Whilst the main focus of Lendman's article is the BBC's pro-Israeli bias, his overall analysis of the BBC at the begginning of the article seems accurate to me. Pro-government, pro-big business; "a propoganda system for elite interests". Whilst here and there it is possible to find honest investigative reporting on the BBC (for instance Panorama's recent Daylight Robbery by Jane Corbin), such instances are rare.
And Lendman is right to note how little difference there is between the BBC and its Anglo-American corporate counterparts. To my eyes their content seems largely indistinguishable, cetainly in terms of reporting about corporate and governmental corruption. Take (again) the BBC's Daylight Robbery, an incisive television piece about corporate financial corruption in Iraq. The film estimates that some $23billion is unaccounted for, stolen or missing from the massive corporate contracts awarded by the US government to the multinational corporations. It picks out the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root (KBR) as a major benificiary of the missing billions.
Whilst such journalism should be applauded and its like encouraged, we may equally ask the BBC why there was no headline story about it on their website (my search showed there was no accompanying story at all)? Or why such war-profiteering does not make the nightly news when over 1.1million people have today been killed in the cause of the making of those billions?
Global Research, June 13, 2008.
'In its near 86 year history, BBC has a long, unbroken and dubious distinction. Today it's little different from its corporate-run counterparts in America, Britain and throughout the world. In fact, on its tailored for a US BBC America audience, what passes for news matches stride for stride what people here see every day - mind-numbing commercialism, shoddy reporting, pseudo-journalism, celebrity and sports features, and other diverting and distracting non-news that should embarrass correspondents and presenters delivering it. It offends viewers and treats them like mushrooms - well-watered, in the dark, and uninformed about the most important world and national issues affecting their lives and welfare.
That's the idea, of course, and has been since BBC's inception. John Reith was its founder and first general manager. Reassuring the powerful, he set the standard adhered to thereafter: "(You) know (you) can trust us not to be really impartial." BBC never was and never is.
Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about "honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure." How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task - to function as a "propaganda system for elite interests." On all vital issues - war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East's longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is "reliable" - pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever.
This article covers one example among many - BBC's distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it's fully in step with its American and European counterparts - Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don't; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC's coverage exacerbates it...'
Saturday, 14 June 2008
Thursday, 5 June 2008
FILM: Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism [notes]
These are some of the notes I took whilst watching the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism (on freedocumentaries). Much of the film consists of testimony from former FOX insiders. Some were only willing to speak on condition of anonimity.
TRAILER
STATISTICS
Murdoch's Empire
9 satellite television networks
100 cable channels
175 newspapers
40 book imprints
40 television stations
1 fim studio
Murdoch's Audience
280 million: US television networks
300 million: Asia satellite networks
300 million: homes receiving his cable channels
28 million: read his magazines
Total Audience
4.7 billion people (can that really be true?)
NOTES
FOX News Channel was established in 1996. Roger Ailes, FOX CEO and chairman, said FOX's aim was to "restore objectivity" in the news. And to do "fine, balanced journalism". [Really, that's what he said.] He was formerly a media strategist in the presidential campaigns of Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.
Murdoch was and is fanatically pro-Reagan. Reagan's birthday is treated by FOX like a religious festival, a holy day, with wall to wall coverage devoted to the great man...
Former employees speak of a kind of surveilled Stalinist system within FOX, a system where everyone is constantly monitored and in fear of saying the wrong thing.
Every morning FOX employees receive a list of what to report, how to report it, and a list of what to ignore or repress. If you don't tow the line you lose your job. A 23rd March 2004 FOX memo stated (on the 9/11 Commission) "don't turn this into Watergate".
The streaming banners and graphics are consciously designed to subvert the audience into accepting neo-conservative, pro-right ideas.
FOX is a Republican party political broadcast that runs 24/7. Nothing more.
A former employee spoke of how the "news flash" was used when the Columbine shootings occured, but then it soon started to be used for meanigless stories about celebrity and cultural trivia.
"Some people say..."
Opinions can't be disproved. "Some people say..." is a tool which allows the reporter or presenter to promote any political perspective he or she likes. It allows for lies to be peddled as truth. Everything is permissable.
FOX's devotion to Christianity compells them to run stories that ask such deep and searching questions as, "Why is Jesus so popular?"
Fear is the most economic and reliable weapon in the propoganda tool box. Make them afraid. Make them very afraid.
"Fair & Balanced"
A FOX slogan. Fair and balanced. But what law compells the media to report in a 'fair and balanced' way? It's a law called the "fairness doctrine". The fairness doctrine legally prevents the US media from reporting with undue bias...
Well, it used to. The "fairness doctrine" was abolished under Ronald Reagan. FOX and every other corporate news organisation in the US can legally say pretty much whatever the hell they like. So they do. End of story.
[You can see why Murdoch is so pro-Reagan. Reagan as good as gave Murdoch the keys to his Empire.]
The economy "is in great shape"
FOX default position. Bush has been great for the economy. Everything is just great.
Iraq "is in great shape"
FOX default position. The war has been great for Iraq. Everything is just great.
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
The Home Office is creating a database to store details of every phone call, email and web page visited in Britain
By Andy Bloxham writing for the Telegraph.
~~~
"The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged."
"The Government wants to create the system to fight terrorism and crime."
~
"A Home Office spokesman said the move was needed to reflect changes in communication that would "increasingly undermine our current capabilities to obtain communications data and use it to protect the public"."
~~~
Read the full article here.
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"This and no other is the root from which the tyrant springs: when he first appears he is a protector." (Plato)
Sibel Edmonds and the Machine: chewed up and spat out
Sibel Edmonds was born in 1970 and is Turkish-American. Up until March 2002 she worked as a translator for the FBI. During the course of her work she encountered evidence that the the FBI was actively supressing evidence of US involvement in the illegal sales of nuclear materials and technologies to Turkey (often on behalf of Pakistan's ISI), drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, and corruption from the very highest levels of the US government down.
~
Joseph K in the 21st Century
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When Sibel Edmonds brought this evidence to her superiors at the FBI she was told to leave it alone and that pursuing it would only open a can of worms. So she took her concerns to higher management within the FBI and eventually to assistant director Dale Watson and the FBI's director Robert Mueller. At this stage she was told not to take her concerns any further. If she did, she was told, the FBI would retaliate against her. When Sibel Edmonds refused to keep quiet she was fired. The offical and indeed only reason she was given for being fired was, "Solely for the convenience of the United States government.
~
In March 2002, around three weeks before she was fired, Sibel Edmonds took her case to the Department of Justice Inspector General's office and also the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The Inspector General promised the SJC a completed investigation into Edmonds case by autumn of that year. The investigation was never finished and never made public. The reason cited was "state privilege" and "national security". In spite of this several Senators of the SJC continued to work with Edmonds on her case. However this work finally came to an end in May 2004 when Attorney General John Ashcroft sent an order to Congress saying that the Justice Department was "retroactively" classifying everything Congress and the SJC had in its possession in regards to Sibel Edmonds case. The SJC was ordered to delete everything about Edmonds from their websites. The Attorney General was literally gagging Congress. From that time on the Senators of the SJC who had worked on Edmond's case simply stopped returning her phone calls.
Sibel Edmonds has since become known as the most gagged woman in US history. If she speaks out about what she knows she will be jailed.
That is a brief synopsis of Sibel Edmonds case. Listen to Edmonds tell her story in her own words below.
~
~
Who you gonna call?
~
What's perhaps most revealing when you look into Sibel Edmonds story and hear her speak is that you begin to understand how the vast US political, judicial, corporate and media machine operates when it is the US government itself that is accused of wrong doing. The FBI is the federal government agency whose purpose is to investigate crimes and gather evidence. They not only refused to investigate the evidence Edmonds had - or at least they refused to make their investigation public - they fired her, simply because she would not ignore the crimes she had uncovered. So Edmonds went to Congress. And Congress was duly gagged by the Attorney General. Then the courts threw out her case after hearing testimony given by government lawyers that Edmonds and her council were barred from hearing (they were told by the judge to leave the court room and were given no transcript of what was said; a situation that you cannot help but describe as Kafkaeque). Then there is the testimony she gave to the 9/11 Commission (behind closed doors). Not only was it left out of the final report, it was also stricken from the public record. All the while the Executive branch of government has classified everything in relation to Edmonds case. And I mean everything. Even Sibel Edmonds date of birth has been classified. And of course there is the coporate media, which does and says nothing.
~
In US politics the constitutional 'checks and balances' that are suposed to restrain government are now utterly impotent. Government does pretty much whatever it likes, even if that means commiting crimes (and in Edmonds case we are talking about potentially treasonous activity). And why not? Especially when you know you have the means to cover those crimes up, and to halt, control or impede any investigation into them. And if someone speaks out, that can be dealt with. Those who refuse to be silenced, the whistle blowers, those who try to alert the public of illegal government activity, can simply be chewed up and spat out by the machine. Just like Edmonds. Just like Joseph K.
~
As Edmonds says in the above film: where else can she go? Who does she call when it is the government who is being charged with criminal activity? She has tried the courts, the FBI, Congress, the SJC and the media, and each of them have failed her and have failed others like her.
~
If anyone says to you, "well, why don't people speak out?" Tell them that they do. And that one way or another those people are silenced.
~
9/11: Cover Up
Whilst working at the FBI Sibel Edmonds, amongst everything else, came across evidence that several of the 9/11 hijackers had been actively protected by the Justice Department, the State Depeartment, the White House and the FBI prior to the attacks. Not only was this covered up, following the attacks high level officials within the Bush administration were actively involved in getting persons suspected of being involved with those hijackers out of the country.
~
Links
For sale: Weat's deadly nuclear secrets (The Times, Jan 2008)
Interview with Jim Hodge
Just a Citizen (Sibel Edmonds website. You may be interested in the 'gallery'. Remember that Edmonds has been gagged from naming those involved in her case...)
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (founded by Edmonds in 2004)
Saturday, 17 May 2008
The Orchestrated Eradication of Liberty in Britian
"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end."(Lord Acton)
Around five or six months ago I decided to keep a file dedicated news articles about the increasing number of ways the British state is spying on us. I was partly motivated after finding out that home secretary Jacqui Smith had quietly passed a law in July 2007 giving 795 public companies and government agencies the right to spy on all British mobile phone calls and messages. No discussion. No debate. You are no longer at liberty to make private phone calls.
Then I kept reading other stories in the press about new government spying programmes, so many so that it was becoming hard to remember them all. Hence I started keeping the file.
A few weeks ago I noticed how large this file had grown. Forty-five articles in around six months. And this list is not exhaustive.
The majority of the articles I've linked below are from mainstream British news organisations and were published in the last six months. Relatively few were published earlier than this. I should also mention that the majority of articles are exclusively about Britain. I've got another file with article's about the eradication of civil liberties in the US, Europe and elsewhere. For the moment, that's another story.
In the 'war on terror' state power is winning, liberty is losing.
It's nevertheless worth noting the numerous parallels between Britain and the US in regard to not just surveillance measures and the eradication of liberty but also the politics of 'terror'. Both here and in the US the state is using 'terror', by which I mean deliberate fear-mongering, to scare the populous into accepting the erosion of their liberties.
This is far from an original state of affairs. Hitler did exactly the same in the 1930's and for the same reason: to increase the power of the state and to diminish the power and liberty of the people. It is what you would expect in an actual or creeping dictatorship: the creation or exajuration of a common enemy, a mutual national threat (in our case we know that Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA and we know that the threat posed to us by Al Qaeda has been relentlessly exajurated by government and media alike). The state then claims only it can protect you from this enemy, from this national threat. The cost of state protection is liberty.
The global 'war on terror' is in many ways perceivably indistinguishable from a global war on liberty.
The threat to liberty in this country does not begin and end with the state. Powers are increasingly being centralised beyond national democratic boundaries. Work is underway to create databases and surveillance networks that are Anglo-American and European in nature, not just national. It is also noticable that surveillance measures and policies introduced in the UK are simultaneously turning up in the US and elsewhere around Europe.
[To this end consider the following stories which are detailed in the list below. 1) The US now has the authority to spy on British citizens who are on British soil. 2) The FBI is striving to gain access to British biometric information in its efforts to establish a global database of everyone. 3) The US - a country on the verge of martial law - has told Britain that it can "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes within the US. That is, a US Supreme Court ruling now gives the US authorities legal jurisdiction in this country. And we are not talking about extradition here. We are talking about "kidnap".]
Government spying programmes in the UK have reached epidemic proportions. Trends in the US and Europe are following the same trajectory. Everything is increasing. The spying with cameras and listenning devices; the recording of phone calls, emails and internet activity (programmes are actually underway to censor the internet); the introduction of iris and fingerprint recognition technology; increasing DNA and biometric databases; ID Cards; the use of RFID chips in prisoners; mobile phone tracking technology; face recognition technology; smell recognition technology...
"All those who would sacrifice a little liberty for a little security will lose both and deserve neither." (B Franklin)
The articles below should be read as a warning. We are getting ever closer to the point where pretty much everything we do will be monitored in a state surveillance grid from which it will be impossible to escape. This has to stop. The government needs to understand that we are not going to tollerate being spied on and monitored. The laws allowing government to do so must be repealed. The surveillance apperatus, dismantled. There can be no exceptions.
It's a simple choice between liberty or slavery. You choose.
- Smith targets internet extremism: "The internet can't be a no-go area for government."
- Big Brother tapping our phones and emails 1,000 times a day In the last nine months of 2006, various authorities and agencies made "253,500 requests for phone taps, the interception of emails or post."
- CCTV camera microphones to be axed: A somewhat absurd report by the Telegraph stating that camera microphones are to be "outlawed" because they are "highly intrusive". Yet later in the report they say camera microphones will be allowed in "extremely special circumstances," so they're not being 'axed' at all.
- Children should be put on DNA database: This is the view of Britian's most senior forensics expert, Gary Pugh. Behaviour should be analysed to assess if children are "potential offenders". If found guilty - of potential future crimes - their DNA is taken.
- Facebook can ruin your life. So can MySpace, Bebo...: Information you post on scoical sites can be used against you.
- 'Free CCTV film access for security services': They can spy on us at will.
- Insects become fly-on-the-wall spies, with tiny cameras, radio controls and microphones: Moths, beetles, rats, pigeons and sharks have been installed with electronic brain implants so they can be controlled remotely. They can also carry cameras and microphones. No, really.
- Government to begin rolling out ID cards 'by stealth' within a year: 'Workers in sensitive jobs will be required to apply for the compulsory cards in 2009, despite the Home Office postponing the overall scheme until 2012...Some 100,000 British airport staff and others working in sensitive locations are expected to be affected by the move.'
- Government wants personal details of every traveller: 'Phone numbers and credit card data to be collected under expanded EU plan.' Interestingly, the UK is 'the only country of 27 EU member states that wants the system used for "more general public policy purposes" besides fighting terrorism and organised crime.'
- How mobile phones let spies see our every move: 'Government's secret Celldar project will allow surveillance of anyone, at any time, and anywhere there is a phone signal'.
- Met police officers to be 'microchipped' by top brass in Big Brother style tracking: All cops will chipped and tracked.
- MI5 seeks power to trawl records in new terror hunt: 'Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.'
- Prisoners 'to be chipped like dogs': Prisoners who once wore trackable bracelets are now to have Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips surgically inserted under their skin. RFID chipping may also be used to track prisoners in jail.
- UK council accused of Big Brother tactics over use of fingerprint technology in schools: A school in Wales is introducing a system whereby children will pay for their lunches with fingerprints rather than money.
Thursday, 15 May 2008
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