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Obama, Hu Jintao Press Conference Held In China (VIDEO): Leaders Talk Economy, Iran, North Korea, Tibet, And Taiwan

2009-11-17T00:50:28Z

(AP) BEIJING President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao promised a determined, joint effort to tackle climate change, nuclear disarmament and other global troubles yet emerged from their first full-blown summit Tuesday with scant progress beyond goodwill.

After two hours of talks and a separate meeting over dinner the night before, the presidents spoke of moving beyond the divisiveness over human rights, trade and military tensions that have bedeviled relations in past decades.

"The major challenges of the 21st century, from climate change to nuclear proliferation to economic recovery, are challenges that touch both our nations, and challenges that neither of our nations can solve by acting alone," Obama said, standing with the Chinese leader in the Great Hall of the People.

Hu, who heads a collective leadership that often has preferred to go it alone internationally, said: "There are growing global challenges, and countries in today's world have become more and more interdependent. "

With each of those big issues from global warming to the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs persistent differences bubbled up in the form of indirect barbs during the joint appearance.

Stung by new U.S. levies on imports of Chinese-made tires and steel pipes, Hu said he told Obama that given a still struggling global economy both countries "need to oppose and reject protectionism in all its manifestations in an even stronger stand."

Obama later called on China to relax controls that keep the Chinese currency relatively weak and thus help fuel exports something Beijing officials have rejected in recent days. Obama also pointedly raised human rights, saying they are fundamental to all.

"We do not believe these principles are unique to America, but rather they are universal rights and that they should be available to all peoples, to all ethnic and religious minorities," Obama said in his only nationally televised remarks on the sensitive issue.

The mixture of promises and lasting differences underscored how intertwined the superpower United States and rising power China are, and the difficult task Obama faces in managing friction with an authoritarian, sometimes testy Beijing.

On his first visit ever to China, Obama said he was mostly striving to better understand China, a geopolitical force on its way to becoming the world's second-largest economy.

"Our relationship going forward will not be without disagreement or difficulty," Obama said. "But because of our cooperation, both the United States and China are more prosperous and secure."

Aside from his meetings with Hu, Obama received a formal welcome. He walked past rows of soldiers in dress uniforms and dined on chicken soup with bean curd, Chinese-style beef steak and roast grouper at a state banquet. He also toured the Forbidden City, the emperors' palace for more than 400 years, and met the head of China's legislature, a former mayor of Shanghai, the commercial hub where Obama started his three-day stay in China.

In a minor advance, the two leaders set a deadline of early next year for resuming an on-again, off-again dialogue on human rights. Charting a new frontier for cooperation, the two agreed to reciprocal visits by the heads of their space programs. Promises were made to step up visits by military leaders to help overcome years of distrust over a Chinese military buildup and U.S. reconnaissance missions in the seas off China.

Headway was made on climate change. The two committed their countries the biggest emitters of the heat-trapping gases causing global warming to backing a detailed political agreement at next month's climate-change conference in Copenhagen. In their formula, rich countries would commit to reduction targets while developing ones would agree to meet softer goals that would be monitored.

Yet the positions were not markedly different from those Beijing and Washington held before Obama's arrival.

So it also was with attempts to curb Iran's nuclear program and disarm nuclear-armed North Korea. Though Obama talked of continuing diplomatic efforts on Iran and North Korea, Hu did not endorse the U.S. leader's talk of sterner actions should negotiations falter. Beijing has strong interests in keeping North Korea stable and in maintaining budding energy cooperation with Iran.

"Iran has an opportunity to present and demonstrate its peaceful intentions, but if it fails to take this opportunity, there will be consequences," the U.S. president said. Hu did not mention consequences.

Keeping the differences veiled rather than open was a measure of success of sorts for Obama. With its economy still in trouble, U.S. international prestige still battered and China holding $800 billion in U.S. government debt, Obama came to the Beijing summit with a weaker hand than previous U.S. presidents. That makes the emphasis on practical cooperation all the more needed, Chinese analysts said.

"The Chinese leadership will not worry too much about the U.S. pressure. In the context of the financial crisis and George W. Bush's legacy on the issues of Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. needs China much more than China needs the U.S.," said Yu Wanli, an America expert at Peking University.

At their joint appearance, Hu called on the U.S. to respect China's "core interests" code for ending support for Taiwan and for the Dalai Lama, in his Tibetan government-in-exile. Obama obliged by saying Tibet was part of China. But he urged China to restart talks with the Dalai Lama's representatives something Hu did not mention.

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Dave Lindorff: President Obama: Don't Lecture China on Censorship

2009-11-16T17:45:25Z

President Obama, in his visit to China, held a "town meeting" with Chinese students in which he praised openness and lectured them on the value of freedom of information, saying that he is a "supporter of non-censorship" and that open access to information was a "source of strength."

And yet America is hardly free of censorship. Heck, the president himself has gone to court to prevent the release of photographs of US troops torturing captives in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo. Talk about censorship! But it goes way beyond just such crude, totalitarian style control over information.

Let's just take the issue of depleted uranium weapons, over 1000 tons of which have been expended in the US invasion of Iraq, most of it in populated areas where millions remain exposed to the radioactive dust of the burned material. There is almost no reporting on this topic in the US media. The Pentagon has for years lied about and hidden the effects of this deadly substance, used in shells, bombs and bullets because of its unique ability to penetrate hard steel armor and concrete bunker walls. It has refused to disclose where the weapons were fired, and has denied US troops the tests that would show if they have been contaminated. It has even resorted to having paid Pentagon hacks surreptitiously libel, slander and otherwise undermine those military sources and journalists who have tried to expose this scourge (this reporter has been the target of such disinformation attacks).

But censorship in the US goes beyond these crude efforts at government-directed control of information. In America, some of the most potent censorship is done by the privately owned media -- supposedly a bastion of freedom of expression.

There is no reason why the US media cannot report on depleted uranium and its deadly legacy in places where it has been used, such as Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or on and around American military bases from Maryland to Hawaii. And yet it does not. Just recently, stories have appeared both on Britain's SkyTV and in the Guardian newspaper, reporting on an alarming rise in unusual birth defects and infant cancers in Fallujah as well as in other Iraqi cities like Basra, Najaf, Baghdad and Samara -- all urban areas where there were major assaults by US forces both in the initial invasion, when most of the DU weapons were used, and later during fights against holed-up insurgent groups.

In Fallujah, the Guardian reports that birth defects are up by a staggering 15 times normal -- an increase of 1400%! While the article doesn't mention depleted uranium specifically, and says that doctors in Fallujah have been "reluctant to attribute" the astonishing number of birth defects to the massive assault on that city by US forces in late 2004, they do say those doctors cite "radiation and chemicals" which were dumped on the city.

There is no such report about this in the US media.

Is that censorship? Of course it is.

The American government doesn't tell CBS News or CNN not to report this story, which amounts to a US war crime. It does not (at least generally), contact the editors at the New York Times or the Washington Post and say, "Don't report on the infant mortality crisis in Iraq, or on the possible connection to US weaponry" (Though the government did ask and successfully get the Times to hold a story about the National Security Agency's massive electronic spying program for a year, and managed to pressure the Times' editors to kill a Times reporter's story about President Bush's likely use of a hidden cueing device during the 2004 presidential debates). The editors of those news organizations themselves most of the time simply decide that either the story is of no importance to readers or they worry that they may be criticized either by the government or by other media organizations for being unpatriotic, or biased.

The end result of such a process of self-censorship, however, is that the American public is as ignorant about certain things as someone in China.

More ignorant in fact.

One thing I learned from living and working as a journalist and journalism teacher in China back in the 1990s is that the Chinese people, with their long experience of living in a totalitarian dictatorship in which all media are owned and tightly controlled by the state and the ruling Communist Party, are acutely aware that they are being lied to and that the truth is being hidden from them. Accordingly, they have learned to read between the lines, to pick up subtle hints in news articles which honest journalists have learned how to slip into their carefully controlled reports. They have also developed a sophisticated private system of person-to-person reporting called xiaodao xiaoxi or, literally, "back-alley news." This system used to be word-of-mouth between neighbors and friends. As telephones became ubiquitous, it was done by phone, allowing transmission over long distances quickly. Now there is the internet, which, while it is systematically controlled via what has become known as China's "Great Firewall" -- effectively all of China is like a vast corporate "intranet" which blocks access to outside websites -- still allows the flow of email. This is nearly impossible to monitor, particularly when the messages are not bulk mailed to large numbers of addressees.

So in China, reports of corruption, of local rebellions or strikes, of internal struggles within the government or party, or of important news about the outside world that the government wants to keep at bay, manage to circulate widely inside China despite a huge state censorship apparatus.

This alternative highly-personal news network works because the Chinese people know they are being lied to and kept in the dark, and they want to break through that official shroud of secrecy and control.

In the US, in contrast, we have a public that for the most part is blissfully unaware of the extent to which our news is being censored, filtered and controlled. Like the President (who knows better), we boast of our "free press," and our open society, and indeed, as a journalist, I am free to write what I want to write.

But given that most people get their news either from corporately owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn't really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment write because it won't appear in the corporate media. Since most Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a society with a free press and no censorship or control of information, they don't even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed to them by corporate media sources.

The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites. Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.

The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond just the use of nasty weapons.

Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western Democracies in the world have some form of national health care -- either a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or Switzerland -- and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.

Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of living in the world -- or even close? No. Because the American media continue to portray the US as "number one."

Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA? No. This important bit of information doesn't get mentioned in the US media, which always starts the organization's history at 1988, when it got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and children that our beloved soldier "heroes" are conducting in Iraq and Afghanistan in our name.

No censorship in America?

Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don't insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven years in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author, most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006) and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Xiaoda Xiao: My Voice

2009-11-16T15:17:56Z

During the years 1971 - 1978 I performed forced labor in one of Mao's Prison Labor Reform Camps, on an island in Lake Taihu in China known as West Hill Island. The camp held several thousand prisoners, about half of whom had been charged with counterrevolutionary crimes: for openly criticizing the government and its leader, for listening to foreign radio broadcasts, for spreading political rumors against the central committee of the communist party, for writing anti-communist diaries, and, as in my case, for having accidentally torn a poster of Mao.

I am thrilled that "The Cave Man," my first novel, which is based upon my prison experience in China, will be published this December. It means that my voice, which is both reflective of myself and representative of friends who survived the brutal communist prison camps in China, will be heard.

Under the strict censorship regulations of the current regime in China, the publication of any literary work that shows signs of penetrating in depth, or exposing the reality of prison life since the 1950s, during which years millions of innocent men and women were sent to labor reform camps as "rightists," as counterrevolutionaries, or as treasonous individuals, is forbidden. As a result, it appears to an outsider that nothing significant has ever happened. There were only a few literary works in the early 1980s that touched on these prisons, but they provided information and pictures that turned accusations against the system into praise for the party.

According to the authorities at that time, political prisoners, or counterrevolutionaries as they were then called, were generally considered to possess dangerous thoughts that would bring disorder and cause chaos to an allegedly "normal" society. So they were much more easily targeted as the trouble-makers in the prison camp than were the ordinary criminals - rapists, thieves - who were encouraged to report to the authorities about any problematic speeches given by their fellow political inmates. This had directly caused five prisoners, as I witnessed myself, all of them counterrevolutionaries, to be executed at the open trials during my imprisonment, while the same speeches spoken by an ordinary criminal would be accepted as a common mistake, or simply ignored by the prison cadres. The more education a counterrevolutionary inmate had received before his imprisonment, the more likely it was he would become a candidate for the death penalty. Among the five condemned prisoners, there were three former school teachers, a local opera director, and a former military officer, all of them well-educated.

Now some say that the whole country was mad during the Cultural Revolution. As a survivor of and witness to the brutal violence against innocent people, I disagree; my experience tells me that it was the regime that was mad, and not ordinary people, who wouldn't have harassed their neighbors had they not been encouraged to do so. Ordinary people wouldn't persecute their neighbors, but the authorities would.

One of my fellow inmates, for example, who had been interested in the dubbing of foreign films, and who, since childhood, had always gone to the movies with his elder brother and three other friends, was arrested, and for their mutual interest he was sentenced to a ten-year prison term as a counterrevolutionary. His elder brother and their three friends, as well as one of those friends' mothers, were executed in the spring of 1970 in Nanjing. The mother had hoped that she could be executed side by side with her son, but her last wish was rejected and they were executed separately, although they were killed on the same day. What kind of a regime was this if not mad?

The endless self-condemnation and confessions, which I was forced to perform through innumerable nightly thought-reform sessions as a counterrevolutionary, were unbearable, but they proved fortunate in one regard. These sessions greatly strengthened my ability to pay extra attention to what I had said and done in the past. Thanks to this, I was able to remember many details of what I had gone through in those years on the island. I still recall how angry I was when I read what other writers wrote about their prison experience. So I decided to write my own stories as well as the stories of my fellow inmates.

I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to come to the United States, a country where freedom of speech is honored, and that I have, with the help of my friends, been able to transform my experience into a novel.

The characters in "The Cave Man" are based on real people known as the lucky few who, having survived the sub-human conditions of the prison camps in China, still struggled on the narrow border between life and death, and still felt haunted by nightmares they had gone through in the camps. They had expected, when they stepped past the iron gate, that they would be able to enjoy the remaining days of their lives freely, only to find themselves living in a prison camp larger than the one they had survived.

Allen McDuffee: Blackout: Military Personnel Banned From H1N1 Vaccine Sites

2009-11-05T10:56:21Z

UPDATE BELOW

If you want to draw attention to a problem, try hiding it. That's the strategy of several military bases when it comes to the H1N1 vaccine.

Shortly after the Pentagon announced that all Armed Services personnel would soon be facing a mandatory H1N1 vaccination program, I started receiving email from soldiers, airmen, marines and sailors because of a previous story I had written on the anthrax vaccine. Mandatory vaccine programs are a sensitive subject in the military, so it's not a huge surprise that swift and visceral reactions to the program gained speed.

With a vaccine that was so new and little known about it, like many Americans, troops were heading to the web to find answers to their very legitimate questions -- not only for themselves, but for their families who have the option of receiving the vaccine on base. What they found instead is that several websites and blogs with key information asking critical questions had been blocked from their viewing.

Among those that were repeatedly mentioned as blocked sites are the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), the site for Gary Matsumoto's book Vaccine-A, and vaccine expert Dr. Meryl Nass. NVIC is a national, non-profit founded in 1980s that, through public education, advocates "vaccine safety and informed consent protections in the mass vaccination system." Matsumoto's site contains a forum in which thousands upon thousands of service members have posted testimonies regarding their experiences with the anthrax vaccine. And Nass is one of the world's foremost experts on vaccines who has testified in front of Congressional committees -- and, I might add, never has had a malpractice suit brought against her.

The Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sites, however, are all available for military personnel. The official word from governmental agencies is welcome but critics, regardless of whether they were considered experts, are not.

According to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, the only blocking of websites Pentagon-wide was in 2007, when a number of heavy-trafficked sites that "used lots of bandwidth" had to be denied to reduce the wear on networks "to ensure they continued to be available for mission requirements."

That turns out not to be entirely accurate.

Some of you may recall the reporting earlier this year when wired.com's Danger Room blog reported that the Pentagon was blocking not only YouTube, but even their own TroopTube.

When TroopTube launched last November, for instance, it was billed as an answer to the bandwidth and security concerns surrounding other video sites. TroopTube "crunches video files into several sizes and automatically plays the one that best suits viewers' Internet connection speeds," the Associated Press reported at the time. And "a Pentagon employee screens each [upload] for taste, copyright violations and national security issues."

Nonetheless, the public affairs office at the Pentagon further instructed me that "anything that may be blocked at the Service or base level should be addressed there -- it's a local issue."

Since I had the most information (and the most complaints) about Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, that's where I directed my questions. After repeated email and phones calls, nearly two weeks later a spokesperson for Wright-Patterson told me that:

The Air Force general policy is all websites are placed into categories based upon their content and intended audience. All unethical categories are blocked as are any sites that are uncategorized. Currently the sites referenced are blocked because they are uncategorized.

A wholly unsatisfactory answer that side-stepped the question, I took this statement to mean that blocking these websites had nothing to do with bandwidth use as in the Pentagon statement and everything to do with the content.

I asked the follow-up question: Since this is a recent decision to block them, why would they not just be categorized rather than being uncategorized? As a result, they would not be blocked for educational purposes of service personnel who have a mandatory H1N1 vaccination program?

Wright-Patterson did not respond to this question.

Making sure that servicemen and servicewomen consent to the vaccine and are informed is apparently not a concern for the Department of Defense. But the message is very clear for one service member who contacted me: "All you need to know is what we're telling you, so shut up and take the vaccine with no questions asked."

Nass, one of the experts whose site has been blocked, points out the real shame in all of this: "It's unfortunate that the service members who are defending our civil rights are not afforded the same consideration."

Note: If you're on a base that has blocked websites related to the H1N1 vaccine, I'd love to know what sites are blocked and what base you're on. You can post the info in the comments below or contact me directly.

UPDATE (11/18/09): See my piece on how the Air Force is now requiring that children in on-base daycare to get the vaccine.

Threatened Voices Charts Bloggers Under Attack Around The World

2009-11-04T12:13:47Z

Blogging from a fancy office in Soho, it is easy to forget how dangerous it can be for bloggers around the world to do their work. But just last month, a HuffPost blogger in Cuba, Yoani Sanchez, was refused permission to travel to the US where she was to be awarded a prize by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In other cases, bloggers face harassment and even imprisonment for calling attention to government corruption and abuses.

Earlier this year, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Burma is the worst place in the world to be a blogger. The article went on to say:

"Bloggers are at the vanguard of the information revolution and their numbers are expanding rapidly," said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. "But governments are quickly learning how to turn technology against bloggers by censoring and filtering the Internet, restricting online access and mining personal data. When all else fails, the authorities simply jail a few bloggers to intimidate the rest of the online community into silence or self-censorship."

Now, Global Voices, a global community of bloggers, has launched a project to try and keep track of the the censorship and harassment bloggers can be subjected to. Titled Threatened Voices, the project shows on a map the disturbingly high numbers of bloggers arrested or imprisoned in different countries.

Check it out and if you know of anything not included, please contribute.

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Mahnaz Afkhami: Iranian Women's Voices

2009-10-26T13:44:08Z

In the flood of news and information that surrounds us every day, we may take for granted the constant ripple of voices around the globe whose struggle to be heard often ends in violence, imprisonment or death. Ironically, it is only the new information age that is allowing many of those voices to be heard for the first time; voices that were previously muffled by oppressive regimes.

What an outside audience may see as sudden bursts of political activism often reflects years of dialogue and refusal to be silenced. We should make every effort to recognize and document the long-term efforts of grassroots activists in building such movements.

Such a document is a new English translation of the book, Iranian Women's One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality: The Inside Story. Women's rights activist Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani captures the essence of the monumental grassroots struggle for rights in Iran, and locates its strength not among individual activists but within the power of a movement itself.

The core objective of the One Million Signatures Campaign when it began in 2006 was to mobilize Iranian women to become advocates for reform of gender-discriminatory laws. But it became much more than that. Gathering signatures, it turned out, became a springboard for deeper dialogue, conversations about laws and their meaning. Thousands of people -- young and old, male and female, liberal and conservative -- discovered the relation of their own personal narratives to the collective movement and took on a role within it.

One result: the massive street demonstrations, in which women played a leading role, after Iran's botched elections last June. The demonstrations shook the foundations of the government's legitimacy and created fissures among the ruling elite, making the Islamic Republic vulnerable to internal and external pressure.

Khorasani, a renowned journalist, was a co-founder of the movement, and her account offers unique insight into an extraordinary story of Iranian women's perseverance, creativity and strength. Women came together in public and private spaces, both real and virtual, to share their stories and raise their collective voices in support of women's equal rights. The story also serves as a guide for other grassroots campaigns, a model for advocacy and education that transcends the political, economic and cultural barriers that often stand in the way of large-scale collective action.

Grassroots movements and individual women throughout the Global South are relying on increasingly sophisticated and varied forms of communication for their legal education and reform efforts. Another book, Guide to Equality, documented alternative interpretations of religious laws and the successful strategies Moroccan women used to reform their family laws in 2004. Translated into Persian and buttressed by face-to-face exchanges and email connections, the book gave vital help to the One Million Signatures campaign.

Iranian women are in turn sharing their experiences via the Internet with women in other Muslim societies, bringing new support, dynamism and confidence to the global movement for women's rights and human rights. As Moroccan feminist and human rights activist Rabéa Naciri states,

The experience of Iran enables us to open the debate on the place of religion in politics. The debate on this issue, exemplified by the Iranian women's movement, will be beneficial not only for Iran but for the whole region.

Khorasani is now facing harassment and government threats of prosecution. Her determination to defy those threats and make her book accessible to a wide international audience only testifies to the courage and determination necessary to educate and mobilize grassroots populations to become advocates for equality.

Stu Kreisman: Guantanamo Bay: College Division

2009-10-26T11:21:52Z

Last week I wrote about Butler University in Indianapolis, the first school of higher education ever to sue one of it's own students over the content of his Internet blog. Once word of this abuse of the legal system spread outside the tight-knit world of academics and into the main stream media, plus seeing the outrage of it's own students, Butler backed off and announced that they would drop the questionable lawsuit against Jess Zimmerman.

Wrong! They were kidding! The lawsuit is still on and just in case, the Butler administrators are also going to hold their own "Kangaroo Court" to make sure Zimmerman gets what's coming to him. If they can't kick his keister legally, they'll take the law into their own hands and dish out their own punishment. All this because the administration can't take criticism on the Internet.

The situation is eerily similar to the Bush administration's dealings in Guantanamo Bay. If you can't convict lawfully, make it up as you go along. Look, we're dealing with a blog, which painted an unflattering picture of the administration. Is it really worth all the time, money and negative publicity just to get even with a student because you're thin skinned? We're not dealing with something as sinister as the Virginia Tech shootings here. (Which the administration has already compared the writings to in what has to be the ultimate in bad taste.)

Is a school entitled to discipline a student? Of course if a crime is committed. But let's get real here. We're talking about freedom of speech on the Internet; something I thought is looked upon favorably at universities. Silencing and punishing your critics went out with the Bushies.

So Butler University is going to be the first school to censor the Internet. Expect Dick Cheney to give the next commencement speech. Butler is doing him proud.

New On The NYR Blog

2009-10-23T16:59:51Z

The New York Review blog has two new posts up today, from Haleh Esfandiari, who writes about her tenure in Evin Prison in Tehran, and Ahmed Rashid, who delves into how exactly the U.S convinced Hamid Karzai to hold a run-off election. The Huffington Post has excerpts below.

Iran's Harshest Sentence for an Innocent Scholar, Haleh Esfandiari

For me Iran's sentencing this week of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh to at least twelve years in prison--the harshest sentence so far passed down by the revolutionary court--is particularly fraught. In 2007, he and I were fellow prisoners in Tehran's Evin Prison. He was held in the men's section and I in the women's section of Ward 209, reserved for political prisoners held by Iran's Intelligence Ministry. We had been arrested within a day of each other, and we shared, in separate interrogation rooms, the same interrogators. He began to send me books; thanks to him I was able to escape the confines of my prison cell by reading the novels of Dostoevsky and Graham Greene.

Now, on October 20, Kian has been convicted, on the kind of fantastical charges beloved of Iran's revolutionary courts--everything from plotting a "velvet revolution" in Iran to espionage and undermining the credibility of the Islamic Republic. He was even charged with endangering the security of the state by belonging to a public email list, Gulf2000 (which posts news and commentary on the Middle East), run by Columbia University professor Gary Sick, who is falsely identified in the indictment as a CIA operative. Read More

How They Convinced Karzai, Ahmed Rashid

Everything that could possibly go wrong in Afghanistan has gone wrong over the past two months. The industrial-level rigging and manipulation of the August 20 election--largely by the government of President Hamid Karzai--could have dealt a death blow to international involvement in Afghanistan, as it entered its ninth year. Worse, it occurred just as the Taliban were ramping up their insurgency and Afghans were becoming even more disillusioned with their government than usual. So how did the US and its allies manage to convince Karzai this week to agree to a run-off election?

Last month the Independent Election Commission--an Afghan body appointed by Karzai himself--gave him 54.6 percent of the vote and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, only 27.7 percent. But in view of widespread reports of fraud, Abdullah, Afghans, and the entire international community refused to accept this result until a UN appointed complaints body called the Electoral Complaints Commission had done a recount. Read More

Read more at the New York Review of Books Blog.

Frankfurt Book Fair Official Fired For Treatment Of Chinese

2009-10-22T08:10:16Z

The Frankfurt Book Fair, which struggled to find a balance between free speech and honoring China as its featured country, dismissed its project manager after yet another embarrassing refusal to let Chinese dissidents speak.

Yoani Sanchez: Fighting the "Demons of Kidnapped Information"

2009-10-21T13:36:41Z

No one knows the mechanisms of censorship in Cuba better than those who write in the few newspapers of national circulation. The press here has been turned into a delicate profession required to measure adjectives, carefully weigh topics and often to hide personal opinions in order to keep a job. It is a life decision to be a journalist for the official media, I know, but I also know some who have been trapped in the twists and turns of complicity, waiting for the day when they can write what they think.

From the Juventude Rebelde newspaper office where Reinaldo worked until 1988, there is very little left because most of his colleagues now live in Miami, Mexico and Spain. Others have retired from the profession, disillusioned with the aborted glastnost and the consecutive calls for criticism, which ended up being bait for the most daring. Jose Alejandro Rodriguez survived all this and carried his personal battle into the "Receipt Requested" section where he published readers' letters with their complaints and questions. Every time I read his crusade against bureaucracy and poor work, I sense the regressive countdown that will probably culminate in his professional silencing.

A few days ago Jose Alejandro could take no more. He took everything he has accumulated about the "excessive centralization" that the press on this Island is subject to and condemned the secrecy surrounding government decisions. In his article "Against the demons of kidnapped information" he used the language of an honest man who always believed in the possibility of humanizing the current system through the transparency of information. I respectfully differ with him, because what has been built on a foundation of hiding, condemning and filtering cannot survive the clear light that emanates from an incisive and free journalism.

The three pages of his harangue lasted just a few hours on the on-line version of Juventud Rebelde. The article was kidnapped by the shrewd hawks of orthodoxy, who know well the danger of a Nation that begins to learn everything you have hidden.

A copy of the article "Against the demons of kidnapped information" can be read here.

Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.

Judy Platt: As Congress Prepares to Reauthorize the Patriot Act, Reader Privacy Must be Protected

2009-10-19T08:23:19Z

While I love to talk books with friends and colleagues, reading for me is a private and personal matter. Government agents secretly privy to what I read might be a fact of life in a dictatorship but it isn't anything I need to worry about in this country. We have a First Amendment that entitles us to read and think freely. Right?

In fact, that First Amendment right to read without the government looking over my shoulder may need some shoring up. In the aftermath of 9/11 and passage of the Patriot Act, (a piece of legislation so massive that not one member of Congress had read it before the vote) many of us in the book community, led by the American Library Association and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, became aware that portions of the new law, specifically Section 215 and the new authority to issue National Security Letters, posed a serious threat to reader privacy. The Patriot Act gave the FBI virtually unlimited ability to search library and bookstore records of people not even suspected of terrorist activities, with little oversight by the courts. Libraries and bookstores targeted by such searches would be forbidden to speak to anyone about them, ever. Five years ago, ALA and the American Booksellers Association, joined by PEN American Center and the Association of American Publishers, formed the Campaign for Reader Privacy to raise the alarm in Washington and throughout the country that precious reading privacy rights were in danger. ALA and ABA rolled out a petition campaign and succeeded in collecting more than 200,000 signatures in libraries and bookstores across the country. The petitions were presented to members of Congress along with the message that a lot of people want their reading habits kept private.

If you think the FBI hasn't got time for fishing expeditions to find out who's reading what, think again. Five years ago, a patron of a small rural library in Whatcom County, Washington, found anti-American quotes written in the margins of a biography of Osama bin Laden and notified the FBI, who turned up at the library demanding the names of every patron who had borrowed the book. The library director's refusal to turn over the records, which are protected by state library confidentiality laws, without a search warrant or subpoena and her principled defense of her patrons' privacy in the face of a subsequently issued grand jury subpoena (later withdrawn) earned her the 2005 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award. At the time it was noted that had the FBI returned with a Section 215 order instead of a grand jury subpoena, the library would not have been able to challenge the request in court and information on dozens of innocent people would still be residing in FBI files.

FBI attempts at library surveillance did not originate with the Patriot Act. Between 1973 and the late 1980s the FBI operated a secret counterintelligence operation called the Library Awareness Program. They were particularly interested in what Soviet bloc citizens were reading. Their incursions extended to bookstores, too. In at least one instance, an independent bookseller in Pennsylvania was visited by the FBI wanting to know the whereabouts -- including the names of the purchasers -- of three copies she had ordered of a new book by an unknown author: Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October. The Library Awareness Program was one of the primary reasons that virtually every state in the Union enacted library record privacy statutes. Those state privacy laws are now trumped by the Patriot Act.

Over the past five years we've made some significant progress on the Patriot Act. While we still haven't gotten the most important protection -- requiring that what the FBI is looking at be connected to suspected terrorism or espionage -- the Inspector General of the Justice Department is now directed to look at how the law has been used by the FBI. His reports have documented widespread abuse.

Three provisions of the Patriot Act, including Section 215 will expire at the end of this year and Congress is working on reauthorization legislation. On October 8 the Senate Judiciary Committee gave us half-a-loaf. In approving a bill that extends Section 215 for another four years, the Committee set a higher standard that will require the FBI to show a connection to someone suspected of terrorism or espionage before they can get library records. But they failed to provide those same protections for bookstore records. Readers out there need to make it clear to their members of Congress and Senators that the privacy of what they read is non-negotiable and that they're entitled to that privacy whether the books they read are borrowed or bought.

Stu Kreisman: Student Blogger Shut Down and Sued by Butler University Over Free Speech

2009-10-18T22:37:29Z

Jess Zimmerman is a junior at Butler University in Indianapolis. Last year he wrote criticisms of Butler's administration in an anonymous blog. It was an opinion piece. Apparently the administrators at Butler don't take too kindly to criticism because now they've taken the unprecedented action of suing Jess and threatening him with their full arsenal of on campus punishments. We now have the first case of a university suing a student over online free speech. (Full disclosure: Jess's father is an acquaintance of mine.)

Yes, I know the Internet is the wild west of journalism. If you believe in any conspiracy or have a very unusual political bent, there are hundreds of sites that will support their beliefs. Responsible adults usually ignore these criticisms and let them slide off their backs. However, Butler has decided to make an example of young Mr. Zimmerman to control Internet content and silence future criticisms of the university.

The biggest crime seems to be that Mr. Zimmerman wrote the blog anonymously. While writing criticisms under a pseudonym could be seen by some as a lapse in judgment, it certainly does not rise to the level of a crime. But then again, there is a long tradition in American history of powerful anonymous writings from Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton to James Madison and John Jay. In any case, nothing slanderous was written in Mr. Zimmerman's blog. They were opinion pieces.

The bog gained popularity on campus, much to the chagrin of the administration. Two e-mails agreeing with Zimmerman's views were sent to the university provost, one of which might have been a bit overzealous. Apparently the president and provost became so alarmed by the e-mails that during a presentation to the faculty senate (a full ten months later) the president referenced the shootings at Virginia Tech. Is this getting a little out of hand? You betcha. (The details of the controversy are here. Zimmerman's blog is here.)

A few days ago president Obama was asked by a youngster at a town hall meeting in New Orleans "Why does everybody hate you?" Obama replied "Take it with a grain of salt... Don't take it too seriously." A much wiser approach than suing a student.

Book Burning: North Carolina Church To Destroy "Satan's Books"

2009-10-15T10:52:22Z

A Baptist Church near Asheville, N.C., is hosting a "Halloween book burning" to purge the area of "Satan's" works, which include all non-King James versions of the Bible, popular books by many religious authors and even country music.

Micah Sifry: The Internet as Toxic Avenger: Trafigura and the Ungagging of the Guardian

2009-10-13T15:43:32Z

Here's a cautionary tale in how not to manage your message in a networked media age, or rather, further evidence of John Gilmore's brilliant maxim, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Late Monday night in England, the Guardian posted a strange article reporting that it was being prevented from reporting on a question pending in Parliament. The only thing the Guardian could say was that the case involved Carter-Ruck, a prominent PR firm that specializes in working with global corporations. But that didn't stop the blogosphere, which immediately took affront at the assault on free speech. Within 24 hours the whole story was out in the open, to the chagrin of Carter-Ruck and the oil commodities firm Trafigura, which was trying to hush up an embarrassing report on toxic dumping in the port of Aibidjan by one of its ships in 2006.

Here's the gist of the Guardian's original report on its gagging yesterday:

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented -- for the first time in memory -- from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The British blogosphere went into hyperdrive speculating about the case, and swiftly zeroed in on this report, posted to Wikileaks, connecting the oil commodity firm Trafigura to a report of toxic dumping off the coast of Africa. Apparently Carter-Ruck was trying to keep the issue from surfacing publicly and had obtained a court injunction barring coverage of a pending question that was being raised on the matter by a Member of Parliament. The word "Trafigura" also took off on Twitter, essentially making Carter-Ruck's legal efforts essentially moot.

Here you can see how the gagging of the Guardian was rapidly overwhelmed by mentions of Trafigura on Twitter.

For the rest of the story, go here.

China Guest Of Honor At Frankfurt Book Fair

2009-10-13T15:27:16Z

BERLIN — Organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair worked for 15 years to secure China as the guest of honor at their five-day showcase of global trends and best sellers that opens to industry delegates Wednesday.

Organizers are steeling themselves for lively discussions and the possibility of protests at the fair, which boasts about 6,900 exhibitors from more than 100 countries.

Rob Kall: Interview With Pro-Bono Civil Rights Defense Attorney Paul Hetznecker

2009-10-07T17:07:32Z

On Monday, October 5, over 60 peace activist, anti Afghan war protesters were arrested in front of the White House. It seems like a good time to publish this interview I did on my Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show a few weeks ago with Paul Hetznecker, who defends protesters as part of his life work.

I met Paul because he is defending, pro bono, Cheryl Biren, a managing editor for OpEdNEws.com, who was arrested while photographing police arresting protesters demonstrating against the Army Experience Center.

Rob Kall: Good evening. It's been a busy day today. I spent the
morning down in Philadelphia in a court room with OpEdNews.com
reporter, Cheryl Biren-Wright and the AEC 6 - the six protesters who
were arrested at the Army Experience Center a few weeks ago on
September 12. It was an interesting morning.

We have tonight, coming on in a few minutes, Paul Hetznecker. Paul
Hetznecker is a defense attorney who does a lot of work, pro bono, with
people who have been involved in protests of different sorts who are
engaged in fighting for civil rights.

He is working to defend Cheryl Biren-Wright and the six protesters
and I had a chance to meet him today and he is, as I described in the
diary announcing this radio show, he's a lion. He is an awesome guy who
is about protecting our rights, protecting our constitutional rights in
particular.

Here, I have Paul Hetznecker and I described you as a lion of a man
in my newsletter that I sent out announcing this radio show. After
seeing you in action today I was very impressed Paul.

Paul: Well, I appreciate those comments. It's very kind of you Rob.

Rob: To start off with you're defending pro bono the six
protesters who were arrested at the Army Experience Center and Cheryl
Biren-Wright, the reporter who was arrested while taking photographs
there.

Paul: That's correct.

Rob: There was a
hearing today and I'm not sure just what to make out of that and what
we can say and it would be great if you could give a little bit of a
summary about how things look for them and where they're going.

Paul: Let me start out by saying that we have not received
police reports yet so I do not have their official version of what
they're claiming what the protesters actually did to prompt the
criminal charges that were brought.

But, I will say this, there has been a longstanding policy of the
Philadelphia Police Department to have their Civil Affairs Division
monitor, surveil, and conduct intelligence gathering with respect to
protesters in the city.

And, this goes way back and it is not unique to Philadelphia.
Police departments throughout the country during the 60s and 70s
established what they called Red Squads back then which were
intelligence gathering units that would show up at protests essentially
to monitor the protest, to make sure that the protest didn't become
violent and that was ostensibly their official mission.

But, their unofficial but more significant mission was really to
gather political intelligence on the protesters and there is a
longstanding tradition in many police departments of gathering this
information and then sharing it with federal authorities and other
intelligence agencies in order to essentially create a catalogue of
protesters, a kind of intelligence gathering process that goes way back
and has continued and has actually intensified over the last ten years
since the protest in Seattle ten years ago.

And so there is this longstanding tradition of what has been
phrased, and I think properly coined, a "war on dissent" in this
country and that war has been intensified not only under President
Bush, but it continues so even to this day.

Rob: Under Attorney General Holder would you say?

Paul:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Certainly, Holder is a breath of fresh air
compared to the previous administration, but the infrastructure of the
surveillance and the intelligence gathering that exists within the
federal government and coordinates with local police departments
existed as I said even before Bush came into office. Certainly, it got
much more insidious and much more, I think dangerous, in the efforts
that were made post 9/11 and use of the Patriot Act and other efforts
that have been well-documented with surveillance by the NSA and by the
Pentagon and other agencies which were barred by law from conducting
domestic surveillance. What we have seen is this has carried out
throughout the course of the last ten years with a variety of tactics.

So, I make that comment only because I think it's important that
when defending individuals in a protest situation not only are the
examination of the charges and the sufficiency or lack thereof of the
evidence an important part of any defense, it's also important to know
what the underlying strategic plan of the police department has been
with respect to protests and in conjunction with that the efforts to
identify, catalogue or what has been phrased "political profiling" of
those people they believe to be the center of whatever particular
political demonstration is being conducted.

Rob: I was there and what I saw were police somewhere
between 50 and 80 uniformed and non-uniformed police seriously
attempting to intimidate and actually threatening the media with arrest
if they stayed to cover arrests.

Paul: Right. And that's a very dangerous part of this whole
development and I think what has been seen over the years and really
started I think in real coordinated effort by local and federal
agencies to criminalize dissent but also to marginalize those who are
protesting and also kind of eliminate the press overview of their
activity is the process or the tactics that you just mentioned - the
intimidation, the threats of arrest, "you stay here," the seizing of
cameras and video cameras when there is an event that is going on in an
attempt to control, from their point of view, control the events that
are going to unfold.

So, for example, if the police decide to create an arbitrary line
of demarcation and indicate to people that you're not to go beyond this
point at a particular protest that can be documented very easily by
individuals who were there either part of the protest or independent of
the protest such as yourself who was there to simply cover the event
and it becomes an important third eye, a way in which the police
tactics and the police use of their power on the street has an
oversight and the oversight would be the media, those people present on
the scene who documented this. Well, they don't want that. They want to
have unfettered discretion in those kinds of situations.

Rob: [station ID] We're talking to Paul Hetznecker, a
defense attorney who does a lot of pro bono civil rights work and we're
talking about the protesters and the reporter who were arrested at the
Army Experience Center.

You know Paul, one thing that I'm very interested in and aware of
is that the Obama administration promised transparency in government.
Actually OpEdNews even got a grant from the Sunlight Foundation which
focuses on government transparency. Most of what they do is aiming for
transparency in contracts and legislation and relationships with
lobbyists and things like that, but it seems to me that allowing the
press to see what the police are doing is just one of the most clearly
obvious kinds of transparencies that is out there. Isn't it?

Paul: I agree and I think it's a much broader issue because
it's not just whether it's the Bush or Obama administration that is
called to task. It's really a question of how far government agencies
have gone to essentially marginalize our areas of privacy as well as
our areas of public protest.

Rob: We're talking about marginalizing the Constitution aren't we?

Paul:
We are. Not marginalizing, but really changing the whole kind of view
that we've had traditionally about the rights that are protected under
the Bill of Rights. Those protections that are guaranteed under the
Bill of Rights only having meaning if people are able and feel
comfortable enough and willing enough to express themselves.

So to bring the first amendment to life you have to stand on a
street corner and protest an issue and you have to be able to express
yourself without worrying about being identified or categorized as a
dissenter, as a threat to the state, someone who is now in a position
where your identity is going to be known by agencies, you're going to
be identified, you're going to be profiled, you're going to be possibly
hounded, there is going to be a file created because of your protest.

All of these efforts by the government which are longstanding, they
go back for decades, but what has happened recently is that our focus
has changed, that as a society we don't believe that those activities
that have been traditionally protected under the Bill of Rights are
ones that should be heralded, that should be lauded, that should be
cherished and now considered threats and so the dialogue has changed.

So, those people that engage in a protest such as the ones that
these individual clients have engaged in now are considered a threat, a
threat to the status quo, a threat to the particular agency or
governmental entity which they are confronting rather than what I
believe which was really was born out of a tradition of struggle the
view that this is exactly what was protected under the first amendment,
under the Bill of Rights.

"We" were here essentially on this street corner to argue, to voice
our dissent because this is a protection that is guaranteed something
that we should cherish and laud and and support rather than the
society's focus has changed and the focus is now well to what extent
are these people there to disrupt and possibly threaten a governmental
agency or a governmental entity or a particular view that is embraced
by possibly the majority of the public.

I think what we need to do is change the dialogue a little bit and
talk about how our realms of freedom or areas of freedom, our ability
to communicate, to associate and to express ourselves are further
enhanced by activity, by the kind of activity which is now deemed to be
criminalized or deemed to be marginalized.

Rob: Cheryl Biren-Wright was charged with criminal conspiracy because she was taking pictures of police arresting protesters.

Paul: Right.

Rob:
This is just insane to me. It's not just the police who were part of
this, though, this is also the District Attorney's office right?

Paul: They are the charging authority, yes, and they are
provided the information by the police department. But, you're right,
it's very frightening and it is the kind of thing that happened on
several occasions and more recently the one that I think is most widely
circulated was Amy Goodman from Democracy Now being arrested last year
in Minneapolis by the police and again after she had announced herself
as a reporter who was covering the particular protest at that moment.

I think the total disregard for the freedom of the press or the
ability of reporters to cover an event is a frightening development
because there seems to be no concern about whether or not a person who
has a press credential, a person who is taking photographs, a person
who is doing exactly what the police surveillance squads are doing
which is filming the event and taking photographs of the event that
somehow that person presents a threat to the official version, whatever
official version they want to present about what happened that day.

I guarantee you that the official version of the police report is
going to differ very much from the accounts reflected in the
photographs and in the individual accounts of those who were there in
support of the protest, but also those who were there to cover it such
as Cheryl who was not a protester, who was simply a member of the press
covering the event.

Rob: You told me in our conversation earlier today that you
had an impression that the police are treating independent media
different than the establishment media. Can you talk about that a
little bit?

Paul: Well, I think that's a broader
discussion, but it goes back to independent media, for example,
covering the Republican National Convention in 2000 and the way the
independent media had been treated by the police during the course of
the events that unfolded during that week. Part of the strategy and I
think it's a multi-faceted and multi-pronged strategy by those who
engage, those entities such as the civil affairs and in coordination
with FBI, those who engage in surveillance of political dissenters and
political protesters do not want these events covered by independent
press and independent media.

Rob: Why?

Paul: Because in large part it
goes back to what I said earlier that they want to be able to control
the version of what unfolds in front of them at that particular time
and have the ability to provide a version that is going to support
whatever charges are eventually brought.

Rob: So they want to prevent the press from covering the
events so that the press is unable to have visual evidence of what
happened that would refute the verbal reports and the selected visual
evidence that are presented by the police. Is that what you're saying?

Paul: Correct. And that happens routinely. So, for example
at many demonstrations when the police begin to take action they
immediately push the press out of the way and get them out of the way
and further away from the events that are occurring. Anybody with a
camera, anybody with a video camera is identified as a threat to their
actions and so they try to move them off . Essentially it is more of a
tactic than anything else, clear them out, we don't want the press to
cover this particular event.

Now part of that I think is systemic in all police departments
because if you look for example, there were a couple of events within
the last few years that occurred in Philadelphia involving police abuse
one of which was a situation where news helicopters covered police
officers making an arrest in what they believed to be a shooting case
in which they took several men from a car and beat them in full view of
the cameras. Well, those cameras happened to be up in the helicopter so
they could not do much about preventing that from being disclosed to
the public, but it is this natural tendency on the part of the police
officials on the scene to eliminate any kind of independent review of
their activity.

Now, does that comport with the first amendment? No, of course not.
Arresting Cheryl in this particular case who was a reporter covering
the event was absolutely in violation of her rights - not only
her right to be there as she was a licensee in that area as everyone
who was invited into that particular location at the mall and this
particular Army center is inside the mall so those individuals who were
there to protest were invited into the mall to protest, she was there
as a member of the press covering the event so her place there was
completely protected and sanctioned not only by their initial action of
inviting everyone in but by the first amendment. She was there to cover
the event.

So, their actions in arresting her obviously become a much more
important, I think, important struggle for all of us to have the truth
revealed. Because, if you start to eliminate the press from any
particular location based on arbitrary police decision making then you
have essentially allowed them unfettered control of that particular
event whether it's a protest, whether it's a march, whether it's a
picket, whatever it might be it is essentially an area in which the
press has a right to be, a right to view that event, a right to cover
it, document it, record it and then disseminate it to the public and
that is all that Cheryl was trying to do that day. And, unfortunately,
she became the victim of excessive police activity.

In this particular case it looks as if based on the photographs
that I have seen that she had been targeted by one civil affairs
official and directed by one official to another official to actually
go over and make the arrest of her because she had a camera.

Now, that's the way it looks based on the other photographs that
were taken not by her but by other individuals there and I think those
pictures are a clear example of exactly what I'm talking about which is
the police attempting to control the situation. They've made a decision
to make arrests, they are now going to conduct those arrests and they
don't want their activity to be documented independently.

Rob: This is what I saw, for example, when they threatened
the TV crew and bullied them into leaving that is exactly what it was
all about.

Paul: Let's mention that a little bit. Tell
me about that part of it. You said that there was a TV crew there that
was covering the event and what were they told by the police and who
was the TV crew?

Rob: The TV crew was Frontline with PBS and they had been
covering this story of the protests of the Army Experience Center and I
watched the police tell the reporter - and I didn't hear every word of
it but I heard some of it and it was basically - "you gotta get out of
here now, we're giving a final warning and if you don't get out you're
going to be arrested." And, after Cheryl was arrested and I went
outside I wanted to see why didn't the police do something with the
reporter from Frontline and I asked her and she said, "Well we got out,
we left." I said why, "because they told us we'd be arrested if we
stayed." Now, this to me is just outright bullying by the police of the
press. Because I was there in May and I saw the exact same kind of
thing happen, it gives me the impression that it's a systematic policy
of the police. Not some accident. Not some rogue cop.

Paul: Yea, absolutely, I agree with that 100%. I think it is
a systematic policy in any situation where there is a protest or
demonstration and as I've said this began and it was very clear in 2000
that when arrests were unfolding that the police did not want the press
documenting those arrests. Like I said, I think it's a general police
policy but it's much more clearly effectuated in cases where it's a
high profile political demonstration where the police acting on
whatever prompting they have either from those individuals who were the
focus of the demonstration, the Army in this particular case or whether
it might be a particular governmental entity whether it's prompted by
them or by the police themselves at a certain point when they take
action they do not want it documented so you're right. It's not an
accident. It is a systematic thing.

Rob: Does this happen all over the country would you say?

Paul:
Well, it does happen. What's more important though and I want to make
this clear that the kinds of tactics that have been used by the
agencies that have investigated protest groups in this country are very
much systematic. That they are, for example, following the Seattle
protests in 1999 what was awakened was a very dangerous sleeping giant
and that was the sleeping giant that had been foreshadowed by the
COINTELPRO investigation done by the Church Committee in the 1970s
which was a series of frightening abusive tactics by the federal
government, by the FBI and other federal entities such as the defense
department and the CIA and other evidence of domestic surveillance and
intervention and illegal conduct by those agencies in an effort to
undermine the first amendment rights of political activists in this
country.

What 1999 did in Seattle was really reawaken this as I said this
sleeping giant of domestic surveillance and the joint FBI terrorism
task force was established and what began in Seattle continued in
Washington DC in 2000 during the demonstration, I think it was the G-8
summit there in 2000 and then, of course, it came clearly into view,
the tactics that were used in 2000 here in Philadelphia during the
Republican National Convention.

What they did was and there is a series of things that they've done
and they've refined their tactics, they refined it in 2004 during the
conventions in the presidential conventions, one in New York and they
did it again last year in 2008 and what the common denominator of the
police agencies have been are several. One is what they would do is
create protest zones where people were allowed to protest far from the
situs of their particular protest so if the convention center was
holding...

Rob: That's what's happening this week in Pittsburgh at the G20.

Paul: That's exactly right.

Rob: They've been designated...

Paul: That's right.

Rob: Is that legal?

Paul: Well, that's a very good question. Let me explain to
you, it really cuts to the heart of this whole issue and this battle
over the first amendment because what was developed was a strategy, for
example in 2000, the Republican National Committee I believe at the
behest of the federal authorities and swallowed up all of the public
spaces with permit requests so all of the public spaces where protest
groups would want to protest in either the center of the city or near
the Wachovia Center where the convention took place, they were
swallowed up by these permits so there was only one public space that
the City of Philadelphia authorized for a demonstration by protesters.
Everything else was swallowed up by these permit requests. That was one
strategy.

The second one was to create so there are these non-protest zones
which are areas where the City says okay you're off limits and they've
done this in Pittsburgh. They've done the same thing in Pittsburgh.

What they then do is then they create this little caged zone and
say okay you want to protest here you are. You can go over here and
express yourself off in this little remote caged area and that's where
you can express your first amendment rights. Well, that was never ever
contemplated in all the litigation over the first amendment in the last
five decades. The idea was that you could take your protest to the
street, that you could take your protest to the situs of your protest
so if it was a governmental agency, a court house, a corporation you
could go to the foot of that particular entity and express yourself
because that was the whole nature of dissent in this country and the
first amendment was to allow you to express yourself and possibly with
very uncomfortable and difficult speech at the location so that you
could be heard. Not in a corn field somewhere cordoned off in a cage.

Rob: So, we've got the G20 in Pittsburgh, there are two
locations where they've basically done exactly what you've described.
Do these protesters have the right to go somewhere else and if they
don't abide by what the police tell them to do and they get arrested do
they have something defensible and if they went all the way up to the
Supreme Court with the Neanderthal 5 that are there now would they have
any chance of getting those free speech rights?

Paul: Excellent question and let me address it in the
following manner. And I'll address it with what has been essentially an
attempt to preempt much of this by the lawyers representing the protest
groups in Pittsburgh. Lawyers went into federal court requesting that
the illegal conduct by the police which they had searched illegally
according to the reports that I have heard and read, searched illegally
several organizations that were there to create a fair, an
environmental fair, to demonstrate the alternatives to the
environmental policies that have been embraced by the G20. Well, the
location for that particular fair was in dispute and they sought a
permit and they also sought an injunction from the federal judge to
stop the harassment, the intimidation, the illegal searches of the
individuals that were going to organize this fair and those supporters
who came to attend it. They were shot down by a federal judge so the
question of whether or not ...

Rob: I have to throw in a couple of weeks ago I had Cyril
Wecht on, he's a world famous medical examiner who was a victim of one
of the Rove directed Bush appointed DOJ prosecutors who worked with a
Bush appointed judge who was so unbelievably inappropriate that he was
pulled off the case and the decisions reversed. This is the Pittsburgh
we're talking about here and it could be the same kind of judge
couldnt' it?

Paul: I know a little about the Wecht case just from
newspaper accounts, I can't comment on the particular judge that made
the ruling in this case, but what I can say is this is that the hope of
these lawyers is that they would find refuge, that the first amendment
would find refuge within the walls of that particular judge's court
room and what they found was that they found no refuge so the question
of whether or not the first amendment will find protection within the
courts is an open one.

The law is a rationalization for power. The only limitations are
the limitations that we find in the document that we know as the Bill
of Rights. So the protection that we have for freedom of association,
for freedom of expression, for the protection of privacy zones whether
it be in communication or in thoughts that are communicated privately
through telephone, or Internet. All of these issues are I believe in
the battleground of this new frontier which the Internet has
essentially opened up for all of us and that new frontier is really the
battleground over our freedom of our first amendment rights whether on
the street or in our expressive modes through telephone communication
or Internet communication is what we are battling right now. And, it's
an open question whether we are going to find sanctuary in the courts
or whether we are essentially going to be shot down, but that doesn't
stop the struggle.

The first amendment only finds life and breath in the activity, the
expressive activity, of those people who embrace it. You know, dissent
was essentially one of the guiding principles in the founding of this
country was that the expression of dissent, the ability to confront
power with truth with a different point of view, with a lone voice in
the wilderness that was all built into our concept of what this country
was all about. What's been challenged over and over again over the last
three or four decades is this idea that we have this protection because
this protection has now been marginalized, it's been limited and there
are zones of privacy just like there are zones of expression are now
smaller and smaller.

So, when a court says it's illegal to stand on a street corner and
bark out your proclamation against the government because you're
disrupting someone else or when a court says we consider this
particular organization to be a threat to national security therefore
we are going to allow the federal government to investigate,
infiltrate, intimidate that particular organization we have
relinquished a zone of freedom that we may never get back without
something much greater happening. Whether that will happen in the
courts or not remains to be seen. I do not have a lot of faith in this
Supreme Court. I can be honest with you. Now over the years if Obama's
appointments change the composition of this court we'll see.

Rob: [station break] I'm talking with Paul Hetznecker. He
is a defense attorney who does a lot of pro bono work with protesters
and people who are fighting for our rights and our freedoms and Paul we
don't have that much time left and I have a couple of things I want to
go over with you.

One is this idea of civil disobedience as part of the fight for health care for everyone. What do you think about that idea?

Paul:
I think it's a fascinating idea. I think the notion that health care is
a civil right, that health care is a human right I think is an
important concept that we must embrace. You know, if we look at the way
resources are disseminated for health care, obviously there is a huge
disparity between those who have access to adequate health care and
those who have no health care at all and don't have access to the
channels of power that allow them to have access.

So, I think health care as a human right is absolutely essential in
our dialogue over this issue of changing modes of health care and
whether or not this particular bill or a new bill is passed or this
country changes its view on health care, I think fundamentally, the
dialogue has to change and the concept of health care as a human right
is an essential part of that change.

Rob: And the civil disobedience, is there a way that you
would envision protesters engaging in it that would be directly
relevant to health care? Would they block health insurance company
doorways, would they go to hospitals. I'm just trying to envision how
civil disobedience would apply. Rosa Parks went to a bus. Somebody else
went to a lunch counter. How would people fighting for the human right
of health care engage in metaphoric actions that would basically get
the attention of the media and force the elected people to do their
job?

Paul: It's a good question. I think it's only based on the
limit of the imagination of those activists who are conducting that
particular battle and struggle. You mention Rosa Parks, civil
disobedience has been a core part of social change in this country for
two centuries and if you look at the fundamental changes in our laws
whether they be the labor laws, civil rights laws, the laws that
allowed for equal protection and the laws that permitted women the
right to vote, they are all really fundamentally motivated by social
movements and social movements engaged in all kinds of tactics one of
which is civil disobedience so I certainly wouldn't be surprised if
civil disobedience became a part of the social movement around this
core issue of health care as a human right.

Rob: Another question, you just got some good findings and
facts from a judge regarding a case that you were working on regarding
some protesters who were responding to a supposed KKK march. What did
you come up with. I know you were pretty pleased with the results and
the success. What was that about?

Paul: It's an interesting case. It's a case in which what was announced...

Rob: We have three minutes.

Paul:
There was an anti-racist network that routinely confronts the Klan and
Skinheads whenever they are conducting public rallies. Two years ago
what was announced as a rally sponsored by the KKK was apparently
supposed to take place at Love Park in Philadelphia at noon on a summer
day.

This anti-racist network caught wind of this either through the
Internet or other sources and they went as a group, not a large group,
but as a group I think in large part in disbelief. Well, there was no
rally. It was the KKK rally that never was. The people that showed up
were anti-racist protesters along with two undercover police officers
posing as Skinheads. Those two individuals eventually left the park
after a verbal confrontation, got into a black sedan driven by FBI
terrorism task force members. What happened as a result is the back
window of that vehicle was broken apparently by one of the protesters.
That is what they are alleging. Arrests were made.

As a result of those arrests police reports were generated and
unfortunately for the protesters who were arrested, the information
about those undercover officers was never revealed. We filed motions
requesting the release of that information because we had information
that there were confidential informants, it turns out they were
undercover police officers. What the judge ordered was that in fact the
Commonwealth, the District Attorney's office, had to reveal the
identity of those undercover police officers because they were material
witnesses to the event and the DA's office appealed that ruling and it
was sent back to the municipal court judge who had made the initial
ruling for findings of fact and conclusions of law that were issued
today again reaffirming the order, her original order, to release the
information about who these two undercover police officers were as
material witnesses.

Rob: This has been great. This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up
Radio Show. We've been talking to Paul Hetznecker, a lion of a defense
attorney. L-I-O-N...Paul, amazing work you're doing. Thank you so much
for doing it and for being on the show and I'd love to have you back.

Paul: Thank you very much. I'd be honored to be back again in the future. Thank you very much for having me.

Crossposted from OpEdNews.com

Thousands Rally In Rome To Defend Press Freedom; Berlusconi Dismisses As A "Joke"

2009-10-03T14:36:23Z

ROME — Tens of thousands of people, including journalists and media rights activists, gathered in a Rome square Saturday to defend press freedom, accusing Premier Silvio Berlusconi of trying to silence critical voices.

Berlusconi, a media magnate, has dismissed the accusations as a "joke" and the demonstration as a "farce." He said this week that there is more press freedom in Italy than in any other Western country.

Writer Liu Xiaobo Release from China Demanded By Congress

2009-10-02T18:06:55Z

New York City, October 2, 2009--Calling yesterday's near-unanimous vote approving a Congressional resolution demanding the immediate release of critic and writer Liu Xiaobo "a critical show of solidarity from the U.S. government at a critical time," PEN American Center urged the Obama administration to press for the prominent dissident's release in advance of the president's visit to Beijing on November.

Reporters Uncensored: An Open Letter to Hugo Chavez

2009-09-30T10:42:12Z

By Matt Ferrero

At the United Nations press conference last week, Hugo Chavez was asked to defend his decision to suspend the broadcast license of Radio Caracas Television. The accusation, he reported, was a boldfaced lie.

A lie reported by media like TVes -- the Venezuelan government's own public television station -- using equipment confiscated from Radio Caracas Television.

Being more skeptical of anything I see on Venezuelan government television, I wrote Mr. Chavez a letter to come to his defense:

Dear Mr. President,

I bet you're tired, so I'll keep this short. It's tough to go through a UN press conference when the style is so different from what you're used to. Reporters here can just be so... Critical. Let me just say that I, at least, know where you're coming from.

After eleven years of unlimited service, it hurts to be compared to Benito Mussolini. Just remember that it would be difficult for any revolutionary leader to consolidate government power for a decade without collecting a few naysayers. With all you've accomplished, I'd consider having to survive only one coup a sign of approval. Given such slander, you're brave to preside over the "freest press Venezuela has ever seen." It's remarkable that your 240 radio stations can remain so democratic when only forty percent of them are currently under federal investigation for harming the "mental health of the people."

I say go ahead. Shut down thirty-four broadcast media stations. Confiscate the equipment owned by a critical television station to use for your new public news channel. It's time to take a strong hand to those journalists who have abused their power by inciting "anxiety, concern and panic." If the Venezuelan people start to hear more about the billions of dollars they're losing to official corruption, they might be concerned indeed.

Best,
Matt Ferrero

See RUTV Creator Tala Dowlatshahi question Chavez on his treatment of the press:
www.reportersuncensored.com

Banned Books Week

2009-09-29T11:13:12Z

It's Banned Books Week and the American Library Association is celebrating by posting an interactive map showing the books that have been banned around the country in 2007-2009. Viewers may be surprised to find a large cluster of these prohibited books in some of the bluest of the blue states.

Along with the locations of each reported book, the map also gives the titles and brief summaries of the cases against these books. The stories range from the predictable fears about magic-related books to the traditional opposition to classics like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (the book was re-allowed in the Manchester, CT classrooms that it had been taken out of after some protesting letters to a local newspaper).

Other books included on the map are And Tango Makes Three, a picture book about a penguin family with two dads, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, for depictions of drugs, rape, and, yes, also homosexuality, and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy for its religious and political viewpoint. Check out the top ten banned books of 2008 at the ALA website.

For Banned Books Week events in your area and to find out what you can do to help, head over to the official Banned Books Week website.

This Week In Unnecessary Censorship (VIDEO)

2009-09-26T08:31:21Z

Jimmy Kimmel is no fan of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulatory body in charge of policing the airwaves. Each week he mocks their job by taking clips with normal every day language and using censorship to make it seem lewd or inappropriate. As a result everything from "Sesame Street" to CNN comes out dirty...and hilarious.

This week, Jimmy got intimate with celebs at the Emmys, explored his own anatomy with Adam Carolla, and exposed the sexual side of "SpongeBob SquarePants." It's all pretty disturbing for a Saturday morning.

Click here for the last episode!

WATCH:

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Brandon Mendelson: Oh Noes , You're Outrage: Hating On The Family Guy Critics

2009-09-24T18:45:26Z

Let’s walk through the following blog post. The excerpts are from “Family Guy Hacks A Cat To Death: Humor Or Repugnance?”

“That’s it. I’m not going to sit here any longer and do nothing but jaw with supporters of Family Guy on my Hub”‘

If you don’t want to jaw with them, why don’t you just delete the comments or block the users? Why does everyone think a blog is a democracy? Its not.

“I’ve just sent this letter to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) through media channels and intend to follow up to ensure that action is taken.”

Really? Granted, PETA freaks over everything (just ask the president), but it’s a cartoon. A. Car. Tooooooon. Out of everything to be offended with on Family Guy (how about that joke with Meg, the hot dogs, and the New York Knicks?) you’re upset about Peter killing a cat? Stewie beating the crap out of Brian was ok?

Hmm. Brutal violence. Questionably racist hot dogs. No? Not offended? But an anoynmous cat? Oh NOES, YOU’RE OUTRAGE!

“As a leading blogger on the number one internet publishing platform HubPages, I have railed against Seth MacFarlane and Fox Network’s Family Guy for unethical and repugnant subject matter which has no right to be shown on the public airwaves of the nation.

Whoa. A leading blogger? Sorry dude, unless you’re on this list, the only thing you’re leading is a trail of smoked bullshit. I’ll give you that Hubpages has a lot of traffic, but if you’re a leading blogger, wouldn’t you need to appear on, oh I don’t know, on the first twenty pages or so of the best Hubspot authors?

Oh, and number one Internet publishing platform? Hmmm. Blogger. Wordpress. Typepad. Even Live Journal is ranked higher than Hubpages on Alexa.

“However, in the episode of Family Guy aired last night, April 19, 2009, this following scene completely left me disgusted, nauseated and revolted:”

Wait. I thought, “I have railed against Seth MacFarlane and Fox Network’s Family Guy for unethical and repugnant subject matter which has no right to be shown on the public airwaves of the nation”. So why are you still watching it?“

“As a lifelong animal lover I cannot possibly imagine the effect that this scene can have on children, showing one of their cartoon heroes savagely killing and desecrating the corpse of a household pet.”

Dude. I taught in the ghetto. If you think what kids see on Family Guy is going to have an adverse effect on them, you’re a fool.

I find no redeeming social value to a young impressionable child channel surfing and watching what to all outward appearances is a fun kiddie cartoon and ending up viewing a man mutilating a household pet or a half naked woman trying to have sex with a tied-up dog, whether the dog is anthropomorphosized or not.

Television broadcasts not on PBS require social value? I realize Kim Kardashian is hot, but where’s the social value in Keeping Up With The Kardashians?

I’m pretty sure Family Guy airs at 9pm. It’s not 10pm, which is when it should air if you want to split hairs concerning content that airs according to the FCC guidelines, but I like how you assume:

1) Kids are retarded. They’re not.

2) That kids are watching the show on television. They’re not, they’re watching on Hulu. AND if their parents are responsible, the family computer is downstairs, not in the bedroom, where an adult is around if needed if not present as the kids are watching these shows.

“I see no reason why the public airwaves must feature content which not only promotes felonies, pornography, bestiality, animal mutilation, and other forms of horrific violent nihilism, but wraps them in a cartoon format to specifically appeal to young people.”

You know The Flintstones when they aired promoted cigarettes, not to mention sexism, right? And that was outright promotion, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Married With Children, I could go on, but that is all satire meant for entertainment. If you can’t deal with it, you can tune out the “public” airwaves in favor of any number of alternatives. I hear that Internets is awesome.

“I have been advocating that Fox remove Family Guy from the broadcast airwaves, and either put it on an XXX rated satellite channel which is for adults only, or package it in a DVD format and sell it in adult stores. If Family Guy is on the public airwaves which are administered by the FCC on behalf of the people of the United States, then it needs to be removed immediately as pornography.”

Yes. He said that.

“PETA has a long history of activism against television broadcasters who promote animal cruelty. From Reuters on August 15, 2007 with regards to a Gaza TV station airing footage of a cat being swung by his tail:

“It’s shocking and sickening,” said Martin Mersereau, manager of the domestic animal abuse division of U.S.-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).”

Huh. An actual person swinging a cat around violently registers a response from PETA. Whoa. I am now freaking out!

If PETA took this level of action with a single television station in a very small market and audience, I hereby formally request that your agency act immediately and forcefully against a television program promoting the massacre of a household pet viewed last night by millions of Americans.

I’m failing to see the quantum leap here. PETA responded to a program featuring actual people abusing actual cats in the name of education. I won’t debate the merits of Palestinian Television (this clip says it all), but you want them to freak out on a fictional person, abusing a fictional cat, in a cartoon, because you’re offended?

Listen, no one cares what I think. That’s why I’m posting this on my blog and not answering this on television or in the news. No one cares what this author thinks either. All because we’re all social publishers doesn’t mean people care about what we have to say.

Quite honestly, I’m tired of folks like this. Bullies. You remember bullies? That’s what they’re being right now. A loud, stupid, bully who is trying to grind their axe against a cartoon, and to what end?

Let’s say the author has their way and Fox suddenly caved and pulled Family Guy off the air. Then what? They’ll find something else to be outraged with. And then something else. And then something else. In most cases, this would be an assumption on my part, but for people like them, this has been the course of action for years now. All these idiots all worked up thinking what they say matters suddenly because they’ve found other idiots who share their myopic opinions.

For all the good social publishing has brought to us, these people represent the worst kind of evil. The kind our young men and women go overseas to fight against. No sir, I call bullshit on this author, their misdirected anger, and the kind of America he and his friends would leave us with. Enough is enough and I’m tired of the stupids dictating what we can and can’t do or watch.

If we don’t stand up to bullies like this, it won’t end until bland, stale programming, not targeted to anyone in particular, airs on every single channel, on every time of night, on every website around the world. What. Did you think they would stop with America?

We will all live in a place where we dress the same, act the same, and smile the same empty, souless smile that accompanies corpses when they’re displayed at a wake.

And the stupids will be happy with this, until someone looks at them funny or says something in jest, and then you’ll find something else to spew crazy at.

I hate people like this, many of us do, we’re just too busy living life, being responsible, and having fun to acknowledge their existence. But I’m acknowledging their existence because I pledge eternal hostility against their kind, and any self-righteous bully out there that wants to blame everything for what’s wrong with society instead of taking personal responsibility.

If this guy and his friends care so much about the children and what they interact with, what the hell are they doing online writing blog posts like this? Shouldn’t they be out volunteering and helping the children in need through wonderful programs like Big Brothers and Big Sisters? Yes. Yes they should.

Timothy Karr: What Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh Are Really Afraid Of

2009-09-16T10:47:15Z

Can you smell the fear? Switch on cable news or tune in to talk radio and it comes wafting in.

Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck has bottled his own scent. Lou Dobbs' fear gives off a distinct undertone of racial intolerance. And Rush Limbaugh takes to the air to spread an odor that's designed to make Americans angry at, well, other Americans.

It's a fear that's laced with paranoia, stoked by misinformation and prejudice and fed to millions of people via powerful media. But most of all, it's a fear of the changes that an overwhelming majority of Americans called for when they stepped into voting booths last November.

Since then, the old guard has fallen into alignment with old media to hijack the public debate over reform, and vilify reformers as anti-American. And to them the most anti-American notion of the lot is the idea that we need to reform the media itself.

"Part of the strategy of this fundamental 'transformation' of America is to silence dissent," Glenn Beck said on Fox last month. The "most diabolical, hidden parts of this plan," according to Beck, are efforts to reform media through "localism and diversity" -- two principles that have grounded modern communications policy for decades.

Beck was later joined on the program by Rush Limbaugh, who called localism and diversity part of the growing tyranny of the left. This issue is "simply un-American," Limbaugh crowed. "They're trying to do this back-door route with diversity... to shut you up by shutting us down."

Not to be outdone, Lou Dobbs stated falsely: "When you talk about diversity, [you aren't] talking about ethnic, racial or religious diversity, [you 're] talking about more liberals on the air."

The cloud of media hysteria could have been waved off by more sensible voices on cable's evening news roster. But few have stepped forward to challenge Beck, Limbaugh and Dobbs, to replace their fomenting with facts. More worrisome, voices of reason seem to be absent from the media "pundocracy" altogether.

While Beck and his ilk want to portray diversity and localism as a dangerous conspiracy to censor, the fact remains that these ideas have been staples of communications policy since the beginning. The central mandate of the Federal Communications Commission -- as enshrined in the Communications Act of 1934 -- is to promote localism, diversity and competition in the media. This same principle of localism has been a rallying cry for several generations of true conservatives.

Broadcasters get hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of subsidies and the right to use our airwaves in exchange for a basic commitment to be responsive to the interests of local communities.

Moreover, the Supreme Court recognized that "safeguarding the public's right to receive a diversity of views and information over the airwaves is ... an integral component of the FCC's mission."

Sadly, the FCC has failed to live up to this standard. And what mainstream media's fear-merchants are most afraid of is not censorship, but an FCC that actually does its job -- creating more opportunities for people like you and me to participate in media.

We don't have that now. Washington bureaucrats have allowed powerful media corporations to control the public airwaves and dominate local cable networks. We have reached a nadir where the free press that Thomas Jefferson hoped would open "all the avenues to truth" has devolved into a media system that's a megaphone for the few.

Beck and Limbaugh, in particular, are two corporate welfare babies who owe much of their existence to this regulatory failure, which handed control of our airwaves to massive conglomerates like Clear Channel and ABC Radio to broadcast their fear agenda via a syndicated network of centrally owned radio stations.

The cable sector that carries Beck and Dobbs' nightly paranoia is itself a gigantic bundle of government handouts, having built invaluable local monopolies via granted rights-of-way that beam these two into nearly every den in America.

Try calculating what it would cost to get your content across America without a local or federal government clearing your path, and you quickly realize that blowhards like Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh are three of the nation's biggest beneficiaries of public largesse.

And while they're raking in millions in salaries via their government-granted fiefdoms, you, the owner of the airwaves and roads and telephone poles over which they transmit, are getting nothing in exchange.

The ultimate irony of Beck, Dobbs and Limbaugh is that they couch in populist rhetoric a message that, in its very essence, is anti-populist -- designed to protect the swindle at the core of our media system's failure.

And that is why the media's old guard is targeting the idea that this system needs to change.

In his media and technology agenda, President Obama took up the cause of reform by committing to "diversity in the ownership of broadcast media," and pledging to "promote the development of new media outlets for expression of diverse viewpoints."

Obama is right, but he needs to get started on fulfilling that commitment.

Winning real change and giving more people a media voice is ultimately the best response we have to fear campaigns.

Rob Kall: Reporter Arrested While Photographing Protest at Army Experience Center

2009-09-14T13:24:32Z

On Saturday, OpEdNews.com reporter Cheryl Biren was arrested along with six protesters by Philadelphia police while taking photos of arrests of protesters against the Army Experience Center (AEC). She was rough-handled by an arresting officer, held in two different jails for a total of 14 hours, released onto the mean streets of Philly, and locked out of the police station, in the dark, at 5 AM without even the opportunity to first turn on her cell phone to call for a ride home.

Biren was with five other women, including Debra Sweet, head of worldcantwait.com, and Elaine Brower, of Military Families Speak Out, when put outside the jail. (Bowers is also an editor of OpEdNews.com.)

All six were charged with "criminal conspiracy" and "failure to disperse."

Here's what I witnessed:

The police were arresting six demonstrators. The demonstrators were peaceful and cooperating with the police. OpEdNews.com managing editor was on the scene, covering the event as a photographer. She had not carried signs, had not shouted with the protesters. She was there strictly as a journalist -- as the many police videos and photos will prove.

She was at the front of a group of other onlookers who were watching the police arrest the demonstrators who had separated themselves from the crowd. All of a sudden, one plain clothes police officer rushed forward and roughly grabbed Biren, as she was photographing the arrests, pulling her from the crowd and forcing her to the area where the protesters being arrested were standing. She protested that she was a reporter, a member of the press. I, as publisher of OpEdNews, reinforced her claim immediately, to no avail. She was put into temporary plastic handcuffs, which, she reports, were made so tight her wrist was injured.

A number of observers and legal consultants agreed that her use of a professional camera was probably a factor in her arrest. Biren thought fast and before the cuffs were placed on her she removed the chip storing the images from her camera and hid it in her bag so she still had the photos. They can be seen here.

Photo taken by journalist Cheryl Biren moments
before being arrested

Ironically, as a statement of solidarity with journalists such as Amy Goodman, arrested at the GOP convention, Biren co-authored, with a former Opednews.com editor, this article, on Sept. 3, 2008, OEN Condemns Police Action at the DNC and RNC, stating, "A free press where reporters can engage in their journalistic duties without threat of arrest must be respected. Take action."

OpEdNews managing editor, Cheryl Biren, on the scene in lower left, taking photos, of Elaine Bowers being arrested (image blurred). Biren can clearly be seen as part of a crowd of onlookers, not in the space police were clearing where arrests were taking place. No other onlookers were arrested. Photo by Rob Kall.

That started a 14-hour journey in a prisoner bus to two jails. During that time police lied to her and me about how long she would be in custody. Apparently, this is a common practice by the police, telling prisoners that they will be held a much longer time than actually happens.

Ultimately, six of the seven women were separated from the one man and taken to the main holding prison for Philadelphia and they were released at about 5:00 AM the next day -- 14 hours later. The male, seventh protester, who was not transferred to the center city Philly jail was released at 9:00 AM.

The good news is that the Army Experience Center closed for the day, on a Saturday at the Franklin Mills Mall. That made the protest a success. Local readers may want to consider boycotting the mall. The police used trespassing as their justification to arrest, when they announced that protesters must leave. Apparently, the charges were changed later.

The arraignment date for Biren and the five protesters is Sept. 23 at 1301 Filbert St. at 11:30 AM. Map: http://bit.ly/Arraignment

The story has received wide play in progressive venues, but could be covered a lot more.

OpedNews Journalist and Six Protesters Charged With Criminal Conspiracy After Arrest At "Army Experience Center", by Linda Milazzo

The press should not be treated this way. Please do what you can to get this story out.

Call the mayor of Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter. Call the Philadelphia District Attorney's office. It is a frightening situation when the press can't cover arrests of peaceful protesters when they are turned into political prisoners. The police should be disciplined for their actions.

Considering Freedom of the Press
Shortly before the arrests began, the police announced that they would be making arrests if people did not leave. A crew from PBS's Frontline left the area immediately. This made it impossible for them to document the police making the arrests. To my knowledge, Biren was the only member of the press who lingered, with a large crowd, who stayed to document the arrests. This is an essential role for the media -- one which the mainstream media on-site chose not to pursue.

The police could have arrested dozens of additional people who were standing next to or very near Biren. All of those people were acting in a very different way from the protesters in the area where arrests were taking place. They were simply observing the arrests. The way Biren was pulled from the crowd and moved to the area where the arrests were being made suggests that the police wanted to "place" her.

The fact that no other observers were arrested, that instead they were "managed" by the some 80 police at the mall, suggests that this was an intentional selective effort to muzzle the press. Shame on the city of Philadelphia. Shame on the District Attorney's office for allowing charges of "criminal conspiracy" to be lodged against a journalist doing her job, defending democracy and our constitutional rights. If all the people in Biren's vicinity had been arrested, there might be a defense for the police -- that all of them had refused to disperse when instructed. But the police had multiple opportunities to arrest others and failed to.

Biren reports that the officer who actually grabbed her acted angrily -- in a scene where there was no need for anger. This was a peaceful demonstration where the organizers were in friendly communication with the police Civil affairs department that was handling the event. Something went wrong here. There should be an investigation. The press is an endangered entity in the US. The big Philly newspapers are in bankruptcy. The police have a responsibility to the constitution NOT to abuse their powers when facing the fourth estate.

Crossposted from OpEdNews.com.

Joan Z. Shore: God and Man and Mohammed at Yale

2009-09-10T16:57:55Z

Sometime in the Fifties, William Buckley, Jr. wrote a scathing essay about his university called "God and Man at Yale." He was deploring the free-wheeling liberalism of his alma mater: its "godless" academic tradition.

What would Buckley think of Yale today? The Yale University Press is releasing a book next week called The Cartoons That Shook the World, but decided to delete the twelve cartoons which depict Mohammed. This is rather like publishing a book on Impressionism that is devoid of illustrations.

The decision has upset the author, Jytte Klausen. But John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press, said the decision was taken after consulting with "experts" (who never read the manuscript). He said it was based solely on concern that angry Muslim terrorists might resort to violence and attack innocent people, as they did when the cartoons were first published four years ago.

Eli Yale must be turning in his grave.

This is worse than censorship: this is self-censorship. This is knowing what is right and appropriate and deliberately overriding it. And then trying to rationalize the decision.

Let's apply this fright-and-flight reflex to some other areas of
American life:

Perhaps we should not rebuild the World Trade Center because terrorists might take offense and attack it again.

Perhaps we should no longer celebrate the sabbath on Sunday.

Perhaps we should put our women in burkas.

How far can a free -- and frightened -- society go before it ceases to be free?

How can a liberal arts institution keep our respect while it fiddles around with facts and fanatics?

I remember that plaintive Yale drinking song from my undergraduate days at Vassar: "We are poor little sheep who have lost our way....Baa, baa, baa". Indeed they have.

Today, we raise our mugs to the Pale University Press in New Craven, Connecticut.