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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Common Dreams:
"According to the Washington Post today, the U.S. intelligence system, in the years since 9/11, has become so massive and lacking in oversight that it is impossible to know how effective it is. The America Civil Liberties Union has long warned about the civil liberties implications of expanding secret government intelligence programs without oversight.
In 2007, Congress created an independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board with some significant powers for overseeing anti-terrorism efforts, but the Obama administration has failed thus far to appoint anybody to that board.
'The intelligence system that is supposed to protect the nation's security now presents a grave threat to our liberties and our democracy. A sprawling and largely unaccountable complex of government agencies and private corporations now controls a huge amount of information about ordinary Americans, monitors their telephone calls and emails and administers a slew of secret watchlists. The unchecked growth of this intelligence system is endangering the very fabric of American democracy.' "
-Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/07/19-14
-->Bloat and erosion of civil liberties under the Obama administration? The NY Times did not print this story.
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OpenLeft.com:
"Liz Fowler, a key staffer for U.S. Sen. Max Baucus who helped draft the federal health reform bill enacted in March, is joining the Obama administration to help implement the new law...
Fowler headed up a team of 20-some Senate Finance Committee staffers who helped draft the bill in the Senate. She was Baucus' top health care aide from 2001-2005 and left that job in 2006 to become an executive at WellPoint, the nation's largest private insurer. She was vice president of public policy at WellPoint, helping develop public-policy positions for the company. In 2008, she rejoined Baucus to work on health reform legislation."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/07/14-7
-->Few reporters in Washington even report on this stuff anymore. The revolving door between corporations and government is so ubiquitous that newspapers like The NY Times don't consider it news at all.
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Madre:
"On Monday, Sabbar Kashur, a young Palestinian man from East Jerusalem, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for something called 'rape by deception.' Apparently, Mr. Kashur had consensual sex with a Jewish Israeli woman after assuring her that he was also Jewish. When she found out that he had lied to her, she went to the police.
Imagine living in a society where you can say, 'I wish I had never slept with you. I’m going to the cops.' Only it’s not funny because Sabbar Kashur will probably go to jail for a year and a half. Meanwhile, efforts to combat actual sexual violence are undermined by a cynical distortion of the term rape. The real crime here, of course, is miscegenation. Anyone from the US should recognize the Jerusalem District Court’s ruling for what it is: an anti-miscegenation measure on par with the now-defunct US laws against 'race mixing' that were once used to uphold white supremacy...
In the US, anti-miscegenation laws were on the books until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. That was the same year that Israel began its occupation of Sabbar Kashur’s home in East Jerusalem. Since then, Israelis have fine-tuned their own obsession with racial purity."
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/07/21-19
-->Judgements making interracial marriage and interracial sex illegal in Israel don't get coverage in The NY Times, the newspaper that is the special guardian of Israel's public image in America.
