Friday, April 25, 2014

Guardian UK:
“The New York Times did not report that a young Palestinian journalist had been arrested in Israel because it obeyed a gagging order issued by an Israeli court. The paper's delayed publication of the story about the detention of Majd Kayyal (see below) was revealed by its public editor, Margaret Sullivan.

She quoted the NY Times's Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, as explaining that the acceptance of gag orders is analogous to abiding by traffic rules or any other laws of the land. 

… It is also the case that some Israeli publications have not obeyed gag orders, such as Haaretz, as did an Australian outlet. And it was Haaretz that petitioned against the gag order on Kayyal's arrest.“

—>The NYT obeying Israeli gag orders on news stories. Quite amazing for what we like to think is freedom of the press in this country. Our newspaper of record didn’t even think the story about the Israeli gag order was worth publishing, and only commented on it in the Public Editor’s Journal blog. 

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Common Dreams:
"Industrial waste from fracking sites is leaving a ‘legacy of radioactivity’ across the country as the drilling boom churns out more and more toxic byproducts with little to no oversight of the disposal process, critics warn.

According to a new report in Bloomberg Wednesday, the controversial oil and gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing is ‘spinning off thousands of tons of low-level radioactive trash,’ which has spawned a ‘surge’ in illegal dumping at hundreds of sites in the U.S.

‘We have many more wells, producing at an accelerating rate, and for each of them there’s a higher volume of waste,’ Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, told Bloomberg. Without proper handling, ‘we are actually building up a legacy of radioactivity in hundreds of points where people have had leaks or spills around the country.’ “

-->The NYT avoids bad press when it comes to fracking. It is almost as if the Gray Lady obeys a gag order from the petroleum industry. It didn't print this story.

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Common Dreams:
"A military judge has ordered the disclosure of never-revealed information detailing the experience at secret CIA ‘black sites.’

The defense team for Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri argued during pretrial motions at the Cuban prison that the Guantanamo detainee's time spent in secret CIA prisons—during which he was waterboarded and threatened with a gun and a power drill—has ‘tainted’ his testimony, and thus the case against him.

The Saudi Arabian has been held at the U.S. military prison since 2006 after being held in a series of secret CIA prisons. He is being accused of orchestrating the Oct. 12, 2000, bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen. …

The rules for military commissions bars prosecutors from using any evidence or testimony obtained by coercion or torture.”


—>A search on CIA “black sites” confirms the fact that the NYT didn’t publish this story. Maybe our premier newspaper obeys gag orders from the Pentagon as well. Torture by the US government is never deemed “fit to print.”