As long as their corporate-sponsored media can keep us talking in terms of conservative/liberal; Republican/Democrat; right-wing/left-wing, then the rich control the conversation–and it will always be directed toward THEIR best interests, not the best interests of the majority.

A British court today granted bail with strict conditions to Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks website, who faces allegations of rape in Sweden.

Assange's lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, asked the city of Westminster magistrates court in London for bail on the following conditions: £200,000 in security, surety from two people, a curfew, daily reporting to police and surrender of his passport.

The judge granted the conditions, and gave lawyers representing Sweden two hours to lodge an appeal. Even if an appeal is not lodged, it is likely that Assange will remain in custody tonight anyway.

A full extradition hearing is scheduled for January 11.

"We doubt whether this actual category of rape would be rape under English law," said Robertson, a former appeals judge at the UN special court for Sierra Leone, and whose former clients include author Salman Rushdie.

Along the main street, the signs in the median aren't advertising homes for sale; they're inviting employees with top-secret security clearances to a job fair at Cafe Joe, which is anything but a typical lunch spot.

The new gunmetal-colored office building is really a kind of hotel where businesses can rent eavesdrop-proof rooms.

Even the manhole cover between two low-slung buildings is not just a manhole cover. Surrounded by concrete cylinders, it is an access point to a government cable. "TS/SCI," whispers an official, the abbreviations for "top secret" and "sensitive compartmented information" - and that means few people are allowed to know what information the cable transmits.

All of these places exist just outside Washington in what amounts to the capital of an alternative geography of the United States, one defined by the concentration of top-secret government organizations and the companies that do work for them. This Fort Meade cluster is the largest of a dozen such clusters across the United States that are the nerve centers of Top Secret America and its 854,000 workers.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

Back in the bad old days of the Cold War -- when mutual nuclear annihilation was a policy option -- a culture of secrecy arose in Washington. What wise observers understood even then was that while governments tried to keep secrets from each other, their chief concern was to keep secrets from their own people.

Considering what had been done in the name of the United States, from Mafia assassination plots against foreign leaders to murder, corruption and coups d'etat, that concern was quite sensible. And there was hell to pay when the hidden history began to emerge.

During the nine years since Sept. 11, the national security state has doubled or tripled in size, with huge annexes in the private sector -- and the culture of secrecy has metastasized simultaneously. As The Washington Post reports in a landmark series titled "Top Secret America," by Dana Priest and William Arkin, the dimensions of the security colossus are stunning. It is nothing less than a fourth branch of government, so large, so powerful and so wealthy that no other branch can even grasp it, let alone control it.

The Washington Post's Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she's easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation -- if not the best -- with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government: what the article calls "Top Secret America." To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents: the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this "hidden world, growing beyond control" -- as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively. But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration's escalating war on whistle blowers:

Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance -- literally -- occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That's why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They're one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.

Virtually every fact Priest and Arkin disclose underscores this point. Here is their first sentence: "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

Last week, I interviewed Mother Jones' Mac McClelland, who has been covering the BP oil spill in the Gulf since the first day it happened. She detailed how local police and federal officials work with BP to harass, impede, interrogate and even detain journalists who are covering the impact of the spill and the clean-up efforts. She documented one incident which was particularly chilling of an activist who -- after being told by a local police officer to stop filming a BP facility because "BP didn't want him filming" -- was then pulled over after he left by that officer so he could be interrogated by a BP security official. McClelland also described how BP has virtually bought entire Police Departments which now do its bidding: "One parish has 57 extra shifts per week that they are devoting entirely to, basically, BP security detail, and BP is paying the sheriff's office."

It didn't make much of a ripple, but yesterday morning the Senate suddenly upped and confirmed a large number of long-stalled Obama nominees.

How many people were confirmed? That's where it gets hilarious.

The Washington Post offers us "more than 60″:

Senators confirmed more than 60 Obama administration nominees Tuesday after months of disagreement on how to proceed with the confirmation of picks for the National Labor Relations Board.

Settling a dispute that began before the May recess, Senators approved NLRB Democratic nominee Mark Pearce and Republican Brian Hayes. But they did not vote to confirm Craig Becker, a former labor union lawyer given a recess appointment to NLRB by President Obama in March.

It might seem unlikely that the United States would elect John McCain to succeed George W. Bush when that would ensure continuation of many unpopular Bush policies: an ill-defined war with the Muslim world, right-wing consolidation of the U.S. Supreme Court, a drill-oriented energy strategy, tax cuts creating massive federal deficits, etc., etc.

Here is one of the big ones: The U.S. news media is as bad as ever, arguably worse.

U.S. business interests at risk from domestic spying

Commentary: Snooping trend is a danger to us all

So any company wanting to develop "software as a service," hosted services, Web-based email or any sort of initiative that involves remote databases that are accessed over the Internet, now has to deal with one big privacy question: Will the U.S. government be snooping in on our data?

(Perhaps if the once-important concept of "due process" were applied to things such as the mysterious no-fly list, none of this would be an issue. Just a thought.)

Iowa farmer Jerry Depew is fed up with criticism from outsiders aimed at his state's caucuses, and so Thursday evening, he's arming his 16-year-old son Justin with a video camera to record his precinct's deliberations for the YouTube set.

Indeed, what was once an obscure and esoteric presidential-nomination process will be one of the most examined exercises in democracy Thursday evening. The Iowa caucuses -- where Iowans have the job of being the first Americans to nominate their party's pick for president -- will face unprecedented scrutiny from media around the globe -- almost 2,000 members of the media have registered to cover the caucuses, one for every 100 of the 200,000 Iowans expected to participate.

September 6, 2007

Nuclear Hypocrisy in the Middle East

Bush, Iran and Israel's Hidden Hand

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analysts

The internet is loaded these days with reports of the inevitability of a U.S., or a U.S.-Israeli, attack on Iran. Some writers allege that the attack is imminent. Others, including the writers of this article, argue only that the attack will happen sometime before January 2009, when the Bush administration leaves office. Many of these stories have by now been picked up by the mainstream media. In fact, it is probably safe to say that today a majority of the traditionally cautious and so-called respectable foreign policy experts in the U.S. think it is at least possible that Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office.

...

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

Media Silence About the Carnage in Iraq

Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month

A state-of-the-art research study published in October 12, 2006 issue of The Lancet (the most prestigious British medical journal) concluded that--as of a year ago--600,000 Iraqis had died violently due to the war in Iraq. That is, the Iraqi death rate for the first 39 months of the war was just about 15,000 per month.

The U.S. and British governments quickly dismissed these results as "methodologically flawed," even though the researchers used standard procedures for measuring mortality in war and disaster zones. (They visited a random set of homes and asked the residents if anyone in their household had died in the last few years, recording the details, and inspecting death certificates in the vast majority of cases.) The two belligerent governments offered no concrete reasons for rejecting the study's findings, and they ignored the fact that they had sponsored identical studies (conducted by some of the same researchers) in other disaster areas, including Darfur and Kosovo. The reasons for this rejection were, however, clear enough: the results were simply too devastating for the culpable governments to acknowledge. (Secretly the British government later admitted that it was "a tried and tested way to measuring mortality in conflict zones"; but it has never publicly admitted its validity).

Is Bush Planning to Nuke Iran? If So, Say Goodbye to Democratic Outcomes

The Reign of the Tyrants is at Hand

The surprise decision by the Bush regime to replace General Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been explained as a necessary step to avoid contentious confirmation hearings in the US Senate. Gen. Pace''s reappointment would have to be confirmed, and as the general has served as vice chairman and chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the past 6 years, the Republicans feared that hearings would give war critics an opportunity to focus, in Defense Secretary Gates words, "on the past, rather than the future."

This is a plausible explanation. Whether one takes it on face value depends on how much trust one still has in a regime that has consistently lied about everything for six years.

The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers.

Anti-Empire Report

What If NBC Cheered on a Military Coup Against Bush?

During the Cold War, if an American journalist or visitor to the Soviet Union reported seeing churches full of people, this was taken as a sign that the people were rejecting and escaping from communism. If the churches were empty, this clearly was proof of the suppression of religion. If consumer goods were scarce, this was seen as a failure of the communist system. If consumer goods appeared to be more plentiful, this gave rise to speculation about was happening in the Soviet Union that was prompting the authorities to try to buy off the citizenry.

I'm reminded of this kind of thinking concerning Venezuela. The conservative anti-communist American mind sees things pertaining to Washington's newest bête noir in the worst possible light (to the extent they're even being sincere). If Chávez makes education more widely available to the masses of poor people, it's probably for the purpose of indoctrinating them. If Chávez invites a large number of Cuban doctors to Venezuela to treat the poor, it's a sign of a new and growing communist conspiracy...

We need your help to advocate for a public broadcasting system that offers more independent programming, harder-hitting journalism, and the educational, ad-free content that is missing from commercial media.

Write a letter to Congress to guarantee permanent funding for public broadcasting.

A titanic power struggle is being waged within the policy elite or power elite, or more simply the U.S. ruling class. The clash is taking place over the war on Iraq, U.S. policy toward Israel--and ultimately over the best way to run the U.S. empire. The war on Iraq is shaping up as such a disaster for the empire that it can no longer be tolerated by our rulers in its present form. The struggle is as plain as the nose on your face; nevertheless it draws little comment. One reason is that we are taught to view matters political through the prism of Democrat versus Republican, whereas this struggle among our rulers cuts across party lines. On the "Left," few so much as allude to this internecine war, much less use it to good effect. This is apparently due to a very rigid, very dogmatic view of how empires function, indeed how they "must" function, and due to a fear of being labeled anti-semitic and thus running afoul of the Israeli Lobby. In many cases this silence reflects an actual sympathy among "liberals" for neocon foreign policy, either out of a latter day do-gooder version of the White Man's Burden, or an attachment to Israel.

This struggle is in no way hidden and definitely not a secret conspiracy. It is out in the open, as it must be, since it is in great part a battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. This fact makes the absence of commentary about it all the more chilling...

...Spocko was doing some work related to my own in his own market in California's Bay Area. His target? KSFO, home of Melanie Morgan, Lee Rogers, Brian Sussman and other poisonous 2nd rate talk show wingers.

Since this is Spocko's gig, I'm gonna pretty much use his words to explain what's gone down. Before the flip, to give you something to chew on as you click to the full story, I can tell you this much: you're gonna love what you read. Spocko has actually cost Disney money - he chased away advertisers and forced them to pay a law firm to intimidate his ISP. The story isn't all good though - Spocko's broke and can't afford to wage the legal battle, so he's shut down...

The Surge Pushers

The War and the New York Times

The war in Iraq, one of the most disastrous military enterprises in the history of the Republic, has the New York Times' fingerprints all over it. The role the newspaper played in fomenting the 2003 attack is now one of the best known sagas in journalistic history, as embodied in the reports of Judy Miller, working in collusion with Iraqi exiles and US spooks to concoct Saddam's imaginary arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

But so fixated have many Times critics been on the WMD/ Miller saga, that they have failed to notice that across the past sixth months the Times has been waging an equally disingenuous campaign to escalate American troop levels in this doomed enterprises.

The prime journalistic promoter of the escalation - it is time to retire the adroitly chosen word "surge" -- now being proposed by the White House is Michael Gordon, the Times' military correspondent, a man of fabled arrogance and self esteem.

Gordon's has been the mouthpiece for the faction -led by Gen. David H. Petraeus -- inside the U.S. military in Iraq that has been promoting the escalation. As Gordon himself triumphantly announced in the New York Times this weekend, Gen. Petraeus has been picked by Bush to lead the open-ended escalation of the war that Petraeus has long campaigned for.

Throughout his time in Iraq Gen. Petraeus himself has been very adroit at fostering good relations with carefully selected reporters, like Gordon. That strategy has been vindicated by the steady stream of stories in the Times--not just by Gordon--reflecting his views.

A Monday night broadcast of CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer confused America's "number one enemy" with one of America's most popular senators, RAW STORY has learned.

During a January 1st broadcast of Wolf Blitzer's nightly news program, a pre-commercial preview of the show's next segment included a story on the hunt for Al Qaeda's leadership. Over a photo of Osama Bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Blitzer stated, according to the transcript, "Plus, a new year, but the same mission. Will 2007 bring any new changes in the hunt for Osama bin Laden?"

But instead of asking "Where's Osama?" the graphic over the two Islamists read "Where's Obama?" referencing the surname of popular Illinois Democrat Senator Barack Obama.

Poynter's Al Tompkins provides a range of resources that will help you make sense of -- and cover -- Saddam Hussein's execution.

What was he convicted of?

Saddam Hussein was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, in the deaths of 148 Shiite Muslims in the town of Dujail, Iraq.

Who else was executed with him?

Barzan Hassan and Awad Bandar were sentenced to die as well, but CNN reported Friday night that they were not hanged with Hussein and would be executed later. Read CNN's full story on the trial here.

What was wrong with the trial?

Human Rights Watch lists many problems, not one of which stopped the execution.

How many people did Saddam's regime kill?

A 2003 report from the White House Web site said:

Under Saddam's regime many hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of his actions -- the vast majority of them Muslims.

According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, "victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks ... some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage."

Saddam has had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered.

WASHINGTON – When Robert Steinbuch discovered his girlfriend had discussed intimate details about their sex life in her online diary, the Capitol Hill staffer didn't just get mad. He got a lawyer.

Soon, though, the racy tidbits about the sex lives of the two Senate aides faded from the front pages and the gossip pages. Steinbuch accepted a teaching job in Arkansas, leaving Washington and Jessica Cutler's "Washingtonienne" Web log behind.

While sex scandals turn over quickly in this city, lawsuits do not. Steinbuch's case over the embarrassing, sexually charged blog appears headed for an embarrassing, sexually charged trial.

Lurid testimony about spanking, handcuffs and prostitution aside, the Washingtonienne case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline.

Cutler, a former aide to Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, says she created the blog in 2004 to keep a few friends up to date on her social life. Like a digital version of the sex-themed banter from a "Sex and the City" episode, Cutler described the thrill and tribulations of juggling sexual relationships with six men.

One of those men was Steinbuch, a counsel to DeWine on the Judiciary Committee. Cutler called him the "current favorite" and said he resembled George Clooney, liked spanking and disliked condoms.

"He's very upfront about sex," she wrote. "He likes talking dirty and stuff, and he told me that he likes submissive women."

Into the Aybyss

http://www.cjr.org/iraq/

In August 2004, CJR asked Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal to keep a diary of her time in Iraq. Before we could print her piece, we were scooped, inadvertently, by Fassihi herself. She often sent e-mails to friends, and her September 2004 letter reflected her mood at the time: grim. "Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest," she began, and then later, "The genie of terrorism, chaos, and mayhem has been unleashed . . . as a result of American mistakes." Somebody in the chain put the letter on the Internet, and it went around the world. Among fellow journalists the reaction was swift: some worried that an objective reporter had revealed so much; others felt she made it seem as if no reporting could be accomplished in Iraq; still others thought the e-mail was dead on. Meanwhile, something about the personal nature of the note communicated the reality, more forcefully than yards of standard prose, of what Iraqis call "the situation." Here at CJR we wanted more, and for our forty-fifth anniversary issue we interviewed Fassihi and forty-six other journalists who have covered the war in Iraq. Out of their anecdotes and insights we constructed an oral history — the first of its kind. These people are covering the most significant story of our time and doing it under circumstances that nearly defy belief. They have lived and studied "the situation" closely, some of them for four years or more. This is their story.

Chapter 10: The Continuing Story
http://www.cjr.org/iraq/chapt10.htm

Chris Hondros
Getty Images

I think a lot of journalists want every war to be like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a place where you can stay in a nice hotel, get up in the morning, drive in your car, see a battle, cover it, see all these dramatic things, and then drive back just in time to send your pictures and have a nice dinner at the American Colony [Hotel], and smoke and drink wine, and tell war stories, and what happened that day, and booze it up into the night, and do everything all over again the next day. That's nice; I've covered stuff there, too, but the world isn't conformed to how journalists should cover — the world is as it is and we as journalists go and do it. Sometimes things are easy and sometimes things are incredibly hard.

Tom Lasseter
Knight Ridder (McClatchy)

Most of western Iraq — you just can't function out there as a western reporter. The country has gotten smaller and smaller. I miss Iraq, I do. I live in Baghdad, but I miss the country.

Farnaz Fassihi
The Wall Street Journal

I can't imagine going to Iraq for the first time now and writing it. Truly you do not know the country. You would be writing blindly, with no tangible sense of the place or the people. So I think that as we've sort of gotten tired and cycled out, it's going to be interesting to see how that's going to play out.

Christopher Allbritton
Freelance writer

I hope I contributed to the world's understanding of what's happening in Iraq. I would like to avoid going back to Iraq. I'm not personally interested in the story anymore. Burned out. With too few breaks. Most of the world is waiting for this train wreck to run its course. Anyone can see it's going from bad to worse to truly terrible.

1. Why did the U.S. invade Iraq? (And why did important sectors of the political elite, like Scowcroft, oppose doing so?) What are the U.S.motives for staying?

The official reason was what Bush, Powell, and others called "the single question": will Saddam end his development of Weapons of Mass Destruction? The official Presidential Directive states the primary goal as to: "Free Iraq in order to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, their means of delivery and associated programs, to prevent Iraq from breaking out of containment and becoming a more dangerous threat to the region and beyond."

...

2. What, from the elite perspective, would be a major victory in Iraq, what would be modest but still sufficient success, and what would constitute a loss? More, for completeness, how much does democracy in Iraq, democracy in the U.S., the well being of people in Iraq, or the well being of people in the U.S. - or even of our soldiers - enter into the motivations of U.S. policy?

A major victory would be establishing an obedient client state, as elsewhere. A modest success would be preventing a degree of sovereignty that might allow Iraq to pursue the rather natural course I just described. As for democracy, even the most dedicated scholar/advocates of "democracy promotion" recognize that there is a "strong line of continuity" in US efforts to promote democracy going back as far as you like and reaching the present: democracy is supported if and only if it conforms to strategic and economic objectives, so that all presidents are "schizophrenic," a strange puzzle (Thomas Carothers). That is so obvious that it takes really impressive discipline to miss it. It is a remarkable feature of US (in fact Western) intellectual culture that each well-indoctrinated mind can simultaneously lavish praise on our awesome dedication to democracy while at the same moment demonstrating utter contempt and hatred for democracy.

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Do you have a comment or news story?

Have you taken a picture or filmed some video that tells a story? If so, BBC News wants to hear from you. Read below to find out how to get in touch with us.

David Loyn, London, 6/11/06

Well at least somebody is watching. I have interviewed guerrilla fighters often enough before in Afghanistan, as well as in Iraq, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Nepal, Kosovo, Bosnia, Gaza, Beirut, several places in Africa, and Northern Ireland. I have been led down dark alleys, into anonymous places, agreed to do interviews with people in masks, silhouettes, whatever, just to get their story.

But I have never before been accused of treason, nor threatened with death in emails by outraged British patriots. My recent Newsnight report on the Taliban was even raised in parliament and in that far more important cockpit - Question Time on BBC 1. So why did it have the effect that it did?

Part of the answer as to why the protests were so strong has to be in the timing. With Britain and America tiptoeing away from Iraq, the increase in the British military presence in Afghanistan this year has taken on huge importance. Access to the story has been micro-managed by ministers. The Defence Secretary who sent the soldiers in said that they would leave 'without a shot being fired'. Instead the British military has had the hardest summer of fighting in half a century.

If I had gone when the invitation from the Taliban first came, before the fighting of the summer, then the report might not have had the impact that it did. When my friend and producer Najibullah Razaq, a Briton of Afghan origin, first came back with the news that the Taliban were keen to talk in April, British forces were not yet heavily involved on the ground. For a variety of logistical reasons, it took a while to set the facility up. By the time we had all our ducks in a row the fighting had been intense.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 18 — With Judith Regan's authors still reeling from their publisher's abrupt dismissal, the sparring between the headline-making Ms. Regan and her former employer, the News Corporation, grew more intense, more personal and more specific on Monday over accusations that she had made anti-Semitic comments that prompted her firing.

The News Corporation, controlled by Rupert Murdoch, released what it described as notes of a heated telephone conversation on Friday between Ms. Regan and Mark Jackson, a lawyer for HarperCollins, the corporation's publishing division that includes the ReganBooks imprint.

According to the notes, Ms. Regan protested that the publishing house had not supported her during a firestorm last month over a confessional book by O. J. Simpson and a related television program, which the News Corporation canceled after public protests and growing unease among affiliate television stations.

After conquering the advertising frontier in cyberspace, Google, Yahoo and eBay are now turning to traditional media for future growth by brokering ad sales for offline media like radio, television and print. The Internet players' foray into offline advertising could drive down rates, but advertisers and media companies may not completely abandon the current system of relationship-based sales for Internet auctions, according to Wharton faculty and industry executives. There will be little, if any, change in the way viewers see traditional media advertising. What will change are the middlemen who broker these ads.

Consumer-oriented ads are currently placed through a network of companies that are paid to bring advertisers and offline media companies together. The Internet companies hope to step into that space using automated auction technology to bring buyers and sellers of traditional advertising together the same way they now sell Internet ads for themselves and others.

With the line between so-called professional journalists and bloggers growing ever blurrier, a U.K. official has made a pitch for a voluntary code of conduct aimed at reining in the maverick blogosphere.

On the Internet, generally speaking, "there are no professional standards, there is no means of redress," said Tim Toulmin, director of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), an independent body that enforces a set of standards for the U.K. newspaper and magazine industry. His statements were reported Tuesday by the BBC.

Luis Padilla, 29, father of three, had been kidnapped, driven across the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, to a house in Ciudad Juarez, the lawless city ruled by drug lords that lies across the Rio Grande. As his wife tried frantically to locate him, he was being stripped, tortured and buried in a mass grave in the garden - what the people of Juarez call a narco-fossa, a narco-smugglers' tomb.

Just another casualty of Mexico's drug wars? Perhaps. But Padilla had no connection with the drugs trade; he seems to have been the victim of a case of mistaken identity. Now, as a result of documents disclosed in three separate court cases, it is becoming clear that his murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the Juarez 'House of Death', is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of connivance and cover-up stretching from the wild Texas borderland to top Washington officials close to President Bush.

These documents, which form a dossier several inches thick, are the main source for the facts in this article. They suggest that while the eyes of the world have been largely averted, America's 'war on drugs' has moved to a new phase of cynicism and amorality, in which the loss of human life has lost all importance - especially if the victims are Hispanic. The US agencies and officials in this saga - all of which refused to comment, citing pending lawsuits - appear to have thought it more important to get information about drugs trafficking than to stop its perpetrators killing people.

The US media have virtually ignored this story. The Observer is the first newspaper to have spoken to Janet Padilla, and this is the first narrative account to appear in print. The story turns on one extraordinary fact: playing a central role in the House of Death was a US government informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as Lalo, who was paid more than $220,000 (£110,000) by US law enforcement bodies to work as a spy inside the Juarez cartel.

...to slag off those holding an opposite point of view as idiots, frauds, careerists or worse was not taking the world anywhere constructive.

If you accept the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consensus view of climate science, humankind is involved in an unprecedented and highly risky experiment with the only ecosphere it has, and climate sceptics are simply vandals laying a tree trunk across the train tracks which society must traverse to escape its fiery grave.

If you dissent from the consensus, you take the view that public opinion and much of politics has embarked on a wild decarbonising goose chase which will break economies, restrict personal movement and distract resources from other important societal challenges.

For 42 years until 2002, the Rockford (Ill.) Register Star endorsed a Republican for governor. This year, it did not endorse the GOP candidate, Judy Baar Topinka. But it didn't endorse Democratic incumbent Gov. Rod Blagojevich for a second time, either.

Instead, it shocked -- and pleased -- many readers by endorsing the little-known Green Party candidate, Rich Whitney.

Fred Smith spoke Thursday evening beginning at 8:00PM for fifteen minutes about the need for a crossing guard at the intersection of Main Street and School Street.

Fred Smith, who was scheduled to speak at 7:30, spoke Thursday evening at 8:00PM for fifteen minutes about the need for a crossing guard on Main Street. Town Hall was crowded, though a few people left as soon as Mr. Smith began speaking. Some onlookers felt Smith was informative and convincing while others dismissed him as "crazy."

Fred Smith, with his pet duck perched on his head, spoke at Town Hall about the need for a crossing guard on Main Street. Some people looked confused and exited quickly. One later said, "I can't take anybody seriously if they walk around with a duck on their head. That man is crazy and I will oppose the crossing guard initiative."

Mr. Smith, and his duck, Quackers, made an informative presentation about the need for a crossing guard near the local elementary school to a standing room only crowd. One onlooker later said, "I hadn't thought about it before, but Fred made good points and I think we do need a crossing guard."

All reporting is biased. All articles are shaped by the facts that are revealed and what is omitted. It is impossible to reveal everything, and it would negate the presence of the article to omit everything. The concept of bias is based on an individual observer's judgement of what is relevant. If an individual believes that the fact that Fred had a duck on his head is relevant, the first version is biased. If an individual believes that the exact location of where the proposed crossing guard will be positioned is relevant, all of the other paragraphs are biased.

Any article, no matter how well written, no matter how lengthy and detailed, no matter how many quotes from observers are included, will appear biased to somebody. Usually the reason a person declares that something is biased is because they disagree with the author. Many people believe that when an author is honest about their personal views and their preconceptions, whatever those views may be, an article by that author is more believable than one written by an author who is hiding their personal preconceptions and trying to appear unbiased.

If one believes that it is impossible to include all facts, and then concludes that it is therefor impossible for an article to be completely unbiased, one must therefor doubt anybody who claims to be completely devoid of bias. While this may only be my opinion, and I am biased, it is also based on many years of formal media studies and also happens to be the opinion of many scholars. I love the AP, but I think even they are biased in their story selection. See: A Study of Bias in the Associated Press. And, of course, I believe everybody on Newsvine is biased.

Autopsy reports acquired from American military sources

On October 25, 2005 the American Civil Liberties (ACLU) posted to their website 44 autopsy reports, acquired from American military sources, covering the deaths of civilians who died while in US military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2002-2004. A press release by ACLU announcing the deaths resulted from torture was immediately picked up by Associated Press (AP) wire service, making the story available to US corporate media nationwide. A thorough check of Nexus-Lexus and Proquest electronic data bases, using the keywords ACLU and autopsy, showed that at least 95 percent of the daily papers in the US did not to pick up the story nor did AP ever conduct follow up coverage on the issue.

The autopsy reports provide positive proof of widespread torture by US forces. Our research team at Project Censored felt that this story should have been front page news throughout the country. Instead the story was hardly covered and quickly disappeared.

AP Bias on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

The study found that there is a strong correlation between the likelihood of a person's death receiving coverage by AP and that person's nationality. In 2004 there were 141 reports of Israeli deaths in AP headlines and lead paragraphs, while in reality there were only 108 Israeli deaths, this difference comes from reporting a death more than once. During this same period, Palestinian deaths were reported as 543 by the AP, but at the time 821 Palestinians had been killed. The ratio of actual number of Israeli conflict deaths to Palestinian deaths in 2004 was 1:7, yet AP reported deaths of Israelis to Palestinians at a 2:1 ratio. In other words, the AP reported 131 percent of Israeli deaths, whereas they only reported 66 percent of Palestinian deaths.

The same could be said of AP's reporting of children's deaths. Nine reports of Israeli children's deaths were reported by the AP in headlines and leading paragraphs in 2004, while eight actually occurred. Only 27 Palestinian children deaths were reported by AP when actually 179 children died. While there were 22 times more Palestinian children's deaths than Israeli children's deaths, the AP reported 113 percent of Israeli children's deaths and 15 percent of Palestinian children's deaths.

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

The Dixie Chicks Ad NBC Doesn't Want You To See

NBC is refusing to air an ad for the new Dixie Chicks documentary, "Shut Up & Sing." Variety reports, "NBC's commercial clearance department said in writing that it 'cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.'"

Harvey Weinstein, who is distributing the movie, issued the following statement:

It's a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is profoundly un-American.

"To announce there must be no criticism of the President, and to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, it is morally treasonous to the American public."
– President Theodore Roosevelt
Comment by TerrytheTurtle