The American Bear

Sunshine/Lollipops

› We Are So Disappointed With the Corrupt Afghan Government | A Tiny Revolution

I’m sure it’s tough for many reasons to work for the Sulzbergers and Carlos Slim at the New York Times. But I’d have an especially hard time coming into the office every day and being forced to write paragraphs like this in today’s story about Afghanistan:

American and NATO officials in Kabul…said that [development] aid would continue, although the amounts given were likely to be reduced over time. And the Afghan government would have to live up to its commitments to battle corruption and run a more open government for the aid to keep flowing.

It’s not just that the New York Times itself uncovered the story of the CIA giving the Karzai government millions in bags of cash one week ago. It’s that the bags of cash article was written by the same reporter, Matthew Rosenberg.

Yet here he is today, faithfully passing along the news about how anonymous American officials sincerely want Karzai to be less corrupt. It’s like breaking the Eliot Spitzer prostitution story, and then quoting him a week later explaining how he’s going to continue paying Ashley Dupré as long as she lives up to his longstanding demand that she be less of a prostitute.

(I have much more sympathy for the payee in both situations. In Karzai’s case, he likely remembers that after the Soviets left, their last puppet was castrated, dragged through the streets of Kabul behind a jeep, and then publicly hanged. So you can understand if he wants to keep some cash on hand.) [read]

From the outset, the establishment media’s coverage of the Boston bombing and its aftermath has been marked by a combination of hysteria and ineptitude. From the initial reports of police seeking a ‘dark-skinned male’ to wholly erroneous and still-unexplained Day One reporting which claimed that a suspect had actually been detained, the average viewer of Fox, CBS or MSNBC would arguably be far less informed from their coverage than they would have been by completely abstaining from television news during the crisis.

Murtaza Hussain

After several hours of reporting to their millions of credulous viewers important “facts” which later turned out to be little more than unsubstantiated rumours, CNN’s Chris Cuomo would admit: “Ok. Now, that would be, you know, we don’t know what’s right or not at this point.” One would hope for such forthcoming honesty from a major news organisation before the subsequent reporting of a major story instead of afterwards, but unfortunately the reverse proved to be true.

While the fast-paced reporting of rumours, hyperbole and innuendo serves very little to the cause of informing and enlightening the millions who rely on cable news for information, it undoubtedly does well at generating widespread fear and hysteria. This is less the result of a grand conspiracy than of simple market economics. Throughout the crisis, ratings at major cable news stations surged - shooting up 194 percent from normal averages at CNN while also posting smaller yet still materially-significant gains at Fox News and MSNBC.

For an advertisement-driven industry where these ratings are the standard bearer of success and financial viability, the Boston bombings provided a major boost. In this light, the impetus to avoid salacious rumour-mongering and speculation - something which would inevitably trigger great fear in a viewing audience devoid of its own means of gauging events - markedly diminishes. Fear and uncertainty may be bad for the populace at large as well as for the functioning of a healthy democracy, but they are undeniably good at generating bigger and more lucrative audiences for news media. In an oligarchic media landscape where both barriers to entry and competitive pressure among existing players are high, cable news outlets have every reason to keep pumping up the hysteria if it means greater viewership. As their hyperbolic coverage of the Boston crisis has shown, they have little hesitance about doing this when the opportunity arises.

› U.S. Militarism and Perpetual War | Jeff Cohen

I spent years as a political pundit on mainstream TV – at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. I was outnumbered, outshouted, red-baited and finally terminated. Inside mainstream media, I saw that major issues were not only dodged, but sometimes not even acknowledged to exist.

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.

We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention – as they so often do – debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say ‘Phil Donahue.’ [++]

› The Day That TV News Died | Chris Hedges

… The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

It does not matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter that Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.

› Death of a Bogeyman: The Corporate Media Bury Hugo Chavez | Dissident Voice

Following the death of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez on March 5, the BBC reported from the funeral:

More than 30 world leaders attended the ceremony, including Cuban President Raul Castro, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.

A message was read out from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A rogues’ gallery of the West’s “bad guys”, in other words. To the side of the main article, the BBC quietly noted that, in fact, “Most Latin American and Caribbean Presidents” attended the funeral, not just the Bond villains.

Following the same theme, a BBC article appeared beneath a grim photo montage of Osama bin Laden, Chávez, Kim Jong-il, Muammar Gaddafi, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein. The report asked: “Is the era of the anti-American bogeymen at an end?”

Like many independent nationalists, Chávez was not “anti-American”, although he was anti-empire. US foreign policy, on the other hand, was certainly anti-Chávez, “variously portrayed as a six-times elected champion of the people or a constitution-fiddling demagogue”, the BBC piece noted.

Similar “balance” was offered by the Guardian’s Rory Carroll, lead author of the newspaper’s Venezuelan coverage between 2006-2012:

To the millions who revered him – a third of the country, according to some polls – a messiah has fallen, and their grief will be visceral. To the millions who detested him as a thug and charlatan, it will be occasion to bid, vocally or discreetly, good riddance.

Fair comment, one might think, until we try to imagine a UK journalist writing anything comparable to the second sentence in response to the death of a US president or UK prime minister.

And yet, unlike so many US and UK leaders of recent times, Chávez did not invade nations, overthrow governments, commit mass murder, mass torture, or mass starvation through sanctions. Indeed, in his years as president from 1999-2013 he was not credibly accused of a single political murder.

If it is to be considered fair, condemnation of Chávez should be proportionate to the extent of his alleged crimes and consistent with the level of condemnation directed at US-UK leaders’ far worse crimes. If Chávez gets much more for doing far less, we are in the realm of propaganda, not journalism. [continue]

‘Linked in various ways’ seems to be the new standard for killing an American. That, in spite of the fact that Shahzad’s tie to Awlaki seems to be the same Hasan had: an inspiration, but not any involvement in the plot. And while Awlaki is reported to have had some role in the toner cartridge plot, reports from Saudi infiltrator Jabir al-Fayfi apparently fingered others in AQAP as the chief plotters. I guess that would be too much nuance to include in a 3,600 word article. Anwar al-Awlaki Is the New Aluminum Tube | emptywheel

› MSNBC boldly moves to plug its one remaining hole | Glenn Greenwald

… [O]ne does not need to be a veteran cable news executive to see what MSNBC has been so sorely lacking: people who loyally defend President Obama. Thankfully, MSNBC is now boldly fixing that glaring problem; they began two weeks ago with this:

“Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has become a contributor for MSNBC. Rachel Maddow introduced Gibbs as a new member of her network’s stable in the final minutes before President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night… . Gibbs was White House press secretary from 2009 to early 2011, when he left to become a senior campaign adviser for Obama’s re-election.”

I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?

But MSNBC wasn’t content merely to hire Obama’s former Press Secretary; today they did this:

“David Axelrod, the former White House senior advisor and senior strategist for President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a senior political analyst, the networks announced today… . Like Gibbs, Axelrod will appear across the networks’ programming.”

Impressively, David Axelrod left the White House and actually managed to find the only place on earth arguably more devoted to Barack Obama. Finally, American citizens will now be able to hear what journalism has for too long so vindictively denied them: a vibrant debate between Gibbs and Axelrod on how great Obama really is.

› The BBC Spins the Truth on Iran's New Centrifuges | Nima Shirazi

The BBC published an impressive piece of scaremongering disinformation on February 13. In an article entitled, “Iran upgrades uranium enrichment despite US warning,” the news outlet reports that new, upgraded uranium enrichment centrifuges are now being installed at Iran’s primary enrichment facility in Natanz.

The report states that Iran itself announced the upgrade to the IAEA back on January 23 and quotes the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, as saying, “We have produced the machines as planned and we are carrying out the installation gradually… to complete the tests relevant to the new generation.”

The BBC ominously notes, “Monitors say the new machines could significantly reduce the time needed to make a nuclear bomb” and reveals that this routine and much-needed technological advancement of an consistently monitored and safeguarded nuclear program has been referred to by the U.S. government as an “escalation.”

Yet this assessment is not only deceivingly broad, it deliberately omits readily available information that would undercut such unnecessary alarmism.

First, as Reuters reported on February 13 – but the BBC curiously didn’t – AEO chief Abbasi-Davani affirmed that the newly installed centrifuges “were specifically for lower-grade enrichment of uranium to below 5 percent purity.” In other words, these upgraded and more efficient machines cannot, by design and configuration, produce weapons-grade nuclear material. Rather, the level to which they will enrich uranium is well below the nearly 20% enrichment level used for cancer treatment and far from the over 90% required for a nuclear warhead.

Further, as the Christian Science Monitor explained last month after the upgrade to the Natanz facility was first announced, most of the enrichment technology currently used by Iran “is from the 1970s, and Iran has had difficulty in getting the centrifuges to run properly, perhaps in part due to the sabotaging effects of the Stuxnet computer worm thought to have been introduced into the plant by the US and Israel.”

Another factor left out of the BBC report is that Iran has also been actively converting quantities of its 20% enriched uranium into fuel rods for use in the Tehran Research Reactor – another IAEA safeguarded site – thereby reducing its amount of stockpiled material and precludes the possibility of potentially further enriching such material to higher, weapons-grade levels in the future.

By claiming only that the new centrifuges Iran is installing at Natanz “could significantly reduce the time needed to make a nuclear bomb,” the BBC is feeding unfounded fears while deliberately downplaying facts. That Iran’s nuclear program is anything but nefarious and clandestine still appears to be an unfathomable and inadmissible conclusion in the Western media.

› “State-run propaganda”: Why does the press protect drone secrecy? | David Sirota

In the last 24 hours, events in Congress have shown how leaders of both political parties have worked together to create a new extra-constitutional precedent — one allowing the occupant of the White House to execute American citizens without judicial oversight or even concrete incriminating evidence. Indeed, in a capital city where the most petty spats create the illusion of divided parties, we are now seeing a senior Republican U.S. senator proposing a formal resolution congratulating a Democratic president for claiming that imperial power.

This is exactly the kind of thing that rightly sows suspicion that for all the politicians yelling at each other, and for all the media handwringing about polarization, in many cases both parties collude to guarantee certain outcomes — especially on national security issues. Yet, as evidenced by an equally troubling revelation, that collusion is not limited to elected officials. It also extends to the media that is supposed to provide a check on those officials.

“Supposed to” is the key phrase — because, as the U.K. Guardian shows, that’s not what’s actually happening. Instead, the British paper reports that major U.S. newspapers “bowed to pressure from the Obama administration not to disclose the existence on a secret drone base in Saudi Arabia despite knowing about it for a year.”

Publicly, the newspapers are citing the age-old “national security” trope to justify their decision to suppress the story at the request of the White House. But that catch-all phrase is designed to obscure the real motivation — the one that one of the papers, The New York Times, let slip out.

In a stunning interview with the paper’s ombudsman, managing editor Dean Baquet admitted that the Times decided not to censor the story because it would pose any kind of imminent danger to Americans, but because it might result in the drone program being curtailed. Here’s the key excerpt of that interview (emphasis added):

The government’s rationale for asking that the location be withheld was this: Revealing it might jeopardize the existence of the base and harm counterterrorism efforts. “The Saudis might shut it down because the citizenry would be very upset,” he said.

Mr. Baquet added, “We have to balance that concern with reporting the news.”

It is not overstatement to call this a genuine watershed moment for American journalism.

Here you have one of the most powerful news organizations in the world publicly admitting that it refused to report a story not because it was concerned about the safety of Americans (aka “national security) but because it believed that doing so might result in people finding out about what’s going on and consequently forcing a change in government policy. Put another way, one of the world’s most powerful news organizations — an organization that is supposed to be a check on governmental power, mind you — literally refused to publish a story in order to keep Saudi citizens from finding out exactly how their dictators were working with the United States to intensify a global military action. [continue]

The entity that is designed to be, and endlessly praises itself for being, a check on US government power is, in fact, its most loyal servant. There are significant exceptions: Dana Priest did disclose the CIA black sites network over the agency’s vehement objections, while the NYT is now suing the government to compel the release of classified documents relating to Obama’s assassination program. But time and again, one finds the US media acting to help suppress the newsworthy secrets of the US government rather than report on them. Its collaborative ‘informal’ agreement to hide the US drone base in Saudi Arabia is just the latest in a long line of such behavior. US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets | Glenn Greenwald (via randomactsofchaos)

(via randomactsofchaos)

jayaprada:

“This narcissistic movie, with all its aesthetic portraits of torture and assassinations, not only enjoys and fetishizes the violence it depicts but also justifies and rationalizes it. It is not – as some more naïve viewers said – a ‘complicated’ or ‘controversial’ way of promoting ‘a debate’ on torture, but the other way around. Torture and assassinations are presented as effective though unpleasant ways of preforming heroic acts. The film completely ignores collateral damage, the innocents who are killed and abused and the inherent abuse of power (and think in that context not just about the acts carried out by the U.S, but also by its allies, in Pakistan for example), which are part of the argument for conducting warfare within a different normative and legal framework. But the problem goes even deeper. Zero Dark Thirty is so self-righteous that it makes the blunt orientalism of The Hurt Locker actually look good. There, the director seemed to have understood that some people like ‘the action’ – but we never saw that kind of emotion in Zero Dark Thirty. After all, no American would like torture or killings. Bigelow’s portrait people at war runs contrary to anything we know about human nature and violence everywhere and at all times. If the director would have shown the sadism and corruption that comes when you cross certain boundaries, then some viewers would have felt uncomfortable, and gone home really thinking or talking about what they saw. But I don’t think the film would have been such a success in such a case. Holywood is giving Kathryn Bigelow prizes because she makes Americans feel good about themselves and the wars they wage.”

— Noam Sheizaf, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is the most vile and immoral war film I’ve seen in years

Zizek on Zero Dark Thirty: Hollywood’s gift to American power

bostonreview:

Here is how, in a letter to the LA Times, Kathryn Bigelow justified Zero Dark Thirty’s depicting of the torture methods used by government agents to catch and kill Osama bin Laden:

“Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

Really? One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naive about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict it neutrally – ie to neutralise this shattering dimension – is already a kind of endorsement.

Imagine a documentary that depicted the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistic operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of the bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators. Where is Bigelow here?

Without a shadow of a doubt, she is on the side of the normalisation of torture.

To read the rest, click here.

› ‘Rise of the Drones’ is Mostly a PBS Infomercial for the Military Defense Industry | The Dissenter

… Before the documentary began, PBS noted the program had received funding from the David H. Koch Foundation for Science. It also received “additional funding” from Lockheed Martin, which on its face looks like a violation of PBS’ underwriting guidelines.

Lockheed Martin is one of the nation’s biggest military defense contractors and is developing drones (in secret). The test PBS is supposed to apply to programs is three-fold and as follows:

Editorial Control Test: Has the underwriter exercised editorial control? Could it?

Perception Test: Might the public perceive that the underwriter has exercised editorial control?

Commercialism Test: Might the public conclude the program is on PBS principally because it promotes the underwriter’s products, services or other business interests?

Having Lockheed Martin provide any amount of money to a program that touts the amazing potential of innovations in drone technology appears to be a violation of both the “perception” and “commercialism” tests. Is it a violation?

In 2008, Lockheed Martin teamed up with Karem Aircraft Incorporated to develop “Karem Aircraft’s Optimum Speed Tilt-Rotor (OSTR) design. It was “one of three approaches selected by the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Heavy Lift program office to receive a Concept Design and Analysis extension contract.” Karem Aircraft Incorporated was founded by Abe Karem. He appears in the documentary and, as The Economist has described him, he is the man who “created the robotic plane that transformed the way modern warfare is waged—and continues to pioneer other airborne innovations.” Karem talks about the advancement and benefits of drone technology. This is a clear conflict of interest. [++]