Salon News - Salon.com

What media coverage omits about U.S. hikers released by Iran - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/26/iran

Fattal then expressed “great thanks to world leaders and individuals” who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and “elements within the Iranian government,” as well as U.S. officials.

Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference.

[...]

Saberi’s case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind — Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press’ Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters’ photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge — it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.

U.S. to build new massive prison in Bagram - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/19/bagram/index.html

As the Obama administration announced plans for hundreds of billions of dollars more in domestic budget cuts, it late last week solicited bids for the construction of a massive new prison in Bagram, Afghanistan. Posted on the aptly named FedBizOps.Gov website which it uses to announce new privatized spending projects, the administration unveiled plans for “the construction of Detention Facility in Parwan (DFIP), Bagram, Afghanistan” which includes “detainee housing capability for approximately 2000 detainees.” It will also feature “guard towers, administrative facility and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems.” The announcement provided: "the estimated cost of the project is between $25,000,000 to $100,000,000."

Speakers bureau works for Iranian terror group - War Room - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/09/07/mek_speaking_offer/index.html

Last week, a person at a Washington think tank was emailed the $10,000-plus-expenses offer to speak at a Geneva event by Lourdes Swarts, managing director of 21st Century Speakers Inc., “on behalf of our client, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Foreign Affairs Committee.”

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) is listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department, and is described as the “political front” of the MEK.

The language of the contract indicates Swarts — as well as anyone who agrees to the speaking offer — is breaking the law that bars material support for terrorism, according to Georgetown Law School professor David Cole.

The Libya War argument - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/22/libya/index.html

In April, 2003, American troops entered Baghdad and Saddam Hussein was forced to flee; six months later, the dictator was captured ("caught like a rat in a hole," giddy American media outlets celebrated) and eventually hanged. Each of those incidents caused massive numbers of Iraqis who had suffered under his decades-long rule to celebrate, and justifiably so: Saddam really was a monster who had brutally oppressed millions. But what was not justifiable was how those emotions were exploited by American war advocates to delegitimize domestic objections to the war. Even though opposition to the war had absolutely nothing to do with doubt about whether Saddam could be vanquished by the U.S. military — of course he could and would be — the emotions surrounding his defeat were seized upon by Iraq War supporters to boastfully claim full-scale vindication (here’s one of my all-time favorites from that intellectually corrupt genre).

.....

As I’ve emphasized from the very first time I wrote about a possible war in Libya, there are real and important differences between the attack on Iraq and NATO’s war in Libya, ones that make the former unjustifiable in ways the latter is not (beginning with at least some form of U.N. approval). But what they do have in common — what virtually all wars have in common — is the rhetorical manipulation used to justify them and demonize critics. Just as Iraq War opponents were accused of being “objectively pro-Saddam” and harboring indifference to The Iraqi People, so, too, were opponents of the Libya War repeatedly accused of being on Gadaffi’s side (courtesy of Hillary Clinton, an advocate of both wars) and/or exuding indifference to the plight of Libyans. And now, in the wake of the apparent demise of the Gadaffi regime, we see all sorts of efforts, mostly from Democratic partisans, to exploit the emotions from Gadaffi’s fall to shame those who questioned the war, illustrated by this question last night from ThinkProgress, an organization whose work I generally respect:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cG_spJFr-38/TlJWW9_YeBI/AAAAAAAAAHQ/kHhML01uY3U/s1600/tp.png

War Room
Wednesday, Aug 3, 2011 21:01 ET
The true cost of George W. Bush’s magical thinking
By Gene Lyons

►http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/08/03/gene_lyons_bush&source=newsletter

The true cost of George W. Bush’s magical thinking

"The mystery has always been why any Democrat would have wanted to follow the catastrophic presidency of George W. Bush. To understand why, it’s necessary to revisit ancient history, specifically 2001. Given today’s TV- and Internet-shortened time horizon, that’s almost like invoking the Napoleonic Wars, but bear with me.

Thanks partly to his skill at “triangulation” — seeking middle ground between left and right — President Clinton left a legacy of prosperity and balanced budgets. Republicans impeached him anyway.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Clinton’s spectacular folly gave GOP hard-liners the excuse they’d spent his entire presidency looking for. That’s not the point. To the Limbaugh-led, Confederate-accented Republican right, all Democrats are illegitimate. President Barack Obama often acts as if he doesn’t understand that.

Anyway, let’s stick to what’s relevant today: taxes, spending and the U.S. economy. According to Congressional Budget Office projections, had the nation maintained the fiscal course the Clinton administration laid out, the national debt everybody rants about would have been retired by 2009.

See, that’s the real cost of George W. Bush’s magical thinking. By any rational accounting, Bush and the GOP Congress that gave him everything he wanted from 2001 to 2007 should be held responsible for the entire $10.6 trillion national debt — along with the $1.3 trillion yearly deficit they handed to Obama, as well as the Wall Street crisis and bank bailouts.

It’s that simple: With no Bush income tax cuts, no unfunded Medicare drug benefit, and no off-budget Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the U.S. balance sheet would have been in fine shape for his successor. Then government investment needed to rescue the economy from the doldrums wouldn’t have seemed so alarming."

(...)

“Not for nothing did Obama invoke President Dwight Eisenhower the other day. He’s basically governed as a moderate Republican all along — definitely not the kind of change his starry-eyed followers once believed in, but probably the best they can hope for come 2012.”

* Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More: Gene Lyons

The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of “Terrorism” - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/23/nyt/index.html

In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know — by definition — that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant — also by definition — that it was an act of Terrorism. As Silverstein put it:

How’s that again? Are the only terrorists in the world Muslim? If so, what do we call a right-wing nationalist capable of planting major bombs and mowing down scores of people for the sake of the greater glory of his cause? If even a liberal newspaper like the Times can’t call this guy a terrorist, what does that say about the mindset of the western world?

#oslo

Fukushima’s tsunami plan was a single page - Japan Earthquake - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/japan_earthquake/index.html?story=/news/feature/2011/05/27/as_japan_earthquake_tsunami_risk

Japanese nuclear regulators trusted that the reactors at Fukushima Dai-ichi were safe from the worst waves an earthquake could muster based on a single-page memo from the plant operator nearly a decade ago.

#Japon #nucléaire #incurie

Haley Barbour’s Google problem - War Room - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/16/haley_barbour_google_problem/index.html

This is what Google’s autocomplete algorithm generates if you start typing Haley Barbour’s name into the search engine:

►http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/03/16/haley_barbour_google_problem/Picture_57.png

A whopping seven of the nine results center on race-related flaps that Barbour has been involved in over the years. Google’s autocomplete feature draws on factors including the popularity of search terms. To explain what each of these searches refers to:

Haley Barbour racist: This one is self-explanatory

#google

Pro-Israel groups cool to Egyptian protests - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/28/pro_israel_groups_egypt/index.html

So for now, at least, don’t look for American pro-Israel groups to do much in the way of supporting the Egyptian protesters.

Wired’s refusal to release or comment on the Manning chat logs - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/29/wired_1/index.html

I’m going to do everything possible here to ensure that the focus remains on what matters: the way in which Wired, with no justification, continues to conceal this evidence and, worse, refuses even to comment on its content, thus blinding journalists and others trying to find out what really happened here, while enabling gross distortions of the truth by Poulsen’s long-time confidant and source, the government informant Adrian Lamo.

#wikileaks #cablegate #wired #lamo

Tiens, mais que devient #Judith_Miller ? Alex Pareene se fout allègrement de sa gueule dans ce poilant papier de Salon.

Judith Miller : From the Times to the nuts- - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/media_criticism/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2010/12/30/judy_miller_newsmax

Since her early days at the Times, when she inserted CIA misinformation into a piece on Libya, she’s always been a tool of power. She was the voice of the Defense Department, embedded at the Times. She was hyping bullshit stories about Iraq’s WMD capabilities as far back as 1998, and in the run-up to the war, her front-page scoops were cited by the Bush administration as evidence that Saddam needed to be taken out, right away.

Lying exile grifter Ahmad Chalabi fed her the worst of the nonsense designed to push America into toppling Saddam Hussein (and giving Iraq to him), and she pushed that nonsense into the newspaper of record. She got everything wrong, and for some insane reason, she remained employed at the Times until 2005, when she negotiated her separation from her longtime professional home.

The media’s authoritarianism and WikiLeaks - #WikiLeaks - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/12/10/wikileaks_media

Beyond the need to destroy this pervasive zombie lie about WikiLeaks’ conduct in the diplomatic cables disclosure, the broader point here is crucial: the media’s willingness to repeat this lie over and over underscores its standard servile role in serving government interests and uncritically spreading government claims. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has an excellent analysis today documenting how, in the wake of 9/11, they dropped all pretenses of checking those in political power and instead began explicitly proclaiming — as The New York Times’ chief stenographer and partner-of-Judy-Miller, Michael Gordon, suggested — that “capturing the dominant view within the government was the job [of journalists], even if that view was wrong.” As Rosen writes, “our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th,” and thus: “To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks.”

That’s why this cannot-be-killed lie about WikiLeaks’ “indiscriminate” dumping of cables has so consumed me. It’s not because it would change much if they had done or end up doing that — it wouldn’t — but because it just so powerfully proves how mindlessly subservient the American establishment media is: willing to repeat over and over completely false claims as long as it pleases the right people — the same people to whom they claim they are “adversarial watchdogs.” It’s when they engage in such clear-cut, deliberate propagandizing that their true function — their real identity — is thrown into such stark relief.

Joe Lieberman emulates Chinese dictators - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com
►http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/01/lieberman/index.html

"And “journalists” like Capehart play along by continuing to insist there’s “nothing new” being revealed by #WikiLeaks despite their never having reported any of this. And since the disclosures, does anyone believe that any of these revelations have received anything close to meaningful attention by the American establishment media?"

#censure