Category Archives: Media

Torture Pictures You Can See and Torture Pictures You Can’t…

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In the news last month, was a torture tape that implicates a UAE royal sheikh (who isn’t in the government) in acts of sadism. In it a uniformed policeman watches as the victim (who shortchanged the Sheikh in a grain deal) is whipped, beaten, electrocuted, and run over by an SUV).  From an ABC report on the tape:

“The Sheikh begins by stuffing sand down the man’s mouth, as the police officers restrains the victim. Then he fires bullets from an automatic rifle around him as the man howls incomprehensibly…..

He uses an electric cattle prod against the man’s testicles and inserts it in his anus. At another point, as the man wails in pain, the Sheikh pours lighter fluid on the man’s testicles and sets them aflame…….

The Sheikh then pulls down the pants of the victim and repeatedly strikes him with board and its protruding nail. At one point, he puts the nail next to the man’s buttocks and bangs it through the flesh.

“Where’s the salt,” asks the Sheikh as he pours a large container of salt on to the man’s bleeding wounds. The victim pleads for mercy, to no avail.

The final scene on the tape shows the Sheikh positioning his victim on the desert sand and then driving over him repeatedly. A sound of breaking bones can be heard on the tape.”

This is all pretty gruesome and horrific. The Sheikh is clearly a monster. But that torture exists in Arab countries is not new. Can there be more to explain the media highlighting of this tape? Remember, it took CBS several years before it got around to the Iraq torture story (it was first reported in the US in 2001. The CBS expose of Abu Ghraib was in 2004).

Could it have anything to do with a recent piece of legislation?

Barack Obama, is throwing his weight behind The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009,  passed on June 1, 2009. What this does is make the Secretary of Defense certify whether any images of prisoner treatment between September 11, 2009 and January 22, 2009 would endanger military personnel or US citizens, and at his discretion and without any possible review, prevent their disclosure. The certification lasts for three years and can be renewed indefinitely.

Here’s Glenn Greenwald on the subject:

“For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied.  For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers.  And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law — again — this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.”

Greenwald acts surprised, which is a bit funny. What did he think? That Obama was going to change things?

It makes you wonder if the Abu Dhabi tape was given airtime simply to provide enough impetus (as in, See, they do it too – and  so much worse ) to pass this horrible bill.

Team Obama Turns Up Heat on NY Journalist

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Michelle Malkin, writing in The Pittsburgh Tribune Online:

“As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.

In an e-mail message to whistle-blower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:

“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else. I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”

It’s only just begun.”

My Comment

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t consider Michelle Malkin anything but a very partisan source. I find her incredibly abrasive and limited. But this story really needs attention, not so much for the revelations about ACORN and the Obama campaign (what else would you expect?), but for the insight into how the government handles the “free” press when it gets out of line.

The CPJ’s Top Ten Worst Countries to Blog In

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In 2008, the Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ found that bloggers and other online journalists were the largest professional group being jailed. Earlier, that honor went to print and broadcast journalists.

Here’s a quick summary of their evaluation of the worst countries in the world for bloggers:

1. Burma

Monitoring, regulation of cybercafes, blocking. At least two bloggers in prison.

2. Iran

Monitoring, harassment, detention, pending legislation advocating death penalty for promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy. One blogger died in jail in unclear circumstances

3. Syria

Filtering, blocking, harassment, self-censorship, monitoring, detention.

4. Cuba

Blocking, harassment. 21 bloggers jailed

5. Saudi Arabia

Widespread blocking, self-censorship

6. Vietnam

Monitoring, harassment.

7. Tunisia

Electronic surveillance including email monitoring, electronic sabotage, content filtering, IP submission, imprisonment of at least 2 journalists

8. China

Blocking, monitoring of email, filtering of searches, deletion of objectionable material. Has a vibrant bloggin culture but maintains world’s most comprehensive online censorship program.  At least 24 bloggers in prison.

9. Turkmenistan

Blocking access to opposition sites. Monitoring of email accounts.

10. Egypt

Monitoring of sites, open-ended detention, sometimes imprisonment and even torture. But only a few sites are blocked. More than 100 journalists detained (usually for short periods).

All this seems very bad compared to what we have in the US.

Or, is it? Let’s see.

  • Email monitoring Check.   And note this program, ADVISE, in the works, supposedly scrapped in 2007, but status unknown is a better description. And if that’s been thought up for the citizenry at large, bloggers should expect quite a bit more attention.
  • Censorship Depends on what you define as censorship.  Wiki demonstrably manipulates  information in subtle and not so subtle ways. Sometimes there’s outright deletion of articles for no good reason besides content censorship. Google not only censors some material overtly, it’s been accused of manipulating the visibility of material. Facebook is reported to be impossible to leave. Finally, there’s probably far more disinformation in the US than in any other country, and it’s certainly the most sophisticated.
  • Website harassment/sabotage Check
  • Controlled mainstream media Check
  • Bloggers killed None that I know of, but I can think of at least two journalists (Gary Webb is the most famous) who died in mysterious circumstances.  And dozens of foreign journalists (and some foreign-born US journalists) were killed outside the country by the US military during the coverage of the Iraq war, as I noted in this piece in 2006.
  • Professional Sabotage Widespread
  • Ruinous litigation Widespread
  • Self-censorship Widespread
  • Verbal and physical threats  Check

Note: I’m not sure why countries like Malaysia and Morocco didn’t make this list.

Could it have something to do with encouraging foreign investments there? I notice that Malaysia has recently been taken off the list of foreign tax havens (Labuan, a small island off the Malatsian coast, is well-known as an off-shore haven).  But only last year,  an antigovernment blogger was jailed on sedition charges .

As for Morocco, when I was there in 2008, I was told repeatedly not to write about anything controversial (such as, Moroccan jails or torture) because it would land me in serious trouble (i.e. jail).  In September 2008, Just a month before I was there, a blogger was sentenced to two years in prison for failure to show respect to the king. The Tangier-Tetuan region in the north of Morocco is the target of  government investment and vast amounts of foreign real estate development and speculation.  I was told by knowledgeable people that a lot of the money pouring into the luxury apartments in Tangiers was drug money….

Crime Rates and Propaganda

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Here’s an odd article in The Brunei Times, June 3, 2008 that lists India as the country with the highest numbers of murders.The caption reads India records highest number of murders in world. Now, what would the average reader take that to mean? The highest murder rate…

But that’s not the case at all.  Here’s the piece, with my comments:

“INDIA has recorded the highest number of murders in the world, a latest study by a government agency shows, news reports said yesterday. Data put together by the National Crime Records Bureau, a department of the Federal Home Ministry, showed that the number of murders in India, was three times that of Pakistan and double of the United States.“

Lila: Anyone glancing at this would immediately come away with the impression that the murder RATE in India was higher than anywhere else. When we say there are more murders in Gary, Indiana, than elsewhere in the US, or when we assess a city for its safety, we look at murder or crime stats in relation to the population.

“There were more than 32,000 incidents of murder recorded in India over 2007-2008, whereas there were nearly 16,700 murders in the US and about 9,700 in Pakistan, the NDTV network reported.”

Lila: This is clearly misleading.  Raw numbers placed next to each other suggest implicitly that the crime levels are comparable. They are not, because the population size varies.

“However, the survey clarified that the rate per population of murder and other crimes in India was much less compared to other countries.”

Lila: The figures for the rates of murder are tucked inside the body of the piece, where the casual reader isn’t immediately going to spot them.  Most people read the headline, the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph.

So, what’s the last paragraph here?

“Indian crime rate has been increasing every year.”

Lila: Well, India’s population has been increasing every year too. But is that mentioned?

This piece was in the Brunei Times last year. A casual reader might assume from this that India had more murders and rapes than South Africa. It actually has twenty and thirty times fewer, despite much greater population, population density, and poverty. Even in absolute terms, the US has more than four times the number of rapes than India, and South Africa has almost double.The US population is over 300 million, which is nearly a quarter of the Indian population of over 1.1 billion. So this really means the rape rate per capita in the US is sixteen times that in India.

This is the second article I’ve seen recently, which seems to be trying to give a misleading impression of India as a very violent country – more violent than Pakistan. There is violence in India – from terrorism. And a lot of that is fomented by rebels, secessionists of various kinds, and yes, by jihadists – many of whom are trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Financial Follies: Condo Builders Under Water

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In the news today, AP reports:

“Multifamily construction plunged 46.1 percent to an annual rate of 90,000 units after a 23 percent fall in March. Permits for multifamily construction dropped 19.9 percent to 121,000 units. Analysts said apartment construction is being hurt by a glut of condominiums on the market and by tightening credit conditions for commercial real estate.”

My Comment

Oh, my. This made my day. Condo flippers and developers are in big trouble.

Overlook the opening of this article, with that plaintive reference to a ” modest rebound in single-family home construction in April” that  “raised hopes.”

Hopes should not be raised. That’s pretty clear by now. Not unless you’re being paid to pump houses for some rash developer who ran out of buyers for his pet eye-sore. We can think of a number of things that should be raised  – black flags, eyebrows, interest rates…..but not hopes.

I’ve been checking condo prices all over the world and it’s the same news. From Panama to Kuala Lumpur, from Miami to  Baltimore. Commercial developers are in trouble.

If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and put a smile on your face, I don’t know what will. These wretched companies drove up housing by 100-300% (and more) in some cities and literally chased people on small or fixed incomes out of places they’d been living for years.

And don’t tell me they added any real value.

In New York. construction in one building was so shoddy, the Buildings Department had to intervene.  I personally inspected a condo where, when the owner kicked the wall, her foot went right through.  Many of them were aesthetic monstrosities that ruined the skyline,  polluted the air, and destroyed the architectural beauty of the places where they metastasized.

Now there’s a glut and the developers are losing their shirts.

Miami’s condo king, Jorge Perez, is sitting on top of a market with the biggest glut in the country. Since 2003, nearly 23000 condos were added to downtown Miami, and 33% of them remain unsold. The financial hurricane hit just when Perez, the “tropical Trump,” had opened his newest project, Icon Brickell, a boutique hotel combined with over 1,640 luxury apartments and squeezed into three towers. Only 18 units have sold so far. Perez (once estimated to have a net worth of $1.3 billion) is in big money trouble. His company, Related Group, lost $1 billion in 2008 and ran up debt of $2 billion, $700 million from Icon Brickell alone.

It just doesn’t get better than that….

Wiki Fake Quote Shows Up Journalists

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In the news:

“When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.

They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud….”

More here

My Comment

Only a 22 year old would be shocked by this, of course. Any one else knows that very few journalists double check sources or go to the original print report and look for an additional sources. But I’m not convinced that Wikipedia is such a paragon of journalistic rectitude either.

And I wonder whether this story coming out now doesn’t conveniently bolster wiki’s own reputation? I like wiki as much as the next person, but, among other instances, when I was writing about Virginia Tech, I noticed some manipulation of the time-line (which I’ve written about on this blog).

The fact is Wiki has its own slant and it often editorializes very strongly. Of course, bloggers do it too.

But bloggers are supposed to editorialize, push the envelope and move faster than the print media. Wiki, on the other hand, is supposed to be the definitive online, interactive, “wisdom of crowds.”

Again – don’t get me wrong. I love wiki and find it mostly a reliable source, at least of references and pointers. But it’s been known to engineer a few things too….

(Continued in the next post)

The New York Times Complains About Chinese Torture

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And no – I don’t mean that someone dripped water into the eyes of the editorial staff until they squealed. I mean they  referred to torture  – committed by the Chinese – and they did it without using quotes, their standard practice when referring to American torture.  The reference was in an obituary for Colonel Harold E. Fisher, an American pilot who died at the age of 83. Here’s what Fisher underwent:

“kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.”

Contributing to the general tone of hypocrisy, Barack Obama has recently ruled out holding the CIA responsible for torture, even though many experts have argued that at least the lawyers who wrote the authorizing memos, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, should be prosecuted.

Just for comparison, here’s what Human Rights had to say about the lack of accountability so far at every level:

“Since August 2002, nearly 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global “war on terror.”

Despite these numbers, four years since the first known death in U.S. custody, only 12 detainee deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official. Of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half. While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, not one CIA agent has faced a criminal charge. Crucially, among the worst cases in this list – those of detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment; the steepest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death: five months in jail.”

The HR report also specified just how brutal the torture could get:

“Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a former Iraqi general beaten over days by U.S. Army, CIA and other non-military forces, stuffed into a sleeping bag, wrapped with electrical cord, and suffocated to death. “

Here’s the whole HR report.

Scott Horton has proved that the documentary evidence of wrong-doing goes straight up the chain of command to the President (I made that argument as early as 2005 based only the record available at the time). So the NYT’s selective treatment of the subject has simply no justification.

Fortunately Glenn Greenwald was at hand to give the paper a thrashing:

“The NYT’s incoherence and double standards, equally, are self-evident. But I would like to know if Bill Keller will remove the t-word from this obit and replace it with “harsh interrogations” as he does when referring to the US government’s use of identical techniques. If not, why not? Remember: these people won’t even use the word torture to describe a technique displayed in the Cambodian museum of torture to commemorate the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge – as long as Americans do the torturing.

I mean: the NYT isn’t just a vehicle for US propaganda, is it? It’s a newspaper, right? It has standards that it maintains across its copy. Right?”

My Comment:

We’re still waiting for the answer on that one. But, meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald and Salon prove that they’re the real press.

And talking about double standards, Al Jazeera poses this question: Torture still continues in Iraq (this time, at the hands of Iraqis), but why is there no global outcry over it?

Swine Flu Hysteria Feeds Drug Cartels

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Confirmation from Bill Engdahl that indeed swine flu is being hyped, with the WHO leading the hyping.  The public has such a short memory. Doesn’t it remember that Tamiflu was the drug Rumsfeld was touting for avian flu a few years ago?

Engdahl point out that even the term “swine flu” is being dropped in favor of Influenza 2, in response to lobbying from pork manufacturers, even though  toxic (that is, faeces-filled) factory farms, like Smithfields’ are said to be the probably source of the outbreak.

Engdahl:

“The Drug Cartel comes in

Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.

On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’[16]

On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’[17]

That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).

With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.

Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic……….

…..If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation.”

Lila: Notice that Mexico now plans to implement a $1.3 billion economic stimulus package to counter the effects of the outbreak on the economy. Presumably this will help increase government spending, government control and global coordination – all long-term goals of the globalists.