Libya's spectacular revolution has been disgraced by racism

And all the morons at The New York Times sigh a moronic sigh in between their warmongering breaths. "Racist overtones...oh well, the empire must continue!"

From The Guardian


The New York Times refers to "racist overtones", but sometimes the racism is explicit. A rebel slogan painted in Misrata during the fighting salutes "the brigade for purging slaves, black skin". A consequence of this racism has been mass arrests of black men, and gruesome killings – just some of the variousatrocities that human rights organisations blame rebels for. The racialisation of this conflict does not end with hatred of "Africans". Graffiti by rebels frequently depicted Gaddafi as a demonic Jew.

Warmongering New York Times Silent On Libya University Massacre By Nato Bombing

The grey lady is dripping with blood these days. The day the New York Times goes out of print, will be a day to celebrate. John Burns should be behind bars for inciting genocide along with other cowardly "American" armchair fascists such as David Horowitz.

From Infowars.

Press TV reports that NATO has bombed a university in Tripoli, killing students and staff. “New images have emerged showing the aftermath of an alleged NATO air raid targeting Tripoli’s Nasser University. The attack reportedly left many university staff and students dead,” reports the Iranian state-funded network. “Libyan state television says dozens of others were also injured.”
The bombing was not reported by CNN or The New York Times.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “evidence of casualties [in Libya] has been thin, despite more than 160 cruise missile strikes by US and British forces, and at least 175 sorties by those and French and a Canadian jet fighter in the last 24-hour count.”

Evidence is “thin” because the corporate media refuses to believe the Libyan government and does not actively research claims of civilian deaths. Humanitarian wars are usually reported as surgical strikes and when the reality of dead civilians can no longer be denied, they are explained away as collateral damage.

Soon after NATO began bombing the country, officials denied civilians die in its bombing raids. Only the death of Gaddafi loyalists and other Libyans criminalized by the United Nations are reported killed in the air strikes.

Last week the New York Times insisted bombing raids in heavily populated urban areas do not kill civilians. “The Libyan government has a growing record of improbable statements and carefully manipulated news events,” wrote John Burns, following his Pentagon script closely. “Sightings of civilian casualties have been rare.”

The New York Times also reported that aluminum tubes were sighted in Iraq. Due in part to the widely reported lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the United States invaded the country and subsequently killed over a million Iraqis...

Read more.

'US Air Force WikiLeaks ban control freakery, smacks of web access clampdown'

Assange and Greenwald Identify The New York Times As Having Bad Character

Down with the Times. My parents being loyal readers of the Times point out that now and then there is an anti-war article in the Times. Nice, but the main force of the Times is pro-war, pro-Pentagon, helped start the wars for the Bush administration with it's propaganda, and has blood on it's hands. I'm not the only one who has noticed.

From Yahoo

...Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and current London bureau chief, pushed back against Assange's contention that the Times engaged in "tabloid activity" when reporting a profile that Assange calls a error-ridden "hit piece."
Assange said Monday at London's Frontline Club that he wasn't surprised by the Times' recent coverage of him, given what he considers the paper's "absolutely disgusting" August profile of Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old army private suspected of supplying the classified documents to WikiLeaks. The Manning piece, Assange said, "removed all higher-level political motivations from him and psychoanalyzed him down to problems in his childhood and a demand for attention."
The WikiLeaks chief also questioned whether the Times simply employs "journalists with extremely bad character" or whether coverage of him and his whistleblower organization is influenced by the "realpolitik that [Times executive editor] Bill Keller has to go through in order to get out any story that depicts the U.S. military in a negative way."

...Burns said he doesn't "recall ever having been the subject of such absolutely, relentless vituperation" following a story in his 35 years at the Times. He said his email inbox has been full of denunciations from readers and a number of academics at top-tier schools such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Some, he said, used "language that I don't think they would use at their own dinner table." Such heated reactions to the profile, Burns said, shows "just how embittered the American discourse on these two wars has become."

In the 2,000-word piece — "WikiLeaks Chief On Run, Trailed By His Notoriety" — Burns and reporter Ravi Somaiya described Assange as the secretive and brilliant driving force behind the global document clearing house. But they also wrote how "some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood." They also noted the recent sexual assault allegations that two women in Sweden brought against Assange.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald called the profile a "sleazy hit piece" and wrote Sunday that it was "filled with every tawdry, scurrilous tabloid rumor" about the WikiLeaks founder. Greenwald likened Burns to the "Nixonian henchmen" who plotted against Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and described him as "one of the media's most enthusiastic supporters of the occupation of Iraq." (Burns has also received much praise for his years as the paper's Baghdad bureau chief, and I profiled him upon his leaving that position in 2007).
"The Iraq War is John Burns' war, and for the crime of making that war look bad, Julian Assange must have his character smeared and his psychiatric health maligned," Greenwald wrote. "Burns — along with his co-writer Ravi Somaiya — is happy to viciously perform that function."



See also: Iraq War Logs Out, Pathetic New York Times Tries To Make Pro-War Spin
And:
The New York Times Continues To Use The Dubious "Zabiullah Mujahid" As Convenient Source For Anti-Wikileaks Propaganda

U.S. Falls in Annual Corruption Survey

The top ten (least corrupt) countries are Denmark, New Zealand, SIngapour, Finland, Sweden, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland, Norway,

From The New York Times

PARIS — Perceptions of corruption in the United States have worsened over the past year, knocking it out of the top 20 in global rankings released Tuesday by the watchdog group Transparency International in Berlin.

Iraq War Logs Out, Pathetic New York Times Tries To Make Pro-War Spin

I come from New York. I am disgusted at what this newspaper has become. The New York Times is now nothing more then a pro-war propaganda rag that tries to spin this immense leak into pro-war, anti-Iranian propaganda. Just google Iraq war logs and see what you get around the world. The world finds in the leaks a condemnation of the wars, but the New York Times for the most part tries to spin them into more propaganda.

Le Monde: Iraq: the ordinary horror revealed by Wikileaks

The Guardian: Iraq war logs: How friendly fire from US troops became routine

Secret order that let US ignore abuse

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

LA Times: WikiLeaks releases sensitive documents on Iraq war

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. military documents about the Iraq war are made public in one of the largest leaks of classified material in American history. The most explosive documents are reports suggesting that U.S. forces knew about but failed to stop numerous cases of prisoner abuse.

Even the USA Today has the courage to be critical: Iraq war leaks: No U.S. investigation of many abuses

But not the NYT.

And what does the Times have to say about it? Read all about it. The first thing they find to say is to blame Iran. Another is to blame Iraq. Not much about America, oh no. We are the good guys, of course.

Leaked Reports Detail Iran’s Aid for Iraqi Militias

Detainees Fared Worse in Iraqi Hands, Logs Say

The New York Times even makes a point of writing their article about civilian deaths something about Iraqis killing Iraqis. Nice spin. Who started the war idiots? You did.

You! New York Times. You are the ones. Not the Iranians. Not the Iraqis. You are the ones who reported about Saddam's WMD's that didn't exist, the falsehood which began the war.

In the build up to the 2003 war the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD

Hats off to Wikileaks. Shame on the New York Times. Because of real journalism from Wikileaks, we now know how many people you and your supporters have murdered. More then 100,000.

Krugman Right On This One?

Krugman is not popular among those who think government spending is out of control, and I don't agree with his editorials often, but he is right about the GOP. They are promising debt reduction while at the same time reducing taxes for the richest Americans and preaching total support for a massive empire building military. It is no secret that it is under Republican administrations that the debt often balloons out of control more so then even under "tax and spend" liberals. That is because the GOP usually retains the programs and increases the already massive military while reducing taxes for the rich and big business. That is a formula which equals debt. Of course many Americans in their anti-socialist rage will never understand this. C'est la vie.

I don't like the Democrats. With the exception of anti-war Ron Paul, I like the GOP even less though.

The chart below illustrates the point. Of course Obama (not on chart) has been a disaster on debt. That however doesn't mean the Republicans will be better. It looks like they will be a terrible disaster as well.



From The New York Times.


...On Thursday, House Republicans released their “Pledge to America,” supposedly outlining their policy agenda. In essence, what they say is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid (one-third of its budget pays for long-term care for our parents and others with disabilities). No more child health or child nutrition programs. No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

The “pledge,” then, is nonsense. But isn’t that true of all political platforms? The answer is, not to anything like the same extent. Many independent analysts believe that the Obama administration’s long-run budget projections are somewhat too optimistic — but, if so, it’s a matter of technical details. Neither President Obama nor any other leading Democrat, as far as I can recall, has ever claimed that up is down, that you can sharply reduce revenue, protect all the programs voters like, and still balance the budget.

And the G.O.P. itself used to make more sense than it does now. Ronald Reagan’s claim that cutting taxes would actually increase revenue was wishful thinking, but at least he had some kind of theory behind his proposals. When former President George W. Bush campaigned for big tax cuts in 2000, he claimed that these cuts were affordable given (unrealistic) projections of future budget surpluses. Now, however, Republicans aren’t even pretending that their numbers add up.

So how did we get to the point where one of our two major political parties isn’t even trying to make sense?

The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape.

And what happens once the movement achieves the power it seeks? The answer, presumably, is that it turns to its real, not-so-secret agenda, which mainly involves privatizing and dismantling Medicare and Social Security.

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

Immigration Harassment Forces Withdrawal of Respected German Opera Director

In Europe generally a certain level of politeness and respect is expected. Europeans coming to America where the slavish population is ready to lick any boot presented in front of it's brainwashed mind are in for a rude awakening. It reminds me of when I came back from Europe and landing in JFK was greeted by a furious TSA worker screaming at us to stand still or be arrested. Welcome to Amerika, Herr Direktor.


From The New York Times

When the respected German director Peter Stein withdrew in July from a major production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” at the Metropolitan Opera, blame was laid on the usual suspects: “personal reasons.”

Now those reasons have become clear. Mr. Stein said he had pulled out because he felt offended by his treatment at the United States Consulate in Berlin when he applied for a work visa and by a lack of sympathy from Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, over confrontations with bureaucracy...

In June he went to the consulate in Berlin for a work visa for the Met job and was forced, he said, to stand for hours in a stifling room with 50 other visa applicants. When he finally reached the consular official, “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you laugh?’ ” Mr. Stein recounted. “I said, ‘I stay here for two and a half hours standing and I am an old man.’ ”

The officer replied, “ ‘In this case you will not have a visa,’ and sent me away,” Mr. Stein said. Mr. Stein said the experience left him humiliated and deeply offended.

Several weeks later he returned and managed to gain the work visa, helped by a Met employee who had flown to Berlin. But the experience rankled, and Mr. Stein sent an e-mail to Mr. Gelb saying he was “terrified and demotivated” out of fear that a similar incident could occur in the United States.

“If anything happens in the same way, I will leave immediately your country trembling alone thinking of the entrance procedures at the airport,” he said...

You have every right to be frightened of the dumb downed and mindlessly patriotic police state "Amerika", Mr. Stein. Why come here anyway? You've got it better over there, I'm sure. For the average American, Opera is The Lion King.

Key Karzai Aide in Corruption Inquiry Is Linked to C.I.A.

From The New York TImes and Prison Planet.


KABUL, Afghanistan — The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials...

Nukes Not Traceable?

An article in the NYT last month concerning a report by the National Research Council seems to suggest that the U.S. might no longer be capable of telling where a nuke would come from in a nuclear terror incident. The traceability of nuclear weapons has been one obstacle to speculation of a nuke being used in a false flag by some secret cabal working inside governments with evil intentions. Now that obstacle might be dissolving. That's one disturbing way of interpreting that at least.

Pentagon report in April never mentioned $1 trillion in Afghan wealth

From Raw Story

Original goal of Pentagon task force that performed Afghan minerals survey was to get "contracts going between US firms and Iraqi firms"

A RAW STORY investigation has revealed that a report released by the Pentagon last April on the progress of the Afghanistan "surge" included only a single passing reference to a survey that is now being touted as having discovered mineral resources in that nation potentially worth $1 trillion.

The lack of any mention of dramatic new discoveries is likely to reinforce suspicions that there is something bogus about the claim in last Sunday's New York Times that "the United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself..."