Thursday, December 09, 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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FireDogLake.com:
"Saturday the White House announced that the following noble protectors of American workers endorsed the NAFTA-style Korea Free Trade agreement:
US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue; President of the National Association of Manufacturers John Engler; Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit; JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon; Amway CEO and top Republican funder Dick DeVos; Big Bank lobby group Financial Services Roundtable President Steve Bartlett; and more.
That's an impressive array of people who are dedicated to protecting the ultra-rich and not giving a damn about real working Americans or American jobs. How could the Obama White House top that?
Here's the second round of endorsements from the White House for NAFTA-style Korea Free Trade; mind you the White House is actually bragging about these names:PhRMA, Wal-Mart, RIAA, AT&T, Mitch McConnell
It's like a party for the Corporate Axis of Evil, and Obama's throwing a kegger."
-->One has to read alternative media to understand what the "free trade" agenda all about: multinational corporate profits at the expense of workers and the environment. But that point of view would never make it into the pages of The NY Times.
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Guardian UK:
"A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young 'dancing boys' to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try and 'quash' the story, according to one of the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.
In a meeting with the assistant US ambassador, a panicked Hanif Atmar, the interior minister at the time of the episode last June, warned that the story would 'endanger lives' and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public.
The episode helped to fuel Afghan demands that contractors and private security companies be brought under much tighter government control. However, the US embassy was legally incapable of honouring a request by Atmar that the US military should assume authority over training centres managed by DynCorp, the US company whose employees were involved in the incident in the northern province of Kunduz."
-->Perhaps a story about "dancing boys" was too off-color for readers of The NY Times. It didn't cover the story. But most stories that put the US occupation of Afghanistan in a bad light are censored by our newspaper of record.
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Inter Press Service:
"WASHINGTON - A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile programme refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.
A key Wikileaks document which should have resulted in stories calling into question the thrust of the Obama administration's ballistic missile defence policy in Europe based on an alleged Iranian missile threat has produced a spate of stories supporting the existing Iranian threat narrative. In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.
But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.
The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles - supposedly called the BM-25 - from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side."
-->Did The NY Times come clean after being exposed by Wikileaks? Not really. In a recent article entitled: "Wider Window Into Iran’s Missile Capabilities Offers a Murkier View," there are references to differing opinions on Iran's missile capabilities. No mention of the Russian evidence. Is The NY Times selling war on Iran the same way it sold war on Iraq? Whipping up hysteria for military intervention by reporting what the Pentagon says as the whole truth? Of course it is.