“I have been familiar with Professor Churchill’s work for a number of years now. I have cited his work approvingly in an essay I wrote for the journal Ethics in 1995 published by the University of Chicago. This journal is probably the oldest and most prestigious journal in the field of ethics and political philosophy published in the the United States. Later, I revised and published a portion of this essay which included the parts that referred to Professor Churchill’s work in my book, Three Challenges to Ethics, published with Oxford University Press in 2001. At the time, I asked Professor Churchill to write a blurb for the back of this book which he graciously did. Both Oxford and myself were pleased to have his endorsement of my book. All of this is evidence of my belief, and the beliefs of the editors of Ethics and Oxford University Press in the excellence of Professor Churchill’s work. There is not even the hint of incompetence here. It is excellence all the way down.”
Not quite as much the fringe lunatic that talk radio would have you believe he is…….or even some of the left-liberal mainstream.
Category Archives: Media
How Propaganda Works: By Erasing Context…
An article I wrote in 2005 on the Monthly Review website about how the liberal press (NY Times, in this case) and the neo-conservative press (National Review) BOTH rewrote the story of Abu Ghraib to make it fit the establishment agenda.
WHY?
BECAUSE IF YOU BLAME JUST THE LAWS, THEN YOU CAN CHANGE THEM BUT STILL KEEP THE POLITICAL CULTURE. THE PARTIES IN POWER CHANGE BUT THE POLICIES STAY THE SAME. WE ARGUE ABOUT DIFFERENT THINGS AND SEE DIFFERENT FACES ON OUR SCREEN BUT NOTHING CHANGES — THE STATE ONLY GETS BIGGER….AND BIGGER……AND BIGGER…
“The Failure of Liberal Journalism on Abu Ghraib“
(November, 2005)
” Eliminate the real details of what went on at Abu Ghraib, substitute a handful of strangely artistic nudes, and it’s only too easy for the National Review to make its case that the chatter about legal memos is simply a Victorian swoon by liberals. This is exactly what [Rich}Lowry does……
…Andrew McCarthy is right in concluding in a January 2005 National Review article that Alberto Gonzales’ “position on this matter [of treatment of detainees from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban at Gitmo] is not a radical view.12 It’s America’s view.”
The right even claims that the 1977 Protocol I to the Conventions that protects non-state actors was simply a partisan addition tacked on by Democrats and that the national liberation movements they were meant to protect were simply terrorist organizations.
Given that, why would today’s resurgent right-wing embrace a legal doctrine championed by Democrats and rejected by their hero Reagan? Why should we expect any other outcome except the “promotion of the promoter of torture” as one conservative publication put it?13
Again, one cannot state too often that the law is part of the problem for conservatives (and for much of America) and that liberals who fail to see this becomes no more than unwitting co-conspirators with conservatives in the legitimizing of torture…………
As long as movements for political and economic liberation are characterized as terror and state terror is disguised in the language of liberation theology, Abu Ghraib is always going to be acceptable to an inflamed population as necessary to “security.” As long as state terror is unacknowledged or normalized or hidden in covert actions, violent acts by individuals can be exaggerated so that they seem to throw up a monstrous irrational shadow against which surveillance and espionage and their other face — torture — can be justified as the state’s rational response.
And it’s finally the political context of this state surveillance — the pervasive presence, both explicit and subliminal, of an infinite voyeurism that replicates and circulates its power in every transaction in society — that permits and finally sanctions the pornographic violence of the state.
This is the context which is fragmented or erased altogether by the media. This is the context without which Abu Ghraib — and in Arabic, Abu Ghurayb means the father of the raven, a bird of ill-omen — becomes no more than isolated and senseless acts rather than what it is literally — a prefiguration of things, a dark messenger from the future, a sign of evil to come.
Related:
1 American Civil Liberties Union, “Government Documents on Torture” (records the government has released under court order in response to the ACLU’s FOIA request).
2 T. T. Reid, “Guard Convicted in the First Trial from Abu Ghraib,” Washington Post (15 January 2005).
3 Rich Lowry, “Thug at the Prison,” National Review (14 June 2004).
4 Anne Applebaum, “Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib?” Washington Post (5 January 2005).
5 Lowry, op. cit.
6 T.R. Reid, “Case Against Soldier Is Presented: Two Ex-Detainees Describe Alleged Abuse at Prison in Iraq,” Washington Post (12 January 2005).
7 Lowry, op. cit.
8 Lowry, op. cit. Neil Lewis and Eric Schmitt, “Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush,” New York Times (8 June 2004).
9 Neil Lewis and Eric Schmitt, “Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush,” New York Times (8 June 2004).
10 “Action Memorandum from the General Counsel of the Department of Defense” (2 December 2002); see also “Memorandum for the General Counsel of the Department of Defense” (15 January 2003).
11 Rich Lowry, “Bring It On: the Real Gonzales Fight,” National Review (7 January 2005).
12 Andrew McCarthy, “Should We Make a Treaty with al Qaeda?” National Review (5 January 2005).
13 Lee A. Casey & David B. Rivkin Jr., “Gunning for Gonzales,” National Review (31 December 2004).
14 Co-authored with John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor.
15 Peter Brooks, “The Plain Meaning of Torture? Literary Deconstruction and the Bush Administration’s Legal Reasoning,” Slate (9 February 2005)
Mandelstam on thinking..
“If you gain every morsel of your bread from the powers that be, and you wish to be sure of getting that little bit extra, then you are wise to give up thinking altogether,”
Nadezhda Mandelstam, cited in “Democracy, Fascism, and the New World Order, ” Ivo Mosley.
A progressive publication carries a review of my book…..two years after the fact…
July 07, 2007
By Seth Sandronsky
[The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media By Lila Rajiva (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2005), 224 pp. Paper, $14.95.]
When the Iraq war began in 2003, Lila Rajiva quit her job teaching school. Based in Baltimore, the author tracked press coverage as a web activist and sent out anti-war petitions. In late April 2004, the U.S. TV news magazine “60 Minutes II” ran photos of naked Iraqi men, sexually disgraced, in detention at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Rajiva penned a series of web articles on publications such as Dissident Voice and Counterpunch. They considered the absence of imprisoned Iraqi women in the torture photos, and how the media had covered – and covered up – Abu Ghraib and other reports of torture in the war on terror since the attacks of September 11 generally. Web journalism surfaced as a popular press during the lively 1999 street protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.
In The Language of Empire, Rajiva studies the factors and forces behind Iraqi detainees’ torture, shining a light on corporate journalism and its role as a service provider to the second Bush administration, which claimed, falsely and in violation of international law, that the U.S. had to go to war with Iraq, on the grounds of its involvement in the September 11 attacks and possession of weapons of mass destruction.
With a keen eye, Rajiva clarifies and demystifies the official narrative of the U.S. forces (including private contractors), to show how, corporeally, psychologically and sexually, they tortured Iraqi detainees. For the record, a partial list of such torture included asphyxiation, actual and simulated drowning and execution, rape and sodomy, prolonged incarceration in putrid, tiny metal cages in extreme weather and desecration of the Qur’an. She begins by analyzing circumstantial evidence from the scandal at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqis had also been tortured during the regime of Saddam Hussein. And she casts a critical eye on U.S. civilian and military policy-makers, broadly defined as the neo-conservative faction in the second Bush administration. Questions of what they knew and when they knew it remain unanswered, as the US occupation of Iraq officially ended in June 2004.
One of the convicted, photographed torturers of racially brutalized Iraqis at Abu Ghraib was Charles Graner, a former prison guard in Pennsylvania’s maximum-security penitentiary where black author and journalist Mumia Abu Jamal has also been held for years on death row. Crucially, Rajiva untangles the class-based media attacks on Graner as a kind of rogue redneck, cast as the proverbial bad apple in an otherwise pristine barrel and sentenced to eight years for his crimes. This framing of the scandal, according to Rajiva, had the partial effect of absolving U.S. policy-makers of legal and moral accountability – though one high-level official involved in authorizing the torture of Iraqi detainees was Michael Chertoff, head of the criminal division of the U.S. Justice Department. He was later promoted to head of Homeland Security…..
[First published in Race & Class in January 2007]
My Comment:
Seth Sandronksy, hat tip to him, was one of the first and very few journalists (besides Jeff St. Clair, Alexander Cockburn, Ward Churchill, and Vijay Prashad) to take notice of the book in 2005, when it came out. I wrote about how the torture fit into the general scheme of things – the first to do so, I believe. I don’t recall any other magazine even deigning to give the book a review. Seth was so kind as to write this in 2007 when he noticed the lack of reviews.
Another friend, Suhayl Saadi, the gifted Pakistani-born Scottish novelist (whose novel Psychoraag is reckoned one of the 100 top Scottish novels) , attempted to get a review in the UK, but there were no takers because – this was the reason they gave — the book was not stocked on regular book shelves. But it was available and selling quite reasonably even without reviewer notice, on Amazon. In fact. it was at the top of the political best sellers in a couple of countries abroad. And nearly 300 universities in the US and abroad have it on their shelves, including Princeton, Yale Law School, Harvard, Columbia, Heidelberg, Monash, and many others. (See WorldCat for a list that is almost, but not quite, complete) and it has been on the reading list of St. Andrew’s University and Amherst in political science undergraduate courses. So you have a book which is:
1. The first book about the media coverage of the torture scandal
2. The first book to state that the absence of the women in the photos was deliberate and critical
3. The first to analyze the hearings and document the discrepancies in the testimony of Rumsfeld and Cambone
4. The first to address the use of the Nick Berg beheading in covering up the scandal (the first book dealing with Berg, as well)
A book
5. Published almost TWO years before the recent (March 2007) Taguba inteview, which reveals that the women’s photos are in fact out there
6. Written and previewed THREE years before it (see my article in Counterpunch on Christian Zionism, excerpted from the last chapter book in January 2005 when I completed and submitted the manuscript).
Now we have the confirmation from Taguba that, yes, there are hundreds of photos, including many pictures of rapes of women and worse. as Iraqi reports have claimed all along.
7. Published by a well known socialist press
8. Written quite accessibly, but in a measured way. I tried to keep it thoughtful rather than sensational to minimize the offensiveness, since I am a non-native. Nor is it arcane, although it is pretty analytical.
9. I write regularly for websites, work with a well known financial writer, and have been interviewed on dozens of progressive radio stations; I graduated from a respected international relations department, am a Christian, not a Muslim, and a 15 year immigrant There is nothing in that resume or background that would suggest any ulterior motive.
And everything I state in the book is sourced and carefully researched.
The book was also
8. Blurbed by some well-known names.
9. Submitted to dozens of progressive outlets and writers to review.
And besides a few activists and smaller magazines, not one of them wrote a review. Good or bad.
Nothing really unusual there. I am just pointing out to people how these things work.
So why the sudden printing of this piece? Maybe, the Taguba interview with Hersh earlier this year and sounds from establishment figures threatening more revelations (the CIA disclosures might be one rumble); maybe, some other establishment pundits now turning up the heat – prompted this. Who knows?
Notice how all of these things happen in tandem — the alarm goes off and mainstream and fringe, government and critics, all rush out of their opposing corners of the field and get into a public scrimmage..
Actually, I should say that several people asked me to send the MS in, and then never reviewed it. Or even answered my email inquiries. That might just be standard DC treatment of small fry by big fry. Only now I find that couple of them have gone on to use some of the material in their own work without citing their source.
News these days is a commodity — of which there is only so much in circulation. Too much can send down prices… The establishment would not be able to make their own roles in the business central and keep the thread of the story firmly in their hands.
So that, friends, is how kinder, gentler censorship works. No gulags for writers here. Only tenure denials and years of low-paid untenured work (ala Norman Finkelstein), or isolation and the intellectual cold shoulder (Chomsky, until he got too famous to be ignored), or aspersions of antisemitism.
So what is my theory about all of this?
A combination of several things.
(And here I am not talking about the commercial issue – the fact that it’s really hard to get anything published at all, let alone sell it or review it.
Or that authors are pretty much on their own with publicity…
Putting that aside – it boils down to this:
I am not the right person to say what I said. And I am not saying it in the only way it would be acceptable.
For one thing, because I wasn’t born in this country.
Fair enough.
Atrocity stories – especially dealing with intelligence – are delicate ones to negotiate, even for natives. In some countries, you would be hauled off to jail or shot, I’m sure, for venturing into that territory. But those are dictatorships or outright police states, like North Korea. I hope that that’s not now the standard for constitutional republics.
That is why I didn’t try to write an investigative book. I doubt if anyone would have told me anything news worthy, or if they had, it would have been vetted so much it wouldn’t have been any use.
I wrote an analysis instead that might have some merit even when the mainstream investigative reports came out. One that wouldn’t become dated.
Meanwhile, Anglophone journalists who know NOTHING about the history of a country, don’t speak its language, have never lived in it for any length of time, or know its conventions, get to go in with camera crews to depict anything that goes on there, analyze sensitive events of all kinds, in any way they want, with the whole force of network TV behind them and with US laws and armed forces to back up any thing they do ,if necessary.
Night after night, they can pound those images onto screens all over the world. However wrong their stories are. And the same goes for Anglophone scholars. They can hold forth on just about anything, and no one questions any of it.
[ I don’t deny that people are probably doing that in other languages too. But the difference is, those countries aren’t hyperpowers with nuclear weapons].
No matter how contrary to what’s in front of their eyes, people bow and scrape and suck it all in. Not just here, but abroad. No one holds a gun to anyone’s head to make them do it either. But they all still fall in line. Even people who know what’s going on. Why?
It’s not that people are silenced — it’s that they only speak in turn. They moderate their views and tune them to the orchestra. Why? Because funding depends on it. It doesn’t negate the good they do. It doesn’t mean they aren’t well-meaning, thoughtful, sincere people who know what’s going on. But it means they have to toe a line that they didn’t get to draw. They could lose their jobs, otherwise. They speak — but they are also spoken through.
Which is why, it’s the citizens – the ordinary folks on the ground – who have to take up the burden of truth in any society.
I’m the wrong person as well, because I am unaffiliated. I don’t write my stories for any reason except they seem important to me.
Sure, I have a boss. But I don’t subscribe to everything he thinks or says and he is nice enough not to make me. No fear of university boards or tenure committees. And while we differ on many economic and financial issues, I’ve actually found him to be a fair-minded and courageous person, given his circumstances. And his antiwar stance is more humane and scrupulous than many more close to my way of thinking.
On the left, businessmen are all supposed to be war-mongering hypocrites. That is a myth. As much a myth that intellectuals are only concerned about the public good rather than about their own careers and vanity.
I’d rather side with people of principle, even if I disagree with half of what they say, than with unscrupulous people who might be in full and complete agreement with everything I say. If we stopped listening only to what we want to hear and responded instead to the quality of person we were dealing with, we would hear things and learn things we did not know. Otherwise, we become prisoners of our own logic and victims of our own limitations. Wisdom comes often against either our logic, or our will, or even — at any given moment – our conscience. For, dormant parts of our own being are awakened by contact with what is alive in others…
On some social issues I think I’m quite close to progressive positions. But for the rest, I believe in free enterprise; it’s just that I don’t think you have much of that going on now. That far I agree with a lot of the Marxist diagnosis. But not much of the prognosis.
I always reside quite gingerly wherever I am, since I don’t subscribe to more than half the dogmas that can be found on any given site — and even then I take them – as I take most theories – with a grain of salt.
You don’t get to pick who publishes you always, or why. And I have to respect the people who do, however different their views.
I see no reason to hug in a global kumbaya before we stop slaughtering each other. We can keep a healthy space from each other and still survive.We only need to do our own thinking for ourselves…
The CIA’s literary lapses…
Short Cuts
– J. Hoberman
From the London Review Bookshop, courtesty of Lew Rockwell.
In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK.
It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the rogue spook and sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell’s death in 1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance in the operation – possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell’s widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark Gable – but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real.
Leab is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of Hollywood’s Cold War movies; the central figure in his account is Louis de Rochemont, the former newsreel cameraman who supervised Time magazine’s innovative monthly release The March of Time and, beginning in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street, produced a number of so-called ‘journalistic features’ for 20th Century Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for their extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street dramatised the FBI’s role in arresting Nazi agents; its 1946 follow-up, 13 Rue Madeleine, celebrated the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, but a dispute between the studio and the OSS director, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, resulted in the organisation’s being disguised as an intelligence outfit called ‘0-77’.
De Rochemont subsequently became an independent producer affiliated with the Reader’s Digest. In 1951, while preparing a new FBI collaboration, Walk East on Beacon (adapted from an article by J. Edgar Hoover originally published in the Digest), he was recruited by the CIA’s blandly titled Office of Policy Co-Ordination to produce an animated Animal Farm. The CIA was already engaged in spreading the Orwellian gospel – as was the clandestine Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. (Both agencies had been engaged in making translations and even comic-book versions of Animal Farm and 1984.) Nor were the CIA and the IRD the only interested parties: according to Leab, both the US Army and the producers of Woody Woodpecker cartoons also made inquiries as to the availability of Animal Farm’s film rights.
The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the frozen British box-office receipts from his racial ‘passing’ drama Lost Boundaries; in fact, Animal Farm was almost entirely underwritten by the CIA. De Rochemont hired Halas and Batchelor (they were less expensive and, given their experience making wartime propaganda cartoons, politically more reliable than American animators) in late 1951; well before that, his ‘investors’ had furnished him with detailed dissections of his team’s proposed treatment. Animal Farm was scheduled for completion in spring 1953, but the ambitious production, which made use of full cell animation, was delayed for more than a year, in part because of extensive discussion and continual revisions. Among other things, the investors pushed for a more aggressively ‘political’ voice-over narration and were concerned that Snowball (the pig who figures as Trotsky) would be perceived by audiences as too sympathetic.
Most problematic, however, was Orwell’s pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie’s screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm’s mandated ending complemented the new Dulles policy, which – abandoning Truman’s aim of containing Communism – planned a ‘roll back’, at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script’s many advisors put it, Animal Farm’s ending should be one where the animals ‘get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing their oppressors’.
Animal Farm’s world premiere was held at the Paris Theatre in December 1954, then as now Manhattan’s poshest movie-house, and was followed by a gala reception at the United Nations. The movie received respectful reviews – as it did when it opened several months later in London – but performed poorly at the box office. (Its major precursor as a ‘serious’ animation, Disney’s 1943 collaboration with the aviator Alexander de Seversky, Victory through Air Power, was also a flop.) Halas and Batchelor did achieve a reasonable approximation of stretchy, rounded Disney-style character animation but, as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed, ‘the shock of straight and raw political satire is made more grotesque in the medium of cartoon.’ This was a dark cuteness. While praising Animal Farm as ‘technically first-rate’, Crowther concluded his review by advising parents to not ‘make the mistake of thinking it is for little children, just because it is a cartoon.’
Actually, Animal Farm was ultimately seen mainly by schoolchildren – particularly in West Germany. Possibly the movie was perceived by this captive audience as an unaccountably dour and violent version of Walt Disney’s Dumbo. But, however the CIA’s fervent call for an anti-Soviet revolt (with ‘help from the outside’) was received by the world, it was rendered moot some eighteen months after Animal Farm’s European release by the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising.”
I did a piece on this in Countercurrents on the CIA and modern art.
A Comment on the Finkelstein tenure situation
Arguments about the use of the Holocaust in public debate don’t constitute an “intra-Jewish fight.” It would be much more accurate to say that they involve questions of state policy in this country (and in Israel) and of propaganda in the west at large — an issue which affects ALL writers, journalists, thinkers, intellectuals, scholars and even citizens who just want to be informed accurately — not simply Jews.
It amazes me how so many Anglophone intellectuals (even well-meaning ones) feel completely qualified to analyze atrocities and abuses anywhere in the world, loudly and superfically (if not downright incorrectly), often with the sketchiest and most second-hand knowledge (gleaned from the English language writings of their own DC-N. York journalist buddies or from scholars at various “prestigious” universities, all sharing exactly the same myopic viewpoint ).
A notable recent example is Martha Nussbaum, whose latest book on India (preparatory, I imagine, to humanitarian bombing, somewhere down the line) can only annoy anyone who knows anything about the subject. When it comes to their own backyard, however, these soi-disant arbiters of universal values frigidly ignore views that aren’t self-selected, insular and distinctly obsequious to their pet theories about life outside hard cover. Prizes, tenures, sinecures, reviews, cocktail parties and the rest of the glitz of intellectual life follow in lock step. A nice system….
Now, good for those who make their living from it – I don’t knock them.
As long as they remember that’s all it is – a living. A way of paying their bills that has little do with the real life of the mind — which might sooner take place in some scorching megapolis abroad or ghetto stink-hole here than at one of their blow-dried soirees. And might take place silently as much as it does vocally.
On the outside, we know this. On the outside, we know it is their self-regarding attitude that makes mainstream idealogues less than credible, less than admirable in the eyes of ordinary human beings. The criticism of these “smatterers” is always within a select framework, in which they and they alone are true subjects.
A fitting response is to hold their opinions in equal disdain. A favorable review from one of them should be treated much as one treats an alarming bug of some kind….you hope you’ll get through, but it might be the beginning of a fatal contamination…
Is this a viable position for a struggling writer? Yes, indeed.
Blogging makes it possible for books to sell and sell well even without reviews from the establishment. Fellow bloggers and dissidents are willing to say a good word here and there. A reader. An unknown collegaue. The pleasure of having the good will and encouragement of those who share your sympathies and your aloneness is something surely far more satisfying than the brittle praise of people whose main concern is pleasing the right people and stepping on the obscure in their frantic rush to the limelight.
In fact, a new ambition — I hope to forego a publisher altogether and publish directly. Perhaps those two lengthy chapter on media ownership in this country that were cut out summarily (would offend too may people, they said), will see the light that way.
So, what has this to do with Finkelstein?
Everything.
The central issue in this country and in many western countries is not globalization or imperialism; it is not torture or the CIA; it is not humanitarian intervention…or realpolitik…or peacekeeping.. or even war.
The central issue is brainwashing. Whether it is at universities or in the press or in think-tanks; whether in war or in peace-time. Whether the subject is Israel or imperialism or the family or women or money or IQ tests or immigration or race.
The issue now is how we think. Or don’t. And what we get to think about. Who does it for us. Why. And where it is leading us.
London bomb hysterics, anti-terror laws, and Gordon Brown’s resume(updated 6/30)
Explosives officers discovered the fuel and nails attached to a “potential means of detonation,” inside the vehicle. Officers “courageously” disabled the trigger by hand, he said. Security sources told CNN that the “relatively crude device” in the first car contained at least 200 liters, or about 50 gallons, of fuel in canisters.
You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.”
More from terrorism expert Larry Johnson at No Quarter
and a word of caution from John Chuckman at Counterpunch.
Just a coincidence, of course, that all this happened just after Gordon Brown, taking over from Tony Blair, made it clear that he was no slouch either in the occupation of Iraq or in the anti-terrorism department.
Only to be expected from a buddy of Henry Kissinger, as this piece by Craig Murray points out:
“Gordon Brown has been a personal friend of Henry Kissinger for a long time, and the last time Kissinger came to London, Brown and Kissinger spent two hours alone together in 11 Downing St discussing Kissinger’s latest book. That should disillusion those daft enough to believe that Brown’s five year support for Bush’s wars was a aberration forced upon him by circumstance.”
(Hat tip to Murray also for this tidbit in the same piece:
“Meanwhile Blair, for whom the House of Commons was never more than a vehicle for personal interest, has quit it even sooner than decently possible, so not a penny of the tens of millions of pounds about to flow his way from corporate America will have to be declared in the register of member’s interests.”)
Here’s an article from February 2006 by Brendan O’Neill (spikedonline.com) that takes on the new transatlantic national insecurity states.
Brown has urged more funding for experts to tackle the financing of terrorism. Translated, that means more snooping into financial accounts of all sorts of non-terrorists.
Joe Citizen, besides having to foot the bills for government-funded panic attacks, also has to clutch his bank statements closer to his heart – lest the larcenous fingers of the feds get into them.
Meanwhile, while Brown wants more tax-payer money for anti-terrorism, he’s not letting on too much about what he’s done with tax-payer moolah before — like losing a wad of it ($4.8 billion) when he sold off Britain’s gold reserves — against the advice of Bank of England officials – at only the bottom of the market between 1999-2002. Nice trade.
Maybe, just maybe, that ought to be a tad more worrisome to people than some half-cocked bomb scare.
Who were the lucky buyers, you ask? Why, none other than the Chinese.
So much for Brown’s national security cred…..
However, that might not carry much weight when measured against his pro-Israeli qualifications, noted in this Jerusalem Post report.
Several of his appointees also seem to share this pro-Israeli bias, James Purnell, for one, who is now secretary of state for culture, media and sport. In that role he’ll have oversight over the BBC and the rest of the British media. Here is Purnell on the subject of criticising Israel and anti-semitism in a letter to Prospect Magazine, in December 2004:
“Israel is a democracy, suffering terrorist attacks, surrounded by countries that don’t recognise its existence, the victim of well-funded terrorist organisations that preach antisemitic hate. The Palestinians deserve a viable state, and are suffering real poverty and hardship. There is suffering on both sides-neither can solve this problem without the other.
“So when some people talk as if Israel is entirely to blame, I ask why. The only answer I can find is that there is something deep in our cultural memory that makes us disposed to blame Jews. That tendency was put in its box by the Holocaust. But today it re-emerges-occasionally, but persistently. I would call it passive, or unexamined, antisemitism.” I wonder what Purnell would call it when anti-Zionist Jews are targeted by pro-Zionist Jews —
anti- antisemitic pro-semitism? Yes – that’s how ridiculous these word games are: “Hate-speech” laws, ” anti-terror” laws — nothing but pretexts for increasing control over people, their money and their lives….
PR from the pros: how to co-opt your critics
From Ronald Duchin of Mongoven, Biscoe and Duchin Public Relations, speaking to the National Cattlemen’s Association:
“Activists fall into four distinct categories: ‘radicals’, ‘opportunists’, ‘idealists’, and ‘realists’. The 3-step strategy is to (1) isolate the radicals; (2) ‘cultivate’ the idealists and ‘educate’ them into becoming ‘realists’; then (3) coopt the ‘realists’ into agreeing with industry. The ‘realists’ should always receive the highest priority in any strategy dealing with a public policy issue… If your industry can successfully bring about these relationships, the credibility of the radicals will be lost and opportunists can be counted on to share in the final policy solution.”
by way of blogger, zwsnipboy.
Police State Chronicles – bill muzzling Internet heads to Senate
“The Senate’s version of massive new telecommunications legislation is headed to the full Senate, after a flurry of amendments and contentious debate in the Commerce Committee. The House passed its own bill on June 8. Media democracy advocates, media producers, technology companies and Internet libertarians opposed to the bill’s passage then looked to the full Senate in hopes that the bill could be substantively improved or, if not, killed.
The proposed legislation has gathered such broad interest because of the potential severity of its effects on mediaand communications technology in the United State. Both House and Senate bills would change the very nature of the Internet, and seriously undermine public accountability over cable and video services, including educational and community TV. While claiming to clear the way for new innovations in broadband access, the bills would likely retard important avenues for Internet innovation and deployment. They would mean the end of the free open Internet characterized by “net neutrality” or equality of access….”
Read more here at Reclaim the Media.
Useful Links:
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Legislation: Maine passes first net neutrality resolution.
American Index II: Tenure denied to Norman Finkelstein
De Paul University’s administration has just disgraced the notion of academic freedom by denying tenure to world-renowned Holocaust historian, Norman Finkelstein, himself a son of Holocaust victims. His research was up to snuff, but, Norm…Norm…so much passion simply won’t do in a scholar, they said. Then final decision was made by De Paul’s President, the Reverend Dennis Holtschneider.
And this, despite the fact that Finkelstein wielded a dazzling arsenal of books and articles, major standing as a public intellectual, the admiration of the foremost researchers in the field – even in Israel, whose policies are often a target of his criticism – and approval from his department and college.
Here’s the story of the tenure battle at the Roman Catholic University, as it came down to the wire. And here is another idol of the left, Noam Chomsky, sounding off on the story behind the story. For good measure, I’m also tossing in the ranting of Finkelstein’s chief nemesis, Alan Dershowitz, who conducted a letter writing campaign directed at De Paul’s faculty and administrations. Outside groups that vocally opposed the tenure board were the Jewish United Fund, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, and the pro-Israel group, StandWithUs. Finkelstein has argued that Jewish groups use the tragedy of the Holocaust for their own ends and to further Israel’s political goals. Here’s a piece in Salon about the feud with Dersh over NGF’s accusation of plagiarism by the Harvard law professor.
That made the old ladies of the De Paul administration take to their smelling salts, despite applause for their pugnacious professor from such leading lights as Israeli scholar, Raul Hilberg, the founder of Holocaust studies, and Oxford professor, Avi Shlaim, a leading expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The university also denied tenure to Mehrene E. Larudee, another highly regarded faculty member, who had campaigned for Finkelstein and was days away from heading up the international relations program.
Let freedom ring…..
Update: A wideranging interview with Raul Hilberg, dean of Holocaust historians, on Finkelstein, antisemitism then and now, the use of language like genocide. And a piece by Finkelstein on compensation over the years from Europe.
Update:
Some background on academic freedom in the US in this excerpt from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger’s Cardozo lecture:
“In the late 19th century, American universities overwhelmingly adopted the German model. They established individual graduate schools, each dedicated to a specific field of knowledge. They also adopted the general principles of the “freedom to teach” and the “freedom to learn” — since, it was believed, in order for graduate students and faculty to break new intellectual ground, they had to possess the freedom of inquiry. Historians trace the codification of academic freedom, meanwhile, to a series of conflicts in the late 1800s that pitted individual faculty members against university trustees and administrators.
The most famous was a case involving Edward A. Ross, a Stanford economist who made a series of speeches in support of the Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896. Jane Lathrop Stanford — widow of Leland Stanford, ardent Republican, and sole trustee of the university — was so outraged by Ross’ activism that she demanded his dismissal. The president of the university eventually acceded to her demands; Ross was forced to resign in 1900.
Ross’ mistreatment at the hands of Stanford administrators became the basis for the charter document of the American Association of University Presidents, entitled the ” Report on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” Co-written in 1915 by Arthur Lovejoy, a Stanford philosopher who resigned over Ross’ firing, and Edwin R.A. Seligman, a Columbia economist, the report sought to remove university trustees as arbiters of research and teaching, and to assert instead the authority of self-governing faculty members. The report stated:
“….. The proper fulfillment of the work of the professoriate requires that our universities shall be so free that no fair-minded person shall find any excuse for even a suspicion that the utterances of university teachers are shaped or restricted by the judgment, not of professional scholars, but of inexpert and possibly not wholly disinterested persons outside their ranks.” (my emphasis)
My Comment:
I should point out that for most of his academic life before De Paul, Finkelstein – who holds a PhD in his field and has a lengthy publication record — taught a full course load as an adjunct for around $15,000 a year (approximately…I’ll check).
Granting him tenure at the end of his career hardly sounds like a tax-burden on citizens, even if one wanted to think of it in that way. Especially as it is faculty (not well-paid administrators making ten times as much or more) who draw students to the universities anyway. Quite frankly, in a free market system he would be owed back-wages. I can think of many private foundations which would have done better by him.
From a libertarian standpoint, I think you have to decentralize methodically. Since, we do already have federally- funded universities, the first step would be to see that they are, in fact, fair and provide academic freedom.
The second step would be to systematically reduce funding at the federal level and move colleges toward private and state funding.
As to leaving the whole business of higher education to private funding, that could be a final step, although it would need to be carefully worked out, expecially in the sciences. I am not sure how it would be done and what difficulties would arise.
Whichever way you see it, though, one thing is essential. Principles have to be applied step-by-step and systematically to everyone, or you’re left with arbitrary and cavalier policies. The university should have a place for a brilliant scholar of the left, like Finkelstein – however controversial his scholarship. But it should also have a place for an equally brilliant and almost as controversial scholar on the right, like Hans Hoppe. Chomsky, to his credit, has supported both.