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 to keep from the public eye.

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DeSmogBlog:

"... Yesterday the Obama Department of Energy (DOE) announced a conditional approval of the second-ever LNG (liquefied natural gas) export terminal.

LNG is the super-chilled final product of gas obtained - predominantly in today's context - via the controversial hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") process taking place within shale deposits located throughout the U.S. ...

The name of the terminal: Freeport LNG. Freeport LNG is 50-percent owned by ConocoPhillips and located in Freeport, Texas, an hour-long car ride south of Houston. The export facility is the second one approved by the Obama DOE, with the first one - the Sabine Pass terminal, owned by Cheniere and located in Sabine Pass, Louisiana - approved in May 2011.

DOE gave its rubber stamp of approval to Freeport LNG to export up to 1.4 billion cubic feet of LNG per day from its terminal."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/18

-->The NY Times mentioned this approval in an opinion piece by Joe Nicotra, who quoted the Wall Street Journal's analysis of fracking: " 'This newly found gas (offers) a historic opportunity to strengthen the economy, increase national competitiveness and create jobs.' I couldn’t have said it better myself." When it comes to making money for the oil giants, our newspaper of record simply becomes a cheerleader for global warming.

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The NY Times:

In a story yesterday, Eduardo Porter asks why austerity is still the rule in Washington. He makes some excellent points. The Harvard study of austerity has been pretty much discredited for its poor methodology and inaccurate results. Some calls for austerity were based on a "virtue of thrift" conservative morality rather than actual numbers. Recent experience around the globe has proven that "excessive thrift will make us all poorer." And, it was probably the banks that were pushing austerity all along in the "interest of moneyed creditors and lenders …"

What to do now with all this enlightenment? Amazingly, Mr. Porter goes on to advocate a long term cut of Social Security and Medicare. Has Mr. Porter learned nothing from reading Paul Krugman all these years? Social Security has absolutely nothing to do with the country's deficit, and it doesn't add one cent to government spending. Moreover, cutting Social Security would lead to an even greater income disparity than we already have. Its payments represent a large percentage of the yearly income of millions of retired workers in the US. 

Can't Mr. Porter think of anything else to cut? Like the trillions spent on wars in the Middle East? Or the trillions given to the big banks? Or the huge tax cuts to the very rich? Or the license given to the large corporations to pay no taxes at all? 

All the news that Wall Street sees fit to print. Mr. Porter, ever eager to sell his intellect in the service of the 1%, answers his own question. Austerity is still the rule because the corporate controlled media wants it that way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/business/despite-keynesians-victory-economic-policy-holds.html?ref=eduardoporter&_r=0

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Guardian UK:

"Hunger strikers at Guantánamo Bay are being threatened with body cavity searches before they can see their legal representatives, a leading human rights lawyer has claimed in a letter to British foreign secretary William Hague.

Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of legal group Reprieve, represents various detainees in Guantánamo, the controversial US military detention camp in Cuba used to house terrorism suspects. ...

In the letter to Hague, seen by the Guardian, Smith said US guards insist on a body search before any detainee can contact their lawyer, either via an in-person interview at the base or with a phone call. 'The US military has started directly abusing prisoners who want to contact their lawyers to tell them what is happening. So anyone who wants to see a lawyer, or have a legal phone call, must have his fingers put up his anus and his genitals touched,' Smith wrote."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/14/guantanamo-hunger-strikers-body-search

-->The NY Times has no interest in the continuing sexual humiliation going on at Guantanamo. It is "see no evil" in the pages of The NY Times when the empire is responsible.

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 to keep from the public eye.

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Democracy Now:

"ALLAN NAIRN: 

'Ríos Montt ordered basically a program of extermination against civilians in the northwest highlands. That’s the area where the Mayan population of Guatemala is concentrated. ...

And the Guatemalan army used a strategy of massacre. They would wipe out villages that did not submit to army rule. And the soldiers at the time described to me how they would conduct interrogations where they ask, 'Who here gives food to the guerrillas? Who here criticizes the government?' And if they didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they would strangle them to death, or they would slit their throats. If the people being questioned were women and they were pregnant, they would slit them open with machetes. They would make people dig mass graves. They would then make them watch as they shot their neighbors in the head, in the face, in the back of the skull. And this just happened in village after village after village.

And it wasn’t an armed confrontation, because the villagers were unarmed. The soldiers were armed with American and Israeli weapons. The villagers were not. It was straight-up murder. It was part of a strategy that had been developed in conjunction with the U.S. In fact, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala at the time, Colonel George Maynes, told me that this village—that he, himself, had helped develop this village sweep tactic. There was a U.S. trainer there, American Green Beret, who was training the military, and this is, in his words, how to destroy towns. And that’s what they did. And now Ríos Montt has been convicted for it.' "

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/13/ros_montt_guilty_of_genocide_are

-->The NY Times plays this story in its familiar way. No mention of US and Israel organizing, providing weapons for and planning the genocide. At the end of The NY Times article, we are told that American officials "were quick to accept military explanations." In other words, the US was misinformed, and not the agent behind the genocide. Our newspaper of record always assumes the benevolent intentions of US foreign policy, even when the facts indicate the exact opposite.    

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Guardian UK:

"Noam Chomsky was among 20 academics who privately lobbied Professor Stephen Hawking to boycott a major Israeli conference, it has emerged. 

Chomsky, a US professor and well-known supporter of the Palestinian cause, joined British academics from the universities of Cambridge, London, Leeds, Southampton, Warwick, Newcastle, York and the Open University to tell Hawking they were 'surprised and deeply disappointed' that he had accepted the invitation to speak at next month's presidential conference in Jerusalem, which will chaired by Shimon Peres and attended by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. ...

The letter to Hawking declared: 'Israel systematically discriminates against the Palestinians who make up 20% of its population in ways that would be illegal in Britain', its treatment of the people of Gaza amounts to 'collective punishment', the construction of Jewish settlements breaches the Geneva convention and 'Israel places multiple roadblocks, physical, financial and legal, in the way of higher education, both for its own Palestinian citizens and those under occupation'.

The letter continued: 'Israel has a name for the promotion of its cultural and scientific standing: 'Brand Israel'. This is a deliberate policy of camouflaging its oppressive acts behind a cultured veneer.' "

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/03-2

-->The NY Times printed nothing about these two foremost intellectuals of America and England who have joined many others in condemning Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. "All the news that's fit to print" never includes reporting on the growing boycott of apartheid Israel. 

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Democracy Now:

"We turn now to Bahrain, where the government continues its crackdown on opposition protesters, with demonstrations repressed and scores of dissidents held behind bars. Some of those imprisoned are now being denied visits from their lawyers or families. At least 87 people have died at the hands of security forces since the 2011 uprising began. Thousands more have been injured.

Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed monarchy last month blocked the visit of U.N. Special Rapporteur Juan Méndez, who was seeking to assess conditions on the ground. The move came a little over a year after the regime also blocked a visit by Méndez and Amnesty International. Bahrain is a key U.S. government ally, hosting the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. ...

MARYAM ALKHAWAJA: 

'Well, I know President Obama in 2011 made that speech that everyone remembers, of course, where he said that anywhere where people come out to demand democracy and freedom, they’ll find a friend in the United States of America. But I think a lot of people, especially in places like Bahrain, believe there was a disclaimer that nobody really paid attention to, which is, if you’re from the Gulf, then our friend is the regime and not the people. And I think that’s the thing that we’ve seen so far, is that, even in the beginning, we saw statements, albeit they were not consistent and there was not much follow-up on these statements, but there has hardly been any real accountability for the Bahraini government due to the human rights violations that have been ongoing in Bahrain for more than two years now.' "

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/10/with_father_and_sister_imprisoned_exiled

-->The NY Times covers up current American human rights violations in Bahrain, the same way it covered up the US support of genocide in Guatemala. preserving the illusion of US benevolent intentions matters more than honest journalism.

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 to keep from the public eye.

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The Nation:

"'NYT' and Keller Promote a US Attack on Syria: Iraq WMD Revisited?

Hail, hail, the gang’s nearly all here. Michael Gordon, Thomas Friedman, now Bill Keller. Paging Judy Miller! The New York Times in recent days on its front page and at top of its site has been promoting the meme of Syria regime as chemical weapons abuser, thereby pushing Obama to jump over his 'red line' and bomb or otherwise attack there. Tom Friedman weighed in Sunday by calling for an international force to occupy the entire country (surely they would only need to stay one Friedman Unit, or six months).

Now, after this weekend’s Israeli warplane assaults, the threat grows even more dire. And Bill Keller, the self-derided 'reluctant hawk' on invading Iraq in 2003, returns with a column today stating right in its headline, 'Syria Is Not Iraq,' and urging Obama and all of us to finally 'get over Iraq.' He boasts that he has.

The Times in its news pages, via Sanger, Gordon and Jodi Rudoren, has been highlighting claims of Syria’s use of chem agents for quite some time, highlighted by last week’s top story swallowing nearly whole the latest Israeli claims."

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174182/nyt-and-keller-promote-us-attack-syria-iraq-wmd-re-visited#

-->War drums beating at The NY Times again. We have seen it all before. Whatever Israel and the US Pentagon dictate, our newspaper of record will print. The empire wants an invasion of Syria!

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Common Dreams:

"A secret federal court last year did not deny a single request to search or electronically spy on people within the United States 'for foreign intelligence purposes,' according to a Justice Department report this week.

The report, which was released Tuesday to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), states that during 2012, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (the 'FISC') approved every single one of the 1,856 applications made by the government for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and/or physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.

This past year saw 5 percent more applications than 2011, though no requests were denied in either. Besides the numbers provided, no other information regarding the court and the court's decisions are made public."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/03-2

-->The NY Times has done little to expose the erosion of civil liberties under Obama. The fact that the secret federal court approves every wiretap request begs the question of who is defending electronic privacy in the US. Certainly not The NY Times.

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Common Dreams:

"WASHINGTON - A United Nations expert group is warning that too many gaps remain in implementing new safeguards among businesses based in the United States, both in terms of their domestic and international operations, to ensure the protection of human rights of workers and communities affected by those operations.

Two members of the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights wrapped up a 10-day fact-finding mission to the United States this week, at the end of which they released initial observations. Ultimately, these will be expanded upon and finalized for presentation to the U.N. Human Rights Council in June 2014.

'With a few exceptions, most companies still struggle to understand the implications of the corporate responsibility to respect human rights,' Puvan Selvanathan, the current head of the Working Group and one of the two members on the U.S. trip, said at the end of the mission 'Those that do have policies in place, in turn, face the challenge of turning such policies into effective practices.' ...

Speaking with reporters and civil society on Wednesday, the Working Group voiced particular concerns regarding low-wage agricultural workers, lack of free and prior informed consent for Native American communities engaging with big business, and harmful practices by the domestic extractives (mining) industry.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/05/04-0

-->The NY Times has always protected the corporate abuse of working people going back to its support of child labor in the mines and factories in the early 1900's. True to form, The NY Times didn't report this recent UN finding.

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 to keep from the public eye.

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Common Dreams:

"Fracking Debris Ten Times Too Radioactive for Hazardous Waste Landfill. A truck carrying cuttings from a Pennsylvania fracking site was quarantined at a hazardous-waste landfill and sent back after its contents triggered a radiation alarm showing the load was emitting 96 microrem of radiation per hour; the landfill rejects waste with levels above 10 microrems. The radioactive material from a site in the Marcellus Shale formation was radium 226, a common contaminant from the decay of uranium-238 that tends to accumulate in bone and can get into water. 

Officials said 'everything was by the book in this case' because the alarm went off as designed; the fracking operators can now either re-apply at that landfill or take their deadly waste to an out-of-state facility that accepts it - and yes, they exist. The scariest thing here: Pennsylvania, which is currently studying radiation contamination associated with fracking wells, claims to be the only state that even requires landfills to monitor radiation levels...

'Long-term exposure to radium increases the risk of developing several diseases. Inhaled or ingested radium increases the risk of developing such diseases as lymphoma, bone cancer, and diseases that affect the formation of blood, such as leukemia and aplastic anemia. These effects usually take years to develop. External exposure to radium’s gamma radiation increases the risk of cancer to varying degrees in all tissues and organs.' "

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/04/25-2

-->The NY Times ran a feel-good article last January 25 about radiation monitoring in Pennsylvania, but failed to print anything about this actual landfill contamination. Our newspaper of record seldom covers stores about radioactive contamination from nuclear power plants or from fracking.

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Common Dreams:

"The active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide may be 'the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment,' being responsible for a litany of health disorders and diseases including Parkinson’s, cancer and autism, according to a new study.

It's 'the most popular herbicide on the planet,' widely used on crops like corn and soy genetically engineered to be 'Roundup Ready,' and sprayed on weeds in lawns across the US. But in the peer-reviewed study published last Thursday in the journal Entropy, authors Anthony Samsel, an independent scientist and consultant, and Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at MIT, crush the industry's claims that the herbicide glyphosate is non-toxic and as safe as aspirin.

Looking at the impacts of glyphosate on gut bacteria, Samsel and Seneff found that the herbicide 'enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins,' and is a 'textbook example' of 'the disruption of homeostasis by environmental toxins.' "

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/26-3

-->The NY Times has long been in Monsanto's pocket. Our newspaper of record would never print a study like this, and didn't even mentioned it in one of their environmental blogs. 

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Common Dreams:

"As the new immigration reform bill moving through the US Senate puts aerial drones at the center of a beefed-up militarized approach to border security, a new report shows that the existing drone-border program has proved an 'inefficient, costly and absurd approach' to monitoring the border or enforcing current immigration laws.

The new report—Drones over the Homeland—produced by the Center for International Policy, 'reveals how the military-industrial complex and the emergence of the homeland security apparatus have put border drones at the forefront of the intensifying public debate about the proper role of drones domestically.'

Specifically, the report challenges what it discovered were 'dubious assertions and myths that DHS wields in presentations to the public and Congress' to justify the border-drone program, which it called 'poorly conceived, grossly ineffective and entirely nonstrategic.' "

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/25-0

-->The NY Times didn't print this story. Could the new immigration bill be more about corporate pork than real reform? You will never get that question in the pages of The NY Times.

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 to keep from the public eye.

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Democracy Now:

"Ríos Montt was the dictator of Guatemala during 1982, '83. He seized power in a military coup. He was trained in the U.S. He had served in Washington as head of the Inter-American Defense College. And while he was president, he was embraced by Ronald Reagan as a man of great integrity, someone totally devoted to democracy. And he killed many tens of thousands of civilians, particularly in the Mayan northwest highlands. In this particular trial, he is being charged with 1,771 specific murders in the area of the Ixil Mayans. These charges are being brought because the prosecutors have the names of each of these victims. They've been able to dig up the bones of most of them. ..

A forensic witness testified in the trial that 80 percent of the remains they’ve recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt’s troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see. ...

And most importantly, the U.S., beginning under the Carter administration but continuing under Reagan and after, asked the Israelis to come in and fill the gap that was caused by congressional restrictions. So Israel was doing massive shipments of Galil automatic rifles and other weapons. And Pérez Molina, as you saw in the video, actually had one of his subordinates come over and show me an Israeli-made mortar."

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/exclusive_allan_nairn_exposes_role_of

-->The NY Times' version of the genocide trial in Guatemala, leaves out all of the above information, from the US and Israeli support of the massacres, to the involvement of the current, US supported Guatemalan president. Sanitized news so American readers can't really understand who was guilty of this heinous genocide.

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Guardian UK:

"Shaker Aamer is the forgotten detainee in the 'war on terror'. After nearly 70 days on hunger strike, he fears he might never return to his family in London. But why is he still being held, despite having been cleared for release six years ago? ...

Aamer's continuing incarceration is all the more mysterious, given that the Americans ruled almost six years ago that he could be freed from Guantánamo. In June 2007, he was officially cleared for release. A security assessment by the US government acknowledged it had no concrete evidence against him. Two years later, the Obama administration reiterated the lack of a case against him, underlining the fact that he could be released. ...

Why might powerful interests desire the silencing of Shaker Aamer? Stafford Smith points out that his case has an incendiary element: he is allegedly able to describe in detail how a UK intelligence agent was present while he was beaten. A British operative, he claims, was present as a US interrogator repeatedly smashed his head against a wall shortly before he was sent to Guantánamo. Described as articulate and highly intelligent, Aamer's allegations of British complicity in his torture and detention would undoubtedly reopen the vexed and fraught debate over British complicity in the darker side of America's 'war on terror'."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/20/guantanamo-shaker-aamer-london

-->Hold an innocent man prisoner for years just so he can't make the US and British governments look bad? The NY Times was disinterested in this story of our government's flagrant violation of human rights. 

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Common Dreams:

"Evading any fanfare, President Obama followed Congress's lead and quietly signed legislation Monday that gutted provisions of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK) which provided important oversight of government employees, including the President and members of Congress, by requiring disclosure of their finances to the public.

'Without the provisions, the STOCK act is made toothless,' writes Dan Auble with the Center for Responsive Politics. 'Insider trading by members of Congress and federal employees is still prohibited, but the ability of watchdog groups to verify that Congress is following its own rules is severely limited because these records could still be filed on paper—an unacceptably outdated practice that limits the public's access. This is not true disclosure.'

Signed in to law last April, Obama originally hailed the measure as a step towards eliminating the 'deficit of trust' between US citizens and their government."

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/17-8

-->Obama's lies about Wall Street are almost always covered up by our newspaper of record. The NY Times didn't print this story. How about a "deficit of trust" in reporting?