hard to watch, but watch it anyway, and arm yourself with knowledge. Only if enough people realize the danger we’re in is there much hope of doing something about it. Bush Sr. and Clinton did NOT take the steps they could have to rid the world of these weapons when the Cold War ended, and they are now in more hands than ever. The risk of all-out nuclear war may be less than during the Cold War, but the risk of a smaller one has never been higher. Even if a smaller one did not escalate into a larger one, the consequences would be unthinkable.

Confronted with the indefensibility of the established order, Amazon.com shows the same defensive reaction as the New York Times and other dyspeptic corporate media outlets, unable to cope with the unruly turn public discourse has taken over the past two years. Anyone who points out that the Emperor not only has no clothes but is revealed without them to be a bizarre and horrifying monster must have faulty eyesight and an ungenerous spirit. Such generosity, of course, is never required of those who point out faults of figures who could be suspected of “antiestablishment” proclivities.

It’s oath-inducing enough when officeholders break their oaths of office. But there can be no greater insolence than an officeholder who denies knowledge of what his oath was.

The President…shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

–U.S. Constitution

I do solemnly swear that I will…to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

–Richard Nixon, 1968 and 1972

Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

–Richard Nixon, 1977

Nixon’s long, painful decent from the Oval Office was marked by the constant assertions of The President’s Men that their loyalty to him overrode all other considerations, including legality, and that they considered this the height of honor. Interestingly, their oath of office is to uphold the Constitution and doesn’t even mention the president, while laws were already on the books that required of them outright disobedience to illegal orders. “Loyalty to the president” isn’t mentioned anywhere, although the fact that the laws allow the president to fire members of his government at will certainly explains where it comes from.

In our own time, the Nixon Doctrine of presidential lawlessness is being used far more vigorously than Tricky Dick ever would have dared. From signing statements to illegal search and seizure to cruel and unusual punishment to forced self-incrimination, Bush’s “anti-terrorism” campaign has ripped out so many parts of the Constitution he swore to preserve, they should probably just issue an abridged edition to save paper.

In the latest in a long train of usurpations, Bush has ordered staffers Harriet Miers, Joshua Bolten, and Sara Taylor to refuse to answer questions and provide documents demanded by Congress. Such orders from more traditional presidents would only be exposed after a lengthy investigation, but Bush has come right out and done it in the open. According to the dark hints of James Comey, whatever they’re hiding is so extreme that that guardian angel of civil liberties, John Ashcroft himself, was ready to resign in 2004 if they didn’t stop it, along with Comey and other top Justice Department officials.

The greatest prophet of the sixteenth century might actually not have been Nostradamus but Shakespeare:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office…

What Hamlet is trying to account for with his great speech, in his princely, flowery language, is why everybody doesn’t just off themselves, given how cruddy everything is. The political trends of the past few years lend renewed significance to this question–especially when it comes to the oath of office.

Consider Keith Ellison, the freshman Democratic congressman from Minnesota who was trashed late last year after he announced he’d be taking his oath on the Koran. His Republican colleague Virgil Goode, who serves a district in an area of Virginia that has been a bastion of slavery, Jim Crow, and white paranoia since the nation began, warned against more Muslims coming into the country and electing more Muslims to Congress. Goode also commented, “I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way.” In an op-ed, with admirably unintentional irony, he called on Americans to “save Judeo-Christian values” to avoid “leaving ourselves vulnerable to infiltration by those who want to mold the United States into the image of their religion.”

Bush refused to criticize Goode’s overt anti-Muslim bigotry–”no judgments have been made,” Bush spokesman Dana Perino explained. But Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) took it upon himself to play the good cop for the GOP, distancing himself from Goode’s remarks:

“Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? …I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I’m glad he’s swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith.”

Unfortunately, what Graham says here is both a deliberate deceit Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s somebody who comes out of academia — and so do I! Now, I may not be the most pro-academic person in the world (to put it mildly), but I do appreciate good academics. That’s why I was tentatively excited when I found out about Feldman’s Frameshop, in which he dissects the way issues are framed so as to advantage conservatism…very much in line with my own blend of media criticism and discourse analysis, very interesting, potentially very good. I even used and linked to some of his material the other day.

I got a little worried when I read the sample chapter from Feldman’s book and found out his glowing reaction to Teddy Roosevelt’s 1906 “Muck Rake” speech, in which the president attacked the bulldogs who were too persistently pointing out America’s failings. Old Teddy had — and in some circles apparently still has — a greatly exaggerated reputation as a progressive. He did do some trustbusting and supported some health and safety regulations, but behind the scenes he was generally quite pro-corporate. He was also a ferocious racist and imperalist. His “Muck Rake” speech, which gave us the word “muckraker,” showed the true colors of a sunshine liberal — sure, criticize abuses, but not too much. Feldman turns this into an inspiring moral message on some elevated plane of little relevance to the actual politics of the time — or of any time.

But what really threw me was this ringing defense of deliberative censorship. In the midst of a post in which Feldman performs the admittedly worthy task of shredding Bill O’Reilly, he chides Mad Bill for accusing DailyKos of fostering “9/11 conspiracy theories”:

According to the FAQ free and open for every human being and Bill O’Reilly to read, The DailyKos adheres to a strict editorial policy whereby posting a 9/11 conspiracy diaries results not only in the deletion of the diary, but the banning of the offending writers from the site. Write a 9/11 conspiracy diary on DailyKos and within hours, your diary,and every other diary you ever wrote, is deleted and your a free account is canceled.

More importantly, O’Reilly failed to report how a volunteer team of DailyKos “trusted users” constantly sifts through every diary posted to make sure the site does not step across that murky line dividing civil debate from violent rhetoric. They accomplish this through a combination of requests to writers to clean up foul language and–occasionally–by “bleeping out” offensive words (e.g., O’Reilly is full of ***t). If nasty words do make are kept in a post, it is typically because they are a key to the story (e.g., the story of Bill O’Reilly’s viewers sending death threats to the owner of The DailyKos). These trusted users do not get paid, they simply believe in DailyKos’s patriotic mission of fostering free and open debate. In the end, then, even though YearlyKos is distinct from DailyKos, JetBlue should be proud of any perceived ties this gives them to The DailyKos–a blog that historians will someday credit with helping to revive deliberative democracy in America.

The hypocrisy here is a clear indication that Feldman has learned a little too much from studying Republican framing — like Saruman researching the rings too long.

After the above quote, Feldman castigates O’Reilly for allowing Dinesh D’Souza to promote his own “9/11 conspiracy theory.” D’Souza’s latest cerebral hemorrhage is that the “cultural left” caused 9/11.

Like well-trained CIA liberals of the Cold War era denouncing both fascism and communism in the same breath (see MORE THOUGHTS below), Feldman wants to make very clear that he rejects both “9/11 conspiracy theories” that blame the U.S. government AND those that blame the left. Instead, he takes a sensible, moderate, reasonable, unideological position in the middle — that it was a conspiracy done by Arabs. The great advantage of saying that Arabs plotted the meticulous conspiracy is, of course, that this isn’t a conspiracy theory. Only if some prominent group of Americans or American allies were the alleged conspirators would it be a conspiracy theory. (If this seems at all an unorthodox statement, just check the way the term “conspiracy theory” is in fact routinely used.)

The kind of “deliberative democracy” Feldman wants is the same one that has murdered people by the millions overseas for the last sixty years — while debating at home how to take our unchallengeable supremacy in the practice of democracy to an even higher pitch of perfection.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New 9/11 Casualties is a horrifying story about what happened to the rescue workers at Ground Zero — more particularly, what happened to their lungs. It’s a very good piece, with the exception of a brief but necessary wave to I.C. — Imperial Correctness. I.C. dictates that the American Empire can make mistakes and (it’s now being whispered) even be callous or downright scandalous in its behavior, but never EVER would it take the lead role in perpetrating atrocities — still less against its own people. That this is provably false from the historical record is not the point; nor will you persuade the willing upholders of I.C. that they are merely saying what Big Daddy tells them to. They can quite rightly point to the fact that they don’t always believe Big Daddy. Big Daddy, the national security state, might, indeed, be wrong. But if he did certain things, he would simply cease to BE Big Daddy, and that is NOT acceptable.

The brief but necessary wave consists of the following bit of disinfo about the Twin Towers, so transparent it might almost be a good thing:

“The weight of the buildings pulverized everything inside—including thousands of tons of insulation, drywall, concrete, glass, plastics, 50,000 computers and other pieces of office equipment—into a fine powder.”

Now how would it do that, I wonder? If you shot all that material out of a cannon and it hit a steel wall in mid-air, it wouldn’t all turn into a fine powder. It would require an incredibly high impact velocity to completely powderize even concrete, let alone all the other materials. This is perhaps the single strongest piece of evidence for controlled demolition, and it’s right out in the open. It’s amazing how people can know about this and still believe the official story. It was precisely when I heard about the powderization, three and a half years ago, that I stopped thinking an inside job was a little too much to believe and remembered Sherlock Holmes’ injunction, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

However improbable — however unacceptable — however world-shattering.

UPDATE: I forgot to point out the most interesting aspect of the New Gravity (a concept every bit as sound as the Third Way, the End of History, and the New American Century). Not only is gravity stronger, it’s much faster than it was before. In fact, the new, improved gravity works in advance…objects now pulverize while falling, BEFORE THEY EVEN HIT THE GROUND. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this photo of the North Tower midway through the process of collapsing — or, more precisely, of blowing apart:

read more…

By introducing a new vaccine, the United States scored a key victory today in the war against prostate cancer. With the win, the U.S. secured a bronze medal in the World Warfare Cup. Here are the standings:

1. Drugs (beat U.S. 11-0, continuing a winning streak that dates back to the 1980′s)
2. Terror (beat U.S. 4-0 with three own goals)
3. United States
4. Prostate cancer

Note: earlier reports of a decisive U.S. victory over Terror in a poorly attended match held in Afghanistan turned out to be incorrect. The winner of that match was, in fact, Drugs.

See this video starting at 5 minutes 43 seconds, or this interview, for more information.

The international NGO Reporters Without Borders, which advocates freedom of the press, releases an annual worldwide press freedom index. Countries are ranked on the basis of surveys designed to record any kind of harassment of journalists and state violence against them that forces them to flee or abandon their work. In 2002, under Saddam Hussein and his draconian control of the media, Iraq ranked a dismal 130. In 2006, after three years of U.S. occupation, Iraq fell to 154. The NGO has also declared Iraq to be among the world’s worst hostage market, with 38 journalist kidnappings in three years.

–Dahr Jamail, from “Another Casualty: Coverage of the Iraq War” (emphasis mine)

You got that right…according to Reporters Without Borders, press freedom is WORSE today in Iraq that it was under Hussein. Partly this is just because the situation is so violent there that no one is safe, especially not people who have to gather information in different parts of town. Anything you can say will offend somebody, and somebody probably has a gun. But it’s also the consequence of direct suppression, such as the 2004 shutdown of al-Jazeera. It’s remarkable how many self-described freedom-loving Americans see nothing wrong with that. I mean, supposing Clinton had shut down Fox News for their negative coverage and endless, anti-government hit-pieces? It strikes me there would have been some ruckus about that. But it’s really only Americans whose freedom of speech counts; for everyone else, freedom means being Americanized. That’s the premise of American imperialism, and it always has been, ever since the days of disease-carrying blankets and prairie missionaries. If you self-consciously, articulately disagree with that, you’re considered disloyal…which, considering what you’re supposed to be loyal to, YOU ARE.

The U.S. directly manipulates and controls media in Iraq, planting stories partly to affect public opinion there, partly to affect it back here. The American government does not hesitate to censor. For example, according to Jamail’s article, Iraq’s Media High Commission sent a letter on the prime minister’s letterhead warning reporters to, “Stick to the government line on the U.S. led offensive in Fallujah or face legal action,” and “set aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear.”

Before anyone gets mad over the title of my post, let me state explicitly that it’s meant in a sarcastic spirit, and of course Hussein’s suffocating dictatorship was anything but “anything goes” for journalists. That makes this report, if it’s even remotely justified, all the sadder.

The only thing I would take issue with in the paragraph I quoted above is the last sentence, in which Reporters Without Borders calls Iraq “among the world’s worst hostage markets, with 38 journalist kidnappings in three years.” It seems to me that would make it among the world’s best hostage markets. Let’s face it: if you going to plunk down some good money to get a hostage, the thing you want is SELECTION.