Empire and the Corporate Media
By Arundhati Roy, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Dissident Voice/Democracy Now!, June 7, 2003
AMY GOODMAN: Well it's a great pleasure to be able to see you face to face and to talk to you in person. We've spoken to you on the phone many times and I very much look forward to your address tomorrow night. Well your book has come out now in a new edition, War Talk and in it, it includes one of the speeches that we have run a lot here and that is your speech "Come September" that you gave in Santa Fe. Juan mentioned the issue of media centralization in this country. In India you see the United States through the lens of--what is it you've said? Fox is what you watch? ARUNDHATI ROY: Fox and CNN I think, are the two channels you get there.  AMY GOODMAN: So what do you think? What do you think of America through that lens? ARUNDHATI ROY: Well you know it's it's true that last year before I came, I was coerced to come to America because I did think that there was no need for me to come here and you know be insulted and called names and so on. Because you think of it as a homogenous place in some way, and I was so delighted to find the opposite. I was so delighted to find that we who are protesting against these things on the outside have some of our staunchest allies in America. And I must say that, it put me in the extraordinary position of defending American citizens against an assault which is absolutely racist sometimes, outside, because of these media channels and because of the policies of the US government, people in America are just seen as a homogenous bunch of rabid, nationalist bullies and that's such a sad thing because I think if we are going to fight to reclaim democracy that fight has to begin here. And all of us have to acknowledge that it is the people of America who have access to the imperial palace. And so, it was wonderful to come. At the same time, this consolidation of the American media. I mean I think, one of the good things that happened after September 11th, was that this myth of free speech and the free market crumbled along with the twin towers you know. Outside America, the American free press has become the butt of some pretty dark humor and nobody now it's contextualized you know. When you watch CNN and FOX news--anywaynot everybody, but a lot of people just watch it as the boardroom bulletin of the White House you know, and know it for what it is.....

The Triumph of the Diligent Dozen
By Richard W. Behan, AlterNet, June 6, 2003
"Can a society whose culture is so given over to excessive commercialization ever function as a deliberative democracy? Can the public find and develop its own sovereign voice, or has its character been so transformed by commercial media . . . that public life will forever be a stunted thing?" – David Bollier, p. 148 in "Silent Theft." -- David Bollier's alarming and vital book, titled "Silent Theft: the Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth," describes a stealthy, violent attack on public life in America. The things we share freely and enjoy in common – our culture and public knowledge, public assets, public services, public spaces, public lands – define us as the American people. Slowly, deliberately, they are becoming private assets and services, private spaces, proprietary knowledge, and trademarked culture, to be marketed for corporate profit. The vibrant body politic is becoming a mundane body economic. This sea change in our public life is primarily the result of the efforts of 12 archconservative philanthropic foundations that set out 40 years ago to advance an ideology known as "neoliberalism," or "free market theology." These foundations – call them the Diligent Dozen – chose to fund not humanitarian projects but ideological programs, and they were willing to do so decade after decade, spending hundreds of millions in the effort. The Diligent Dozen: The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Combined, these 12 fund an intricate, comprehensive network of neoliberal programs all across the country, but their most conspicuous and powerful beneficiaries are the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and their virtual creature the Cato Institute, all in the nation's capital. These three think tanks have crafted or influenced virtually the entire agendas of both domestic and foreign policy for the George W. Bush Administration. And the interwoven personal network of operatives, corporate supporters and corporate beneficiaries is sobering.   The Triumph of Neoliberalism: The main agenda of each of these think-tanks funded by the Diligent Dozen is to push the ideology of neoliberalism. Nations prosper, neoliberals assert passionately, only when citizens are at liberty to exchange rights of private property in free, unfettered markets. When governments seek to regulate markets free exchanges are tainted with some degree of compulsion, and social welfare suffers accordingly. That is the extent of their argument. A facile dichotomy of market vs. government is a gross oversimplification. Mr. Bollier shows how markets are literally embedded in a matrix of governmental institutions, from contract law to public infrastructure to the definition and prohibition of criminal behavior. Government is a precondition for the market system. Nowhere in neoliberal rhetoric is the corporate domination of markets even noted in passing. Exploiting a systemic advantage in bargaining power, modern corporations coerce the markets for their own inputs, and manage the markets for their outputs with advertising and administered prices. They distort – they regulate – "free markets" far more than governments possibly can. Failing to account for this, the neoliberal argument is fatally incomplete.....

New Reports Implicate Soldiers in Death of Journalists
By Ian Urbina, Asia Times, June 10, 2003
On April 8, two journalists were killed in Baghdad. By this date, only weeks into the conflict, the death toll for journalists in Iraq was an alarming 10, more than double the total killed in the entirety of the first Gulf War in 1991. But what was especially worrisome about the deaths of Ukraine-born Reuters cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, and Spanish photographer Jose Couso, was that neither man was near the front lines. Both were in their hotels. Alongside roughly 100 other journalists from virtually every major international news outlet in the country at the time, Protsyuk and Couso were recouping in an officially recognized safe zone – the Palestine Hotel. But an American tank on the opposite bank of the Tigris River, roughly three-quarters of a mile away, fired directly at the hotel anyway. The U.S. military stated that the incident was a regrettable though unavoidable mistake. However, with the recent release of an investigation by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists there is new evidence that the incident was in fact entirely avoidable, and a Spanish judge is being asked to file formal extradition charges against the three US military officers responsible. The defendants are Lieutenant Colonel Philip DeCamp, commander of the Fourth Battalion 64th Armored Regiment of the Third Infantry Division; Captain Philip Wolford, company commander of the tank unit that fired on the hotel; and Sergeant Shawn Gibson, the officer who asked Wolford for permission to fire and received it. The Pentagon has claimed that the tank fire was a purely defensive move. Specifically, military spokeswoman Victoria Clarke wrote the committee a week after the event, stating "coalition forces were fired upon and acted in self defense by returning fire". At the time of the incident, U.S. forces were attempting to find and kill an Iraqi "spotter" who was believed to be watching American troop movements and relaying the information back to snipers scattered throughout the city.....

Americans shouldn't believe a thing Bush says on Iran
By O. Ricardo Pimentel, The Olympian, June 7, 2003
PHOENIX -- The Iraqi war was intended to teach a lot of folks, among them Iranians, a lesson. Arguably, here's what Iran, now in U.S. crosshairs for doing all those things we said Iraq was doing, might have learned. -If, after you are accused of developing weapons of mass destruction, you submit to international inspection, get ready to be invaded anyway. -If you say you don't have any such weapons, you are, of course, lying. If inspectors can't find any, you're hiding them. And if, after invasion, they still can't be found, you were just awfully good at both of the above. -If one of the charges is, specifically, that you're developing nuclear weapons, best you speed things along. You see, as Iraq demonstrated, countries that we say are oh-so-close to having nukes get invaded. On the other hand, we use diplomacy and stinging rebukes for countries such as North Korea. You know, countries that are apparently far along in nuke development, hint that they might actually have the little nasties and have the means to deliver them. If you have nukes, are an authoritarian government, and help us with terrorists, you become an ally. Just ask Pakistan. And if you're an authoritarian government in a country with no religious freedom, supply the world with terrorists and have an abundance of oil, you're also a bosom buddy. Just like Saudi Arabia. The most effective lesson of the Iraqi war, however, is not really for the Iranians, Syrians, Libyans or North Koreans. It's for the Bush administration. It learned that it can stretch the facts, fabricate out of whole cloth, spin nuggets into "truth" and frighten Americans at will. And it's all OK as long as "liberated" folks are jubilant at some point on the evening news. And therein lies a cautionary note for Americans in general. If virtually none of what this administration said about Iraq -- from nuclear weapons to imminent threat -- has been borne out, why should we believe what is now being said about Iran? We are, after all, getting much of our information from Iranian opposition groups, just as we got a lot of our information from all those reliable Iraqi opposition groups. But the biggest conundrum about the war aftermath and the countdown to the next confrontation is that no one here really seems to give a hoot.....

Why Palestinians are the modern Sioux
By Ian Gilmour, The Observer, June 8, 2003
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal's The Palestinian People: A History charts an unequal struggle that has a depressing parallel -- The Palestinias have long been the Native Americans of the contemporary world. In the nineteenth century, Americans showed little regard for America's indigenous inhabitants, taking their land and harrying them ever further westward before huddling them into reservations. So ruthless was this conduct that it evoked the admiration of Hitler who declared that the Germans should 'look upon the [East European] natives as Redskins'. For the last half-century by providing arms, subsidy and support, America has enabled Israel to dole out similar treatment to the Palestinians. Baruch Kimmerling, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Joel S. Migdal, professor of international studies, University of Washington, do not draw this parallel, although, referring to the Gaza Strip, they - perhaps coincidentally - entitle one of their sub-chapter headings 'A Palestinian Reservation'. But they reject the standard Israeli claim that no self-identified Palestinian people existed until very recently, an idea that was memorably expressed in 1969 by the then Israeli Prime Minister. 'There was no such thing as Palestinians,' maintained Golda Meir, who hailed from Milwaukee. 'It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country from them. They did not exist.' While similarly rejecting the claim of the Palestinians that they had existed as a people from time immemorial, the authors argue that 'a self-identified [Palestinian] people' was the result of their encountering over two centuries, first, 'the powerful forces stemming from European markets and governmental administration, and later, Jewish settlements'. Throughout their book the authors' sociological-historical approach is original, illuminating and convincing. The crucial stage in the 'Native Americanisation' of the Palestinians was 'the catastrophe' of 1948-9, when some 750,000 of them - 90 per cent of the Arabs living in the territory that became the Jewish state, or 50 per cent of the population of mandatory Palestine - were driven from their homes by the Israelis' brutal ethnic cleansing. This 'transfer' (the Zionist euphemism) was accomplished by massacres, force and intimidation. Refusing to allow the refugees to return, Israel obliterated 40 Palestinian villages.....

Outrage At Administration Lying Misses A Crucial Point
By Ira Chernus, CommonDreams, June 10, 2003
Wow. The government knew all along there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And they used that as an excuse to take us to war anyway. My generation, raised on the film Casablanca, would say “I’m shocked!—shocked!—George W., to discover lying going on in your administration.” A younger generation would say, “Well, duh!!!” I mean, what did anyone expect? A government that would tell us only the truth? The truth, revealed so unexpectedly in the mainstream press, also reveals a profound dilemma for the left. We run around excitedly exclaiming, “We told you so!” Then we expect to see the Bush war machine at least crippled, if not brought down entirely. When the Bushies seem to sail along virtually unscathed, we don’t get it. We are outraged that they lied, and doubly outraged that so few Americans seem to care. In our perplexed outrage, we are missing a crucial point. While we quite rightly try to digest mountains of facts that contain the truth, we also need to consider the peculiar fate of facts in this postmodern world. While we quite rightly drink in the words of a Noam Chomsky or a Howard Zinn (and we should be immensely thankful for them), we would do well to give equal time to a Fredric Jameson. Jameson taught us, better than anyone else, that the American empire rests on three legs: global corporate capitalism, digital technology, and the triumph of image over factual reality. He taught us why the empire needs each of these legs to stay stable, and how each reinforces the others in a totalitarian web of seemingly benign postmodern imperium. Most of us already understand the power of, and links between, digitized high-tech and globalization.....

Clarifying the occupation lexicon
By Amira Hass, Haaretz, June 11, 2003
Israeli political discourse relies on terms that have become so distorted in meaning that the understanding of the reality behind them has also been distorted. Here are some examples: Closure: On the eve of the Aqaba summit, the Israel Defense Forces announced the "closure was lifted." Radio reporters hurried to announce, "the closure is lifted." Then everyone was amazed the Palestinians weren't grateful. It should be said for the millionth time: The closure on the Palestinians is never lifted; it is only relaxed a little, sometimes. The closure regime was imposed on all Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and has continued, without release, since January 1991. That's before Oslo, the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and the suicide bombings in Israeli cities. Since then, Israel has maintained a sweeping policy that prevents travel by Palestinians. The military authorities grant travel passes to a minority of Palestinians. When the authorities want, it's a large minority, and when they want, it's a small minority. There are "ordinary" closures that cover travel from the territories to Israel and from Gaza to the West Bank. And there are "internal" closures, which in the last two and half years have been very tight. Hundreds of checkpoints and blockades prevent travel from city to city, village to village. There are places where people are allowed to cross by foot, to walk one or two kilometers from one vehicle to another. Sometimes, in certain places, people are prohibited from leaving a village or city. People get through in roundabout ways. Often, they are caught by soldiers and, as punishment, are held for hours on a hilltop, at an intersection, in the sun, in the cold, throughout the entire West Bank. Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the main highways of the West Bank, which only settlers are allowed to use. Checkpoints: Israelis are convinced the checkpoints are meant to prevent terrorists from reaching the country. Nobody asks how the checkpoints between village and village or city and village service the purpose, even when the villages and towns are far from the Green Line or even a settlement. A checkpoint harms more than the economy. Its purpose is to harass and humiliate, on a daily basis. It means constant conflict with soldiers, like on Monday, at the Sudra checkpoint in northern Ramallah. Those passing through it need to walk about two kilometers on foot, from taxi to taxi. Ambulances are not allowed through. The elderly and the ailing are pushed in wheelchairs provided by Palestinian medical relief committees. Sometimes, when there's no alternative, the sick are put on little carts that usually serve to carry heavy loads.....

Why the Lies About WMD Matter
By Ray Close, CounterPunch, June 10, 2003
A Crime Against American Values -- It seems to me that the public controversy over the WMD issue has gotten considerably off track --- in a way that diminishes its overall importance to the country and, incidentally, depreciates our contribution to the debate. This became clear to me the other evening when I watched a discussion between Senators Richard Lugar and Joseph Biden, senior Republican and Democratic members of the Foreign Relations Committee, respectively. They both agreed that the task of collecting and evaluating intelligence about a subject like WMD was very difficult, but that in the case of Iraq, it really didn't matter very much whether prohibited weaponry was ever discovered. After all, it was clear that Saddam Hussein was a monster, and that a commendable service was performed by the United States in eliminating him. The rest of the world seems to be concerned that America's declared reasons for launching a war are turning out to be somewhat dubious, observed both Lugar and Biden, but the important thing is that the American people don't seem to care very much about that; the great majority feel that the outcome has been a resounding national triumph. That attitude has contributed to what I see today as a real diversion from the important central issue. The debate has indeed now degenerated almost entirely into a mean-spirited squabble between various bureaucratic elements in Washington over how certain intelligence about Iraq was evaluated, and whether partisan elements might have manipulated the raw intelligence data to support particular policy objectives. On a certain level these are still very legitimate issues that deserve to be investigated with great care. The debate surrounding them has not been irrelevant or without purpose. But that's not really my point. Rather, I think the time has come to try to lift the substance of the dialogue to a much higher level. We need to leave behind the haggling over methods and procedures and get back to some very important principles that have been violated.....

A Season in the Anti-War Movment
By Benjamin Shephard, CounterPunch, June 10, 2003
From Global Justice to Antiwar and Back Again -- The months of activism from February through March were some of the most exhilarating, depressing, riveting, and charged as any I can remember. If a mood became too intense-another bombing or jump in public opinion-shifted the political climate with a bit of relief or more bad news. The ground remained in constant flux. After grieving for what felt like a loss of the global justice movement, one of the most amazing movements of our lifetimes after 9/11, autopsies proved premature. Fall of 2002, the antiwar movement built the infrastructure of the global justice movement to create a momentum unprecedented in any peace movement in history. I will never forget hearing the roars at Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping's 9/11 first anniversary show. Kurt Vonnegut spoke about Slaughterhouse Five. People were hooting and hollering in the standing-room-only rally/ service at St. Mark's Church. Somehow, a year's worth of somber memories and frustrations were released. In the months to follow, more and more citizens stood up to challenge the buffoonery of the notion that the most appropriate response to the slaughter of innocent lives was killing more of them. "War is so 20th Century," signs at rallies read. "Somewhere in Texas, there is a village missing an idiot," another sign proclaimed on February 15th, the largest day of simultaneous protest in world history. Building on the lessons of the global justice movement, this new antiwar movement of protest would be funny, full of joy, engaging and entertaining at the same time. It would challenge the banality of the "bomb first, ask questions later" approach of the Bushies. And it would succeed in mobilizing people across the country to speak as world citizens in solidarity with people across the globe. Labor unions, church groups, civil libertarians, women's and queer groups would speak out about common fears of a loss of civil liberties and anger over the inequality-expanding economic agenda disguised by this war. The New York city council would pass a resolution opposing the war. Within this opposition, a global peace and justice movement took hold, pulling in masses in ways the global justice movement in North America had never done. The following is a personal account of the peak months of antiwar activism, as a movement found its footing.....

Daniel Pipes, Peacemaker?
By Michael Scherer, Mother Jones, May 26, 2003
Daniel Pipes says the only path to Middle East peace will come through a total Israeli military victory. So why has President Bush nominated him to the board of the government's leading peace think-tank? -- Like many other Middle East scholars, Daniel Pipes sees a way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But unlike most of his peers, Pipes sees no room for negotiation, no hope for compromise and no use for diplomacy. "What war had achieved for Israel," Pipes explained at a recent Zionist conference in Washington DC, "diplomacy has undone." His solution is simple: The Israeli military must force what Pipes describes as a "change of heart" by the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza -- a sapping of the Palestinian will to fight which can lead to a complete surrender. "How is a change of heart achieved? It is achieved by an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat," Pipes continued. "The Palestinians need to be defeated even more than Israel needs to defeat them." Obviously, such extreme views put Pipes at odds with the stated policies of the Bush administration, and even Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has indicated he will accept the "road map" for peace. So it took many by surprise last month when President Bush nominated Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a Congressionally sponsored think tank dedicated to "the peaceful resolution of international conflicts." The nomination has angered American Muslim groups and liberal Jewish leaders, who see Pipes as a poor choice for a peace institute. "Daniel Pipes is not a peacemaker," says Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth and co-chair of the liberal Jewish group Tikkun. "It would be like appointing me to be the head of nuclear physics at Los Alamos."....