Killer Mike - "Reagan"

Noam Chomsky, Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said and Avi Shlaim on Ariel Sharon

The Impotence of Big Brother

Remember this when the NSA stammers out excuses as per why they need to monitor our phones and web activity:

Catholic Social Teaching in Action is Considered Violent Terrorism in the United Snakes

Read this short article, How the US Turned Three Pacifists into Violent Terrorists, by Fran Quigley.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

In summary, three dedicated non-violent Catholic peace activists (quite easily) broke into a major nuclear weapons facility. Essentially, they cut some fences, hung up their peace banners, and spray-painted peace slogans on the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF).  They prayed and sang songs.  It took security a VERY long time to ever arrive, and when they did, the three activists surrendered peacefully and were jailed.

One of the activists, an 82 YEAR OLD Catholic nun answered reporters asking WHY they did what they did, “We had to — we were doing it because we had to reveal the truth of the criminality which is there, that’s our obligation,” Rice said. She also challenged the entire nuclear weapons industry: “We have the power, and the love, and the strength and the courage to end it and transform the whole project, for which has been expended more than 7.2 trillion dollars,” she said. “The truth will heal us and heal our planet, heal our diseases, which result from the disharmony of our planet caused by the worst weapons in the history of mankind, which should not exist.  For this we give our lives — for the truth about the terrible existence of these weapons.”

Overzealous prosecutors and the tyrannical government they represent didn’t like that very much.  The charges immediately escalated from the original misdemeanor trespass charge.  Because the three activists refused to plea guilty to at least one felony charge, they now faced a new charge of sabotage.  3000 people signed a petition to U.S. Attorney General Holder requesting he not allow such an abomination of the justice system.  He didn’t bother to acknowledge the petition and the sabotage charge stuck.  Defendants were charged with intending to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States and willful damage of national security premises in violation of 18 US Code 2155, punishable with up to 20 years in prison.  Counts two and three were the previous felony property damage charges, with potential prison terms of up to fifteen more years in prison.

As the incident played out in court, the justice system was (as usual) manipulated and perverted by the mockery of what it has become since September 11, 2001.  The three defendants were not given a fair trial:

“The government also successfully moved to strip the three from presenting any defenses or testimony about the harmful effects of nuclear weapons.   The U.S. Attorney’s office filed a document they called “Motion to Preclude Defendants from Introducing Evidence in Support of Certain Justification Defenses.”  In this motion, the U.S. asked the court to bar the peace protestors from being allowed to put on any evidence regarding the illegality of nuclear weapons, the immorality of nuclear weapons, international law, or religious, moral or political beliefs regarding nuclear weapons, the Nuremberg principles developed after WWII, First Amendment protections, necessity or US policy regarding nuclear weapons.

The three were immediately jailed.  In its decision affirming their incarceration pending their sentencing, the court ruled that both the sabotage and the damage to property convictions were defined by Congress as federal crimes of terrorism.  Since the charges carry potential sentences of ten years or more, the Court ruled there was a strong presumption in favor of incarceration which was not outweighed by any unique circumstances that warranted their release pending sentencing.

These non-violent peace activists now sit in jail as federal prisoners, awaiting their sentencing on September 23, 2013.

In ten months, an 82 year old nun and two pacifists had been successfully transformed by the U.S. government from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism."

This is what the "war on terror" has brought us to: empowering the government to apply the term "terrorism", "sabotage" or "espionage" to cases of whistle-blowing or civil disobedience, allowing it to convict dissidents of crimes they didn't commit in an effort to suppress all forms of organized opposition.

The Double Standard of US Foreign Policy 2

The War On Terror Is Over. America Lost.

Terror for Profit

USA Today wrote: 

"Tuesday, a 1:07 p.m. ET tweet from the Associated Press exclaimed "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured." It was a hoax, but within seconds, Wall Street was in panic mode, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average into free-fall and erasing nearly $200 billion off the broader market's value." 

Was this a test? Economists experimenting with how  an event like this might effect the economy??? 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/23/hack-attack-on-associated-press-shows-vulnerable-media/2106985/

Sick world we live in. I remember Tuesday after the marathon fiasco, MSNBC had financial analysts with all types of charts and graphs explaining how the ensuing drama affected the NASDAQ.

Anyone else feel alarmed that we are creating a world where gigantic acts of violence create massive amounts of profits for corporations? Anyone else see where this is going?

The Marathon Bombing: What the Media Didn’t Warn You About

By Russ Baker on Apr 19, 2013 

During a meeting on Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours after the bombings at the Boston Marathon, a well-meaning person asked me whether I thought we could assume that the usual suspects were behind the mayhem, or whether there was “more to it.” When I explained doubts about the conventional rush to judgment—and where those doubts came from—I was told I was on dangerous ground. This person, it seemed, was quite steadfast that the culprits must have come from certain well-advertised enemies of America, and didn’t want to even consider anything more complex.

We’re the products of our environment, and, in many respects, the media defines that environment.

Monday’s bombing at the Boston Marathon provides a perfect example of the defects of conventional news reportage—and proof that we urgently need something better. We got “scoops”, “experts”, “updates,” and post-tragedy Kumbaya, but at the end of those days of saturation coverage, we were none the wiser. It’s like what studies find about television news: the more you watch, the worse you perform on knowledge exams.

We ought to care more about the narrative we’re getting, about the texture of what saturates us. The way in which a story is handled shapes our emotions and perceptions, determines priorities, and influences seemingly unrelated outcomes that affect us in profound ways, sometimes transforming our society.

Worry, But Not Too Much
With the bombing story, emotions ran high, of course. The media understand this, and while they talk in reassuring tones and routinely issue sober disclaimers, almost everything they do plays to our irrational sides.

Two elements predominate: danger and reassurance. Some of the talking heads are there to warn about danger, others to reassure us. Some do both. We wouldn’t want just one or the other—it would be too hard to take. But together, they represent, psychologically, an ineluctable offering.

As long as they appear in tandem, we will sit, immobilized, and let the networks’ pronouncements wash over us. We become so anaesthetized to critical thinking that we fail to consider whether we are getting any information of use at all.

Experts
On CBS, a purported expert declared, “It could be Al Qaeda, it could be someone influenced by Al Qaeda, or it could be a domestic lone wolf” –when in fact it could have been anything at all, including a whole bunch of domestic non-Al Qaeda non-lone wolves. This man provided nothing useful in any way beyond conventional stereotypes. What he did do was define the permissible bounds of public conjecture.

Scoops
Speculation and its close cousin, “analysis,” predominate only in the absence of the hottest commodity, “scoops.” News personnel are pressed into service to gather any sort of exclusive tidbits that might put their employer just slightly ahead of the competition. Temporarily, of course, and in the same direction. So, while CBS expert was strongly implying that we might suspect foreigners, CNN went it one better.

Correspondent John King reported:

I want to be very careful about this because people get very sensitive when you say these things. I was told by one of these sources, who is a law enforcement official, that this was a dark-skinned male. The official used some other words, I’m not going to repeat them until we get more information because of the sensitivities. There are some people that will take offense even at saying that.

 Well, no wonder. That “dark-skinned” detail turned out to be a false report.

Repetition
In the absence of “scoops” or a fresh trove of “experts,” TV news outfits resort to repetition. Thus, after several minutes, you’re on a loop. They don’t tell you that you are, and because we hear a live anchor slightly rewording things, we hang on, in the vain hope we are about to learn something new.
Another thing that keeps us hooked is the promise of being re-traumatized in as many ways as possible. Show us that bomb going off again, please. Let’s see new pictures of the killed and injured in happier times. Let’s see closeups of gnarled detritus, and, on occasion with disclaimers that young children ought not watch, at least a hint of blood and gore. Let us “empathize,” and feel good about ourselves for doing so.

Kumbaya
How many times do we have to hear the same—literally, almost exactly the same—stories about “our hearts go out to the families”, about how “neighbors displayed yellow ribbons, lit candles and displayed American flags.” A liberal news site sent out an email saying “we are all in this together.”
To what end all this empathy? It may reassure us that humanity continues to shine through at tough times, but don’t we already know that?

Some might say that stoking a “show of unity” is a principal responsibility of the American media. But is that really the purpose of journalism?

The definition of journalism I find most useful is, simply stated, the production and dissemination of news. And what, exactly, is “news”? Here’s one definition from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Newly received or noteworthy information, especially about recent or important events.

Is it new or noteworthy when people act in expected ways and say expected and indeed almost identical things in new situations?

Substitute for Substance
In today’s economic and journalistic climate, resources for newsgathering are extremely limited. It’s not surprising that the bosses go for quantity over quality. Much easier to collect a bunch of sterile or hackneyed “public reactions” than to ask the tough questions or do the hard digging.

When an event like the Boston bombing gives rise to wall-to-wall coverage, it fills our bandwidth. It exhausts us. It blocks out our ability to focus on anything else. At least, if we’re going to give up on everything else, is it too much to ask that the coverage contain some useful information?

What Gets Blocked Out
At the same moment that all eyes were on Boston, in Washington, legislation imposing restrictions on assault weapons and ammunition clips, along with efforts to require the recording of sales of murderous weapons, were under merciless assault by the NRA and its allies. Indeed, the proposed laws subsequently went down to defeat. As horrible as the death and destruction at the Marathon, it pales by comparison to potentially avoidable gun violence, with literally thousands of times as much carnage. Put another way, the toll in Boston was a compressed version of that occurring during a single ordinary week around this country.

Call the Senate vote bad timing. Just like the atypical rampage the week before in which a “nut” used a knife instead of the standard-issue assault rifle. How atypical? Very, says USA Today in an article, “Mass Knife Attacks, Like at Texas College, Are Rare.” Yet, at the time of the Senate vote, opponents of stronger gun laws were beneficiaries of this statistically anomalous but dominant news story.

Those who still will not do anything after Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown ad nauseum had “cover” from the Boston bombing to not make hard choices.

Of course, a real nut, seeing the kind of coverage lavished on the Boston bombings, would be more, not less likely, to want to generate such a hullaballoo.

Double Standard on Tragedy
We repeatedly fail to see how such media circuses feed the sickness. It’s an uncomfortable topic, but you can be sure that every assigning editor was aware that the Boston Marathon story had all the elements of high ratings: Families gathered. A hallowed sports event. Children. People of all backgrounds. A popular city and site.

Other stories in the news — such as the explosion Wednesday night at a Texas fertilizer plant, resulting in more fatalities than the Boston bombing— lack these compelling elements. How many people were glued to their sets or talking constantly about the Texas tragedy, which involved not “ordinary American families” enjoying a beloved pastime, but blue collar workers in a “right to work” state where unsafe working conditions are hardly considered shocking?  Even when it seemed possible that the Texas explosion might also involve terror, it didn’t capture the same degree of interest. We came to learn that perhaps it was “just” an industrial accident—at a plant that hadn’t been inspected in five years. Such accidents, if that is what it was, are only likely to increase as federal inspection funds are slashed as part of the sequester.

The truth is, some things grab and keep our attention more than others. The people who run the media know this. And because they have to sell ads, they focus on some things more than others.

FBI Missteps
Was there anything else we could have been focused on? There was, but it was just too “distasteful” to broach, at least in the early hours. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it was the Fox brand (admittedly a local station, not the propagandistic Fox News Channel) that dared to raise questions about events that terrorize the public. In this report, the correspondent dares to remind us that the FBI has in the past had close relationships with people who want to blow things up, and has even facilitated these plots up to the point where law enforcement can intervene to thwart the bad guys. Was a similar sting in place at the Marathon – a sting that went horribly wrong?

One veteran marathoner, Alistair Stevenson, the cross-country coach at the University of Mobile, says that he noticed an unusually heavy police presence, including bomb-sniffing dogs and spotters on rooftops, before the race, and that runners were told not to worry—that law enforcement was carrying out “drills.”

Stevenson’s account was reported in an Alabama blog run by a consortium of respectable local news organizations, but it was virtually ignored by the traditional media. Nothing here worth a second-look? Really?

Is it heresy or madness to take a harder look at the metastatic growth of the national security state? History is replete with examples of cynical efforts to create “strategies of tension” in which the public, fearful of growing chaos, turns to the reassurances of those who promise order.

In fact, it so happens that advocates of increasing surveillance are pressing their game on every front. One involves the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which, if enacted, would authorize your web service provider to pass along your real-time personal data to the Federal spooks. There’s been a lot of opposition to this, but something like the Marathon bombing can be a game-changer. Those who monitor public sentiment understand the power of emotion to alter public stances.

That’s not to say there is necessarily anything “more” going on here. But from history, we know that the official story will point to one of two things: either an organized radical (Left or Right or Foreign) group that threatens “the American way of life,” or it will be a “lone kook.”

It could be that by the time you read this, we will “know” the “full story.” At press time, the story was breaking in a new direction, with two young immigrant brothers, Chechens, the identified culprits. Why Chechens, who, though Muslim, would principally have a beef with the Russians, with whom they have been at war, not with the US? And why if they were, as apparently they were, treated well here and given opportunities, including a scholarship?

The upshot will be to bring the US and Russia into closer alignment.

Remember, though, that even the most radical of terrorists can be wound up by infiltrators, or can have links to our good friends, as we reported about those identified as the 9/11 hijackers, and their ties, via a house in Florida, to the Saudi royal family.

Oh, and what about the fire that broke out around the same time as the Marathon bombing, at the nearby John F. Kennedy Library and Museum? Interest in that fire largely vanished as soon as we were tentatively assured that it was (perhaps/probably) unrelated. Talk about symbolism: the Boston Marathon on “Patriot’s Day”—and the repository of records related to one of America’s greatest mysteries, the death fifty years ago of a President who warned us repeatedly of the dangers of tyranny—and who sought peace with the non-hardliners in the Kremlin.

So let’s not settle so fast for the wrong kind of reassurance. Other societies have learned the hard way to be wary of too-easy answers. We simply must be open to the most inconvenient truths—not out of paranoid fantasies, but from a cold-eyed look at history and recent experience.

The Double Standard of US Foreign Policy

To murder several runners using bombs at a sporting event is terrorism.

To murder 175 children using military drones is U.S. policy.

We should accept neither. We should fight against both.

Reporter Asks White House if U.S. Airstrikes That Kill Afghan Civilians Qualify as ‘Terrorism’
by Rania Khalek on April 17, 2013 :

http://raniakhalek.com/2013/04/17/reporter-asks-white-house-if-u-s-airstrikes-that-kill-afghan-civilians-qualify-as-terrorism/

Here is the exchange transcribed in full:

REPORTER: I send my deepest condolence to the victims and families in Boston. But President Obama said that what happened in Boston was an act of terrorism. I would like to ask, Do you consider the U.S. bombing on civilians in Afghanistan earlier this month that left 11 children and a woman killed a form of terrorism? Why or why not?

JAY CARNEY: Well, I would have to know more about the incident and then obviously the Department of Defense would have answers to your questions on this matter. We have more than 60,000 U.S. troops involved in a war in Afghanistan, a war that began when the United States was attacked, in an attack that was organized on the soil of Afghanistan by al Qaeda, by Osama bin laden and others and more than 3,000 people were killed in that attack. And it has been the President’s objective once he took office to make clear what our goals are in Afghanistan and that is to disrupt, dismantle and ultimately defeat al Qaeda. And with that as our objective to provide enough assistance to Afghan National Security Forces and the Afghan government to allow them to take over security for themselves. And that process is underway and the United States has withdrawn a substantial number of troops and we are in the process of drowning down further as we hand over security lead to Afghan forces. And it is certainly the case that I refer you to the defense department for details that we take great care in the prosecution of this war and we are very mindful of what our objectives are.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

Notice That?

Firing missiles into a country we are not at war with to execute a single man.

seem ethical?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/06/uss-cole-al-qaida-terrorist-killed?newsfeed=true

Censorship by Omission

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict provides much clear evidence that the media game is rigged against Arabs in the United States. This video illustrates how (aside from the vast abundance of financial and military support (by way of weapons) the United States showers onto Israel in aid of the Palestinian genocide) PERHAPS THE MOST CRITICAL AID is the one-sided spin of misrepresentation that American mainstream media dishes out to keep citizens here ignorant and complacent.

After all, if the majority of Americans knew the atrocities and war crimes being committed constantly by Israel onto the Palestinian people, they might have a problem with things - like for example ,the U.S. grants and loan guarantees to Israel for fiscal 1997 was $5,525,800,000.

Shirl McArthur wrote in the May 2003 issue of Washington Report.*

McArthur's article, "A Conservative Tally of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: $97.5 Billion - and Counting" tallies the hidden costs, such as interest lost due to the early disbursement of aid to Israel and funds hidden in other accounts. For example, Israel received $5.45 billion in Defense Department funding of Israeli weapons projects through 2002, McArthur says.

Loans made to Israel by the U.S. government, like the recently awarded $9 billion, invariably wind up being paid by the American taxpayer. A recent Congressional Research Service report indicates that Israel has received $42 billion in waived loans. "Therefore, it is reasonable to consider all government loans to Israel the same as grants," McArthur says.

Support for Israel has cost America dearly - well over than $10,000 per American.*

This seems to play out as a major motive for Israel to manipulate and distorts American public perceptions. The United States has been considered Israel's most powerful and supportive ally and accounts for around 25% of Israel's military occupation (and genocide) of Palestine.

Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied territories appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one.

If you don't have time to watch the entire film, at least take a careful look at 48:08 - 50:05 in the film. This is one instance (amongst many others in the film) very clear picture of how Israel's American PR Campaign works their magic in our media and therefore understanding of the situation:
48:08 - 50:05




Further info:
* http://wrmea.org/component/content/article/245-2008-november/3845-congress-watch-a-conservative-estimate-of-total-direct-us-aid-to-israel-almost-114-billion.html

Watch free on Google Videos: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2165626245072381061

Remember the Victims of Terrorism -Stop Funding The Campaigns with Passive Participation

38 Years Ago - a horrible act of terror lit up the skies. Say a prayer and remember the victims of this horrible atrocity when you are breaking bread with loved ones. 1,600 civilian lives stolen Christmas week...

Innocent blood was needlessly shed to preserve the SAME backward principles that have many mindlessly out spending money on useless shit to give one another for XMas.



Shop wisely - the money you are spending is funding today's terror campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, as well as the countless campaigns staged across the globe.

The US Military currently has presence in more than 150 countries worldwide. The presents you buy help fund this imperialism.

Maybe it's time we ask Santa Christ to re-think our foreign policy?