Thursday, January 14, 2010

Fantasyland Media:

http://www.fantasylandmedia.org

Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want keep from the public eye.

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Daily Record UK:
"I've never, however, been in a more dangerous situation than last week in the tiny Sinai port of Al Arish to which the Egyptian dictatorship had insisted we bring our convoy.

Five hundred foreigners from 17 different nationalities with 200 vehicles were crammed into a compound without water, food or toilet facilities. They included 10 Turkish MPs one of whom was the chairman of Turkey's foreign relations committee.

We captured on film from a third floor office the thugs of the Mukhabarat (Intelligence) piling stones and sharpening their sticks behind the backs of several ranks of riot police with helmets, batons and shields. Then mayhem.

We may have complaints about our police, but I tell you, when you see policemen hurling half-bricks into a crowd of women and men who'd come to deliver medicine to desperate people under siege, you thank your lucky stars we don't live in such a state. Fifty five of our 500 were wounded and, but for the shocking effect on Arab public opinion (our own media didn't give a damn) of the live footage (all on Youtube now), we might still be there yet."
http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/george_galloway/

-->The NY Times reports things a little differently: "Overnight, Egyptian security forces and members of the convoy, which is led by left-wing British politician George Galloway, threw stones at each other when tempers frayed over the route the trucks were to take." But even this Reuters story is only on the NY Times website and never made it into print.

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National Priorities Project:
"NORTHHAMPTON, Mass - January 11 - Congress has appropriated an additional $136.8 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the 2010 fiscal year.  National Priorities Project estimates that for this fiscal year, $64.5 billion is directed to Iraq and $72.3 billion to Afghanistan.  Bills that included war-related funding were the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act (H.R. 2892) passed on October 28, 2009; the Consolidated Appropriations Act (H.R. 3288) passed on December 16, 2009; and the Department of Defense Appropriations Act (H.R. 3326) passed on December 19, 2009.

These new appropriations bring total war-related spending for Iraq to $747.3 billion and for Afghanistan to $299 billion, with total war costs of $1.05 trillion.  National Priorities Project (NPP) updated its Cost of War counters to reflect the new totals and to show the local costs of these wars to states and many cities (http://costofwar.com/)."
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/01/11-12

-->The NY Times gives this information one line in a story published on the web. The story was never printed. In effect, the biggest news of the last decade was ignored: how US wars in the Middle East have bankrupted America.

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The Nation:
"German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that the CIA deployed a team of Blackwater operatives on a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany, after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater's owner Erik Prince.

According to Vanity Fair, one of the team's targets was Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized German citizen originally from Syria. Darkazanli has been accused by Spain of being an Al Qaeda supporter with close ties to the alleged 9/11 plotters who lived in Hamburg. The Blackwater/CIA team 'supposedly went in dark, meaning they did not notify their own station--much less the German government--of their presence,' according to Vanity Fair.

This week, a senior lawmaker in Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union called on Washington to provide an explanation. 'If this commando really existed and the U.S. government knew about it but didn't notify our government then this would be a very grave incident,' said the lawmaker, Wolfgang Bosbach."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/09-6

-->The NY Times has this story on its webpage, but did not see fit to print the possibility of US assassination teams working in Western European countries.