The U.S. attack of Gaza

Glenn Greenwald explodes the illusion of the U.S. as a third-party bystander to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:

[P]retending that the US - and the Obama administration - bear no responsibility for what is taking place is sheer self-delusion, total fiction. It has long been the case that the central enabling fact in Israeli lawlessness and aggression is blind US support, and that continues, more than ever, to be the case under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The US is not some neutral, uninvolved party. Whatever side of this conflict you want to defend - or if you're one of those people who love to announce that you just wish the whole thing would go away - it's still necessary to take responsibility for the key role played by the American government and this administration in enabling everything that is taking place.
The ongoing illusion that the U.S. is a neutral outsider is propagated by the U.S. commercial media.
It's just been staggering to see how tilted US media discourse is: Israeli officials and pro-Israel "experts" are endlessly paraded across the screen while Palestinian voices are exceedingly rare; the fact of the 45-year-old brutal occupation and ongoing Israeli dominion over Gaza is barely mentioned; meanwhile, every primitive rocket that falls harmlessly near Israeli soil is trumpeted with screaming headlines while the carnage and terror in Gaza is mentioned, if at all, as an afterthought.

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Greenwald: Obama could not criticize Israel without criticizing himself.

Greenwald makes the case that Barack Obama could not criticize Israel's most recent round of aggression (targeted killings) without criticizing himself. The U.S. media is happy to stick to their standard script.

Israel's escalating air attacks on Gaza follow the depressingly familiar pattern that shapes this conflict. Overwhelming Israeli force slaughters innocent Palestinians, including children, which is preceded (and followed) by far more limited rocket attacks into Israel which kill a much smaller number, rocket attacks which are triggered by various forms of Israeli provocations -- all of which, most crucially, takes place in the context of Israel's 45-year-old brutal occupation of the Palestinians (and, despite a "withdrawal" of troops, that includes Gaza, over which Israel continues to exercise extensive dominion). The debates over these episodes then follow an equally familiar pattern, strictly adhering to a decades-old script that, by design at this point, goes nowhere. Meanwhile, most US media outlets are petrified of straying too far from pro-Israel orthodoxies.

Continue ReadingGreenwald: Obama could not criticize Israel without criticizing himself.

What it takes to end a general’s career

Glenn Greenwald comments on what the media establishment cares about:

[General David Petraeus] has left a string of failures and even scandals behind him: a disastrous Iraqi training program, a worsening of the war in Afghanistan since he ran it, the attempt to convert the CIA into principally a para-military force, the series of misleading statements about the Benghazi attack and the revealed large CIA presence in Libya. To that one could add the constant killing of innocent people in the Muslim world without a whiff of due process, transparency or oversight. Yet none of those issues provokes the slightest concern from our intrepid press corps. His career and reputation could never be damaged, let alone ended, by any of that. Instead, it takes a sex scandal - a revelation that he had carried on a perfectly legal extramarital affair - to force him from power. That is the warped world of Washington.

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Separate debate for the presidential candidates without substantial corporate support

Do you want to hear the other candidates running for president of the U.S.? You can watch it live on October 23, 2012 at 8pm central time. Here's more from Huffpo: The debate, sponsored by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, will feature Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party), Jill Stein (Green Party), Virgil Goode (Constitution Party) and Rocky Anderson (Justice Party)." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/19/third-party-debate-al-jazeera-english_n_1988014.html The debate, which will be moderated by Larry King in Chicago, will be sponsored by Free and Equal. This debate will not be carried by any major American TV network, but it will be carried by Al Jazeera.

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Brookings Institute gets an “F” in describing the job of the media

Glenn Greenwald reports that Benjamin Wittes, a writer for the Brookings Institute wrote: "The [New York] Times is not an advocacy organization whose job it is to 'aggressively challenge' the government's claims of the rates of civilian casualties - except to the extent that those claims are untrue." Wittes was responding to an article by NYT suggesting that the NYT could do a better, more aggressive, job of scrutinizing the drone program of President Obama. Greenwald points out the problem with those who criticize those who dare to question the government:

It's amazing that someone not only believes - but is willing to say publicly - that it is not the job of a newspaper to "aggressively challenge" government claims on a highly controversial assassination program that is shrouded in secrecy and uncertainty. That, more than anything else, is the core purpose of journalism (at least in theory): the reason "freedom of the press" is protected in the First Amendment. And it's precisely the media's systematic failure - more accurately: its unwillingness - to engage in this function that has produced the last decade's most destructive outcomes . . . There really is no point in having media outlets that do anything other than "aggressively challenge" the claims of those in power. Actually, there is a point in having that: it allows government assertions to be glorified as true even when there is no evidence that they are. That is why so many power-serving Washington mavens are so eager to defend that model and demand adherence to it. And their success in that mission is why so many destructive government falsehoods are able to flourish without real scrutiny.

Continue ReadingBrookings Institute gets an “F” in describing the job of the media