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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Inter Press Service:
"A special envoy from President Barack Obama raised the possibility in a secret meeting with senior Iraqi military and civilian officials in Baghdad Sep. 23 that his administration would leave more than 15,000 combat troops in Iraq after the 2011 deadline for U.S. withdrawal, according to a senior Iraqi intelligence official familiar with the details of the meeting.

But the White House official, Puneet Talwar, special assistant to the president and senior director for the Gulf States, Iran and Iraq on the National Security Council (NSC) staff, said the deployment would have to be handled in a way that was consistent the president's pledge to withdraw U.S. troops completely from Iraq under the 2008 agreement, the official said.

Talwar suggested that the combat troops could be placed under the cover of the State Department's security force, the Iraqi intelligence official told IPS..."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/16

-->Another peace promise being broken by our peace prize president? The NY Times didn't think this latest betrayal of the antiwar movement even worth reporting on.

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Reuters:
"GENEVA - The new U.N. torture expert urged the United States on Tuesday to conduct a full investigation into torture under the Bush administration and prosecute offenders as well as senior officials who ordered it.

Juan Ernesto Mendez told Reuters he also hoped to visit Iraq to probe a 'very widespread practice of torture' of detainees with the help of coalition forces, revealed in confidential U.S. files issued by Wikileaks.

He will also try to visit the U.S. detention centre at Guantanamo -- on condition that he is granted private interviews with prisoners still being held by the Obama administration, he said in his first interview with an international media organisation since taking up the independent post two weeks ago.

'The United States has a duty to investigate every act of torture. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much in the way of accountability,' said Mendez, himself a former torture victim, in the wide-ranging interview at the United Nations in Geneva."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/16-7

-->Stories like this make the empire look bad. Of course The NY Times wouldn't report it.

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The Hill:
"Anti-war Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) says he will force a vote on a hard date for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan on the heels of reports they could remain there at least through 2014.

Kucinich said Wednesday that he will force a vote via privileged resolution at the beginning of the next Congress on ending the war in Afghanistan by the end of 2011...

His announcement comes after The New York Times reported that the Obama administration has stressed that it will leave troops in place at least through the end of 2014 in an effort to persuade Afghans and the Taliban the U.S. intends to complete its mission."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/11-5

-->The NY Times doesn't report on Congressional initiatives to end the war. Major news sources in the US still overwhelmingly support the wars in the Middle East, even though the American people do not.

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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The Media Consortium:

"Last week, the Federal Reserve announced a plan to buy an additional $600 billion worth of Treasury bonds in an attempt to stimulate the economy. On Democracy Now!, economist Michael Hudson argues that the $600 billion T-bill buy will help Wall Street at the expense of ordinary Americans.

The Fed justifies the purchase as an infusion of cash into the U.S. economy. The buy-up will certainly be an infusion of cash into U.S. banks. In effect, the Fed will help the government pay back the banks that lent money to finance deficit spending. The hope is that these banks, suddenly flush with cash, will help the U.S. economy by lending money to finance projects that will create wealth and jobs (i.e. opening factories and hiring more workers).

However, as Hudson points out, there’s no guarantee that the banks are going to use the windfall to build wealth in the U.S. On the contrary, he argues, there’s every reason to suspect that they’ll invest the money overseas in currency speculation deals."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/09-3

-->Another 600 billion for the banks to speculate with, with nothing going to the average American worker. Try to find this analysis in the mainstream media.  The NY Times, as usual, obscured the give-away in an article entitled: "Fed to Spend $600 Billion to Speed Up Recovery."

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Agence France Presse:

"GENEVA - The United States faced a barrage of calls to investigate allegations of torture and shut down Guantanamo Bay detention centre on Friday in its first review by the UN's top human rights assembly.

European countries joined appeals for a halt to the death penalty, and there was trenchant criticism of Washington's recent human rights record during wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the detention and interrogation of terror suspects."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/05

-->Not much in mainstream media about this condemnation by the UN Human Rights Assembly. I guess Obama was supposed to change things, and newspapers like The NY Times don't really want readers too upset with business as usual in the US Empire.

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The Patriot-News:

"Tracking the Twitter activity of law-abiding citizens was part of the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security’s intelligence surveillance program.

According to internal Homeland Security e-mails produced through a Right-To-Know request, one of the targets of such surveillance was the Berks Peace Community, a 50-year-old group of Quaker-affiliated senior citizens. They gather on the Penn Street Bridge in Reading every Friday and quietly hold signs questioning America’s 'war habit.'

The e-mails also indicate that monitoring the tweets of law-abiding citizens was 'part of the intelligence effort that is conducted daily... on behalf of the PA Office of Homeland Security.' "

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2010/11/big_brother_monitored_tweets_t.html

-->Why bother reporting on the eavesdropping of our national security state when the President can decide who to assassinate without charges or trail. Does free speech exist when one's life can be taken away by the state without judicial process? Maybe that is why The NY Times didn't cover this story. 

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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Citizens for Legitimate Government:

"The Obama Effect: The Demise of the Democratic Party and a Gift to the Country By Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. 11 Dec 2009

The decision to escalate Afghanistan War should put the final nail in the coffin of "change" and "hope" that Democrats and others crawled into when they supported Obama. The evidence that Obama is every bit the representative of the corporate oligarchy and no less a corporate shill than the rest has been mounting for nearly a year-or well before the election for the cognoscenti. Only fanatics could have heard Obama's speech on Afghanistan and failed to hear the resonances of Bush. But the writing was on the wall over a year ago when Obama supported the bailouts of the banks and brokerage firms that leveraged their destruction of the economy on the foreclosures of homes. Few could miss the fact that the health care reform bill, should it ever pass, will be another unwarranted and gratuitous bailout-this one of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies... Only a working-class majority can overcome the power elite and end the wars.

http://www.legitgov.org/Michael-Rectenwald-Only-working-class-majority-can-overcome-power-elite-and-end-wars

-->Why can't the mainstream media come up with such an analysis? Instead, we hear this week that Obama is too far to the right. Don't trust the talking heads paid for by the corporate media. They can be counted on to always advise a move to the right, with less government regulation, and more tax cuts for the very rich.

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Inter Press Service:

"WASHINGTON - The revelation by Wikileaks of a U.S. military order directing U.S. forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the U.S. military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger U.S. strategy of exploiting Shi'a sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the U.S. war.

And Gen. David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using Shi'a and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi'a and Kurdish police commandos in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by Wikileaks show."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/01-6

-->The US military responsible for the sectarian violence that still plagues Iraq? Americans will never see that part of Wikileaks in the major US media, which often serves to support such US occupations in the Third World. The best The NY Times can do is run "People Magazine" like articles attacking the Jullian Assange, as in: "WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil."

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WAMC/NPR:

Marketplace offered a special segment last week on controlling the federal deficit. The head of the Columbia School of Business Administration was there to claim that the problem is really with Social Security. This despite the fact that Social Security has run surpluses for decades, billions of dollars owed retiring American workers. The surpluses all went to funding US wars and giving tax cuts to the very rich. Social Security is still running a large surplus and will so for the foreseeable future. But Wall Street wants its cut, like the insurance companies wanted their cut of healthcare. So the mainstream media, including WAMC/NPR, must constantly distort the facts about Social Security. How else to rob the majority for the benefit of the richest?

http://www.classwars.org/socialsecurity.htm