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:
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."
-->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."
-->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.
-->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.
