Stop the March of the Police State! Act Now!

My regular readers will know that for several years, since this blog was first created after the events of 77 in July 2005, I have been warning of the erosion of liberties and the creation of police states on both sides of the Atlantic.

The fact that this is happening as a transatlantic phenomenon is no accident. Bush's fascists first performed a coup on the US electorate by stealing the presidential election in 2000. We know now that by rights the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, was the rightful winner. But there was no challenge. Bush and his band of rogues were allowed to take over the White House. And it happened again in 2004 with 'faulty' electronic voting machines! Again, the criminals were allowed to get away with it. What now in 2008?

It was clear to many of us that the events of 911 were indeed a conspiracy involving some very powerful forces in north America and elsewhere. The purpose was to so traumatize the public that there would be no struggle when a premeditated, systematic erosion of constitutional and civil liberties followed --not only in the USA but in the UK as well as in other English-speaking countries. The wholly spurious 'War on Terror' was the ideological weapon used with which to bludgeon the opposition into submission.

On the international level we were told to prepare ourselves for 'Endless War' the description used by the Bush/Blair/Brown neocons for ongoing imperialist aggression by the US/UK/Israel in what might otherwise be called Resource Wars --wars staged in order that the West might secure strategic resources such as Oil, Gas, Water and other Mineral Resources needed to keep its system turning over.

The police states created through the fake 'War on Terror' are but one side of the coin. On the other is the prospect of Endless War. Taken together, we see the nightmare prospect of an Orwellian apocalypse. It started in earnest with the mass-murders of 911 and 77. It continues with the inexorable march of the police state. Many eyes are opening to what is going on. Many more need still to be opened. Please help that process by passing this link and text to as many people as possible. There isn't a moment to lose.

Rory Winter, CHIMES OF FREEDOM.

NUJ Film shows Police obstruction of Journalists
NUJ, 9 September 2008

The National Union of Journalists has released a short film highlighting some of the problems faced by journalists covering public demonstrations.

The video was released the day after the TUC in Brighton condemned the erosion of civil liberties and media freedoms in Britain. TUC unions unanimously backed a motion, proposed by the National Union of Journalists, which called for a rethink of government policies that put journalists at risk of imprisonment just for doing their job.

Speaking after the TUC vote, NUJ General Secretary Jeremy Dear said: “Journalism is facing grave threats in an age of intolerance. Whilst on the streets dissent is being criminalized, independent journalism is being increasingly caught in the civil liberties clampdown.”

The nine-minute video, called Press Freedom: Collateral Damage, includes examples of the police obstructing journalists in their work.


Release of the film follows numerous complaints from media workers who have experiences of the police going beyond their powers in attempting to restrict the ability of journalists to do their work. The NUJ’s motion to the TUC was part of a wider campaign for a greater recognition of press freedom by the UK government.

The motion also highlights cases of journalists, such as Robin Ackroyd and Shiv Malik, who have faced the threat of jail because of legal demands to reveal confidential source information.

In his speech to Congress, Jeremy Dear drew attention to the case of Sally Murrer, who is facing criminal prosecution for receiving information from a police source, and highlighted the problems faced by journalists attempting to cover the recent Climate Camp in Kent.

Jeremy said: “The terrorising of journalists isn’t just done by shadowy men in balaclavas, but also by governments and organisations who use the apparatus of the law or state authorities to suppress and distort the information they do not want the public to know and to terrorise the journalists involved through injunctions, threats to imprisonment and financial ruin.

“The use of the Terrorism Act and SOCPA increasingly criminalize not just those who protest but those deemed to be giving the oxygen of publicity to such dissent. Journalists’ material and their sources are increasingly targeted by those who wish to pull a cloak of secrecy over their actions.”

The speech concluded: “This isn’t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom – and we must expose it, challenge it and act against those who undermine the rights of photographers, journalists and media workers.

“And we must do so because if whistleblowers and sources fear speaking out, if photographers and journalists cannot probe the dark corners of business, politics or human rights, the ability of the media – already under threat from concentration of ownership and cost-cutting – to hold power to account, to expose wrongdoing, to provide the information on which citizens can make informed decisions about their lives will be seriously compromised.

“The Terrorism Act and SOCPA are not sophisticated security policies – they are the blunt instruments of an intolerant government.

“As if in some Orwellian nightmare the Ministry of Freedom tells us that the price we must pay for peace and liberty at home is not just a war in Iraq – not just the billions spent on war – but, in the wake of the London bombings, is the fingerprinting of council workers and the covert surveillance of M&S workers. It is ID cards and 42-day detention. It is curbs on the right to protest, the civil contingencies act and it is the extension of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, a snoopers’ charter giving access to personal texts, emails and internet use.

“The price is too high. Less liberty does not imply greater security. It never has.

“Our movement has been at the forefront of the great struggles for human and civil rights over the past century. In this age of intolerance new struggles must be waged and we must lead that fight.”

Propaganda
Craig Murray's blog
September 10, 2008

I have been worrying about the serious deterioration of civil liberties in the UK for five years now, but a small incident last night convinced me we are living in a country that must be classified as "Not free". I was travelling to the theatre on the tube, and the large majority of passengers were shrouded by copies of either London Lite or the London Paper. Some thirty copies of each banner headline screamed shrilly its message of fear through the train: "Five Suicide Bombers on the Loose in London!" "Jet Terror Plot!" "Terror Jury Holiday Farce Resulted in Acquittals!"

The propaganda, which reflected uncritically the briefing the Security Services and Home Office have been manically pumping out since the non-existence of the "Bigger than 9/11" jet plot was confirmed, was so stark and so divorced from any connection to the truth, that I am convinced we are already in effect living in a totalitarian state where the government controls the population through fear with brutal efficiency and with absolutely no regard to the truth. The government had contrived to turn a major blow for its "War on Terror" scaremongering into a vehicle to ramp up that scaremongering.

The Lite told of there still being bombers around from the "Jet Terror Plot" and gave no indication whatsoever that the jury had decided the jet plot did not exist. Indeed it claimed shamelessly that the three terrorists convicted of conspiracy to murder had been planning to bring down planes - a direct lie.

The London Paper was still more worrying, because it put detail into the line the odious security service spokesman Frank "Goebbels" Gardner has been pumping out on the BBC: juries are unreliable. It said that the failure to convict in the trial was due to interruptions for a holiday for the jurors and because of an injury to a juror in a golf accident. The clear trend of the briefing coming from the government is towards the abolition of jury trials in terrorist cases: Diplock courts.

Meantime in London two men are on trial for "terrorism" because they attended a demonstration at the Uzbek Embassy against the hideous Uzbek regime, at which red paint was thrown at the Embassy to symbolise the blood of Karimov's many thousands of victims. Such protest as paint-throwing should, I think, be illegal, but given events like the Andijan massacre of many hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, I have huge sympathy for those who undertake civil disobedience in the Uzbek case. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but under the notorious Section 58 of the Terrorism Act there is real danger of conviction and heavy sentences.

These are critical times: all good men and women must fight hard against the closing in of the system upon us.

Georgia's Propaganda War

by Dr Gordon M. Hahn

The five-day Georgian-Russian conflict saw Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili (pictured) and other Georgian officials waging an aggressive propaganda campaign and, in many ways, a disinformation war in the Western mass media. This media offensive was the result either of a carefully planned disinformation war or a rush by Western governments, mainstream media, and think tanks to get the Georgians’ side of the story and their side only. Either way, the Georgians were able to wage an effective and constant barrage of propaganda and disinformation against the Russians.

In some 40 appearances in the Western media and at Western think tanks, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasahvili and his ministers made numerous statements in their effort to convince the West that it was obliged to defend Tbilisi from Russia’s incursion. The following is a review of Georgia’s official version of events and a comparison of their claims with the facts as we know them as of late August and early September 2008.

Now Read On

Message for the Day Deconstructed

This is a fifteen-year-old movie in which Professor Noam Chomsky argues that the MSM are profit-driven corporations promoting the interests and agendas of dominant elite groups such as Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission.

Increasingly stressed-out by having to work ever longer at the treadmill just to keep paying the bills and still running-up ever greater credit-card debts, the average person just doesn't have the time to delve into the very real conspiracy perpetuated by the MSM and to find out the truth behind the barrage of lies and distortions it spins out daily.

Instead, a zonked-out Mr and Mrs Joe Public return home to 'relax' with a six-pack in front of the tube. Brain waves induced into an Alpha State by the rapidly flickering screen, they are soon put into an open state of mind where subliminal suggestion comes into play. That's when the science of media management starts to feed Capital's Message for the Day to its proles.

Today's Message, for example: those wicked Russians are bent on starting another Cold War by objecting to Democracy's Missile 'Defense' Shield in central Europe, ergo Russians are shifty warmongers.

Manufacturing Consent with Noam Chomsky

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The BBC's Neocon Propaganda War

The BBC's approach to war and world affairs is, first and foremost, a reflection of the British puppet state's viewpoint. It is questionable that the BBC was ever an independent organization. But, along with the widespread damage to civil and judicial freedoms caused by the noxious Blair de facto dictatorship, the BBC's reputation has dropped to an all-time low of news-whoring.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am constantly warning them that the Mainstream Media (MSM) in both the US and the UK --or USUK for convenience-- is deliberately fuelling speculations that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon and that, for this reason, the US and possibly Israel might carry out a 'preemptive' attack on that country.

The BBC's approach amounts to blatant warmongering. No amount of complaints appear to make the slightest bit of difference. Financed by a compulsory tax in the form of a licence fee, payable by anyone owning a television receiver in the UK, the BBC has huge resources to hand and is a major international satellite broadcaster.

BBC 24 News is received across the planet and many viewers mistakenly believe that it practises a balanced reportage. This is nothing more than a myth which the BBC is, itself, responsible for having perpetuated. The reality is that, particularly under the oppressive Blair regime, the BBC has become a servile tool for the broadcasting of USUK war propaganda.

This was reflected some time ago in comments made by Professor Professor Geir Lundestad, secretary of the Norwegian Nobel committee, when he observed that "media organisations could receive the Nobel peace prize in future."

Prof Lundestad mentioned several contenders, such as CNN, the New York Times, Le Monde and El País.

However, he made a notable exception of the BBC. "Some years ago, the BBC would have been an obvious candidate because it was the international model for news organisations. Nowadays, it is more debatable." He added: "We all know about the problems the BBC has had in recent years," without elaborating.

(The Guardian, 7 October 2006)

What he wouldn't elaborate on was the manner in which Tony Blair had fired the then BBC Director, Greg Dyke, for his daring to criticize Blair on the Irak War and the --to say the least-- dubious circumstances surrounding the 'suicide' of the ex-IAEA inspector, Dr David Kelly, who was scapegoated by the Blair regime.

Ever since Dyke's 'resignation' (he was fired on Blair's instructions) the BBC has taken an extreme lurch to the neocon right and the promotion of the Bush-Cheney-Blair-Zionist war party. Greg Dyke was replaced by a leading zionist, Michael Grade.

Two recent instances of the BBC's highly propagandistic news coverage has been its anti-Chávez reportage on Venezuela and a complete news-blackout on the arrest and trial of two members of the neo-nazi British National Party who were caught with what was reported locally as the largest weapons-haul ever made by the British police.

Not to be unfair, that news-blackout affected the entire British MSM and appears to have been at the behest of Blair.

The above are just two instances taken at random. The actual list of the BBC's right-wing bias would be unending.

PUBLIC HEALTH WARNING!

The BBC is preparing Britain and the rest of the world for US military aggression on Iran. Ever since Bush started his vicious propaganda campaign against Iran, the BBC has meekly followed suit. No doubt, on Blair's insistence.

Just last night on its News 24 programme it screamed out that the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) had 'leaked' a document proving that Iran was 'secretly developing weapons-grade' fissile material. It conspicuously failed to say anything more about this document so I conducted my own search and found this Reuters press release.

Can anyone find any evidence here that the IAEA is warning of Iranian nuclear weapons development? The Reuters/Yahoo article goes on to make the customary speculations but evidence there is none.

That didn't stop the BBC in its headlong rush to serve its neocon bosses in Downing Street and Washington, DC. Not only is the BBC sure that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb but that it threatens the continued existence of that famously peaceable nation, Israel, with the nasty terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, provocatively flying its flags along the Israel-Lebanon frontier.

The BBC then interviewed several Israeli 'experts' who, naturally, spoke in the most objective manner of how Israel was victim to threats from Iran and why a 'pre-emptive' attack against its nuclear reactors would, therefore, be the most sensible thing to do.

Of course, no mention was made by the BBC's jejune reporter, Matthew Price, of the terrible radioactive aftermath to which such an attack would lead, making Chernobyl pale into significance, or the even greater holocaust of a US-led attack using so-called 'low-yield' tactical nuclear weapons.

To get things into perspective, these 'low-yield' tactical nukes are capable of anything between a third to six times the destruction caused by the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs. The US Military now considers this level of destruction to be "acceptable." And so does the BBC apparently which keeps its lips sealed about the US nuclear option.

The BBC has, so far, failed to report on another significant statement from Iran that that country is reluctant to exit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which it, unlike Israel, is a signatory.

So much for its 'balanced' reporting.

The BBC's approach to war and world affairs is, first and foremost, a reflection of the British puppet state's viewpoint. It is questionable that the BBC was ever an independent organization. But, along with the widespread damage to civil and judicial freedoms caused by the noxious Blair de facto dictatorship, the BBC's reputation has dropped to an all-time low of news-whoring.

Does it care? I doubt it. It and its employees now see themselves sliding down the slippery slope to privatization so, in the meantime, will do anything to ingratiate themselves with Britain's rulers. It's a very sad day when a well-known British dissident (himself a victim of Blair's tyranny), ex-Ambassador Craig Murray, admits to better treatment from Rupert Murdoch's SKY News than from the BBC.

Those in Britain who are concerned at the rapidity their country is being turned into a police state should, without any further delay, launch a popular campaign to expose the BBC's dirty warmongering. A vital part of such a campaign should be the promotion of a countrywide non-payment of the annual licence fee, the BBC's life-blood.

The BBC should also be subject to a mass letter-writing campaign in which it is warned that it and its employees would be held to be war criminals for their further promotion of illegal military occupations by the USUK and for their gleeful promotion of a possible upcoming war against Iran.

"I ain’t the world’s best writer, ain’t the world’s best speller
But when I believe in somethin,'’ I’m the loudest yeller"
( WOODY GUTHRIE)

Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

by James W. Loewen

Not too long ago a shocking realization hit me. Though I was an attentive history student in high school, and later earned a college degree in American history, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the Vietnam War. How could that happen, I wondered?

How could someone who spent so much time studying history in school, and even more time studying it outside of school, be ignorant of such an important event? And more importantly, if it had slipped by me, what about others like me?

James Loewen provides the answer in Lies My Teacher Told Me. It turns out that 90 percent of high school history classes never even mention Vietnam – and those that do paint an incomplete and misleading picture. Loewen believes American students are being systematically lied to and misled in their history classes.

His book chronicles the litany of outrages perpetrated in those history classes and in our educational system as a whole. Though its unabashed left-wing perspective makes it unlikely to appeal to our country’s conservative educational institutions, Loewen’s book should be a wake-up call for anyone interested in history or education.

History, ultimately, is a selection of facts, and Loewen argues convincingly that current textbooks have chosen to include all the wrong facts. It is no wonder that most students find history boring when it is taught as merely a succession of presidents, with a pleasant little war every now and then to spice things up.

But shouldn’t students learn all aspects of our history? Instead of being spared the unpleasantness of racial violence, shouldn’t they learn that over a three-year period in the 1860s, an average of one African-American per day was murdered in Hinds County, Mississippi?

Shouldn’t American students learn that president Woodrow Wilson was a vicious racist and that the Federal government, which was integrated when he took over, had been purged of African Americans by the time he left office?

Shouldn’t they learn about the government’s kidnapping and deportation of thousands of Mexican-Americans – including many who had been born in the United States – in the 1930s? Shouldn’t they learn about the concentration camps in which Japanese Americans were confined during World War II?

Shouldn’t they learn about Paul Robeson, perhaps the most talented performing artist in American history, whose acting and singing career was prematurely ended by McCarthyism? Shouldn’t they learn that America’s foreign policy during the 20^th century consisted of violently overthrowing the government of any country that refused to bow to U.S. corporate interests? Shouldn’t they learn that the CIA, acting on behalf of the United Fruit Company, hunted down and murdered one of the century’s most important revolutionaries, Che Guevara, in 1967?

But there are no villains, Loewen points out, in American history textbooks. No American has ever done anything wrong. Bad things just “happen.” In high school history there are slaves but no slaveholders, wars but no warmongers, crimes but no criminals. After all, it might confuse students to learn that Thomas Jefferson raped slave women, or that Abraham Lincoln often used the word “nigger.”

Textbooks do a good job of covering up for American heroes, but in doing so they rob education of its greatest potential lesson: that in life, there are no easy answers. George Orwell’s 1984 was supposed to be satire, but the prediction he made in it – that history would be falsely rewritten by the government in order to remove its most distasteful aspects – has become literally true.

American history as taught in public schools is propaganda of the highest order, just like that once used in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. The result of all this, sadly, is that one can learn far more about how our society works from a single Ani DiFranco song than from an entire U.S. History textbook.

Why is history taught like this? The main reason is that textbook publishers, to ensure that their books will make money, self-censor their works to remove all material that might remotely offend someone. Because textbook adoption committees in most states are dominated by a powerful and well-organized coalition of right-wing activists, books dealing honestly with issues of race and social class have no hope for adoption. In most high schools history is not a form of education, but of indoctrination.

Textbooks’ sunny, blindly patriotic view of history discourages activism by promoting the falsehood that if one does nothing, everything will turn out fine in the end. A textbook then becomes merely a tool for preservation of the status quo – it keeps the Haves in control, and assures the Have-nots that there is no need to worry.

In Texas, state law explicitly states that “textbooks shall not contain material which serves to undermine authority.” Perhaps this is why Texas students are never taught that theirs is the only state that has fought three wars – the Texas War for Independence, the Mexican War of 1845, and the Civil War – to preserve slavery.

The most common theme in American history textbooks is the idea that the United States is a land of opportunity, and that anyone, no matter how poor, can succeed through hard work – an idea that is pure hogwash. Authors conveniently omit the statistics showing that the United States has the world’s greatest disparity between rich and poor, and that opportunities for social mobility are far fewer here than in most other countries.

Textbooks fail to chronicle how corporate influence over government has steadily increased since 1900. They ignore the fact that in order to aspire to our nation’s highest office – the presidency – one must be born white, male, and rich.

But history textbooks are utterly unconcerned with such social issues. U.S. history as taught in textbooks is nothing more than blind patriotism, a flag-waving story of American achievement. For those of us who cannot wave such a flag, it is a history that rings false.

from THE LOUDEST YELLER

BBC: "Keep taking the Blue Pills!"

BBC News 24, the international version of Blair TV's media war machine, has just announced a decision by the British Ministry of Defence to 'allow' the 15 navy ex-detainees to sell their stories to the press. This will only be permitted after the stories are vetted by their commanding officers!

What blatant propaganda from the British corporate state!

No intelligent person is going to believe that this is anything but another seedy attempt on behalf of the Blairite war party to sell the world a load of unmitigated bullshit making their 15 employees sound like heroes who were abused by those terrible Iranians.

It's interesting, though, that Blair and the Brits are entering the information war at this level. Clearly, they've been rattled by the way a handful of bloggers, led by ex-UK Ambassador Craig Murray, successfully challenged the lies being put out by the Ministry of Defence. The quality of Craig's information has been so spot-on that it was taken very seriously by both members of the British Foreign Office and a media otherwise servile to the Blair war party.

The Bush regime --it's not an elected government-- has, for some time, been conducting a war of disinformation through the international press and by practising cyberattacks against dissenting websites on the internet. Now, it seems, that his sidekicks in the UK are beginning to use similar methods.

BBC News 24, along with the rest of the UK media, are also making a big noise about the death of four British soldiers in a bomb-attack in Iraq. The suggestion being put out is that the bomb was supplied to the Iraqi resistance ("terrorists" according to the BBC) by Iran. This is clearly the BBC following an instruction given them by Blair to use the approach already being used by Bush's junta to whip-up anti-Iranian feeling among their respective publics prior to another horrendous war crime, this time to include nuclear weapons, in Iran.

The UK Media must be reminded, over and over again, that it is already complicit in a war crime committed against Iraq and that the enthusiastic spreading of lies and disinformation with which it is now targeting the people of Iran compounds the criminality of every one of its journalists who willingly buy into and help perpetuate the USUK's endless genocide against humanity.