US Media covers Chávez victory and calls it "a defeat"! BBC just ignores it



Allies of President Hugo Chavez's won a strong majority in Venezuela's local elections on Sunday, winning 17 of 22 state governorships and 265 of 327 mayoral races. The opposition made important gains, capturing the Caracas mayor's office and two of the most populous states.

The Real News Network spoke to Latin American Studies Professor Miguel Tinker Salas who says, the fact that the opposition was able to make modest gains means it's a victory for Venezuelan democracy, and the Venezuelan political process, and the maturity of the Venezuelan population who participated—over 65 percent in this regional election process

Ex-CIA Spy, Boris Korczak, speaks some home truths on World Events

Deepak Chopra: 'War on Terrorism' is an Oxymoron
CNN.com Asia, 26 November 2008

"It's interesting how it takes someone from a poor country, at the other end of the stick, [who] finds it so easy to describe the world exactly as it is, and yet we who hold the stick find his statement of the obvious "extraordinarily enlightening", as if it were cloaked in some kind of impenetrable mystery."

Medialens, 27/11/08


Chopra: I think Mr. Obama has a real opportunity here, but a challenging opportunity, a creative opportunity.

Get rid of the phrase "war on terrorism." Ask for a creative solution in which we all participate.

King: Is it because the war on terrorism really can never be won because the terrorists (inaudible)?

Chopra: Because it's an oxymoron. It's an oxymoron, Larry, a war on war, a war on terrorism.

You know, terrorists call mechanized death from 35,000 feet above sea level with a press of a button also terror. We don't call it that, because our soldiers are wearing uniforms. They don't see what is happening, and innocent people are being killed. So, you know, terror is a term that you apply to the other.

King: Thanks, Deepak Chopra, as always, extraordinarily enlightening.

Fugitive Rice makes narrow escape in Auckland
Indymedia, 30 Jul 2008 16:50 GMT

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a narrow escape from justice, with the assistance of the New Zealand Police, in Auckland on Saturday 26 July. The police can now consider themselves accessories to war crimes. Rice met with government leaders in Auckland but was chased by 150 protesters spurred on by a bounty of $10,000. They called for her arrest, under the Geneva Convention, for war crimes and for her role in authorising the use of torture.

There was chanting, speeches and an impressive US flag burning outside Government House where Rice was meeting with prime minister Helen Clark and foreign affairs minister Winston Peters. The speeches focused on Rice's support for the illegal and immoral war in Iraq, as well as the wider and more nonsensical 'War on Terror'; her sanctioning of torture and instrumental role in setting up Guantanamo Bay; and on what a bad idea a free trade agreement with the US would be. Then the crowd relocated to the Langham Hotel, where Rice met with leader of the parliamentary opposition, John Key.

Auckland University Students Association had to withdraw the bounty it placed on the head of Condoleezza Rice two days earlier, under threat of legal action. However, the students association at Victoria University in Wellington doubled the price, offering $10,000 for a successful citizen's arrest. Although several people turned up to the demo with handcuffs, the chance to nab Rice didn't present itself. Police refused to cooperate in the arrest of this war criminal, giving the irrelevant excuse that she is a visiting dignitary.

Police had planned to limit protest at the Langham hotel by keeping protesters on the opposite side of the road, behind shiny new barricades that had obviously been bought specially for the occasion. What they hadn't planned for was a busload of protesters being dropped off at the bus stop outside the hotel. After fifteen minutes of chanting and yelling by protestors, the police claimed that standing on the public footpath outside the hotel, was a 'safety risk.' When protesters refused to leave, the police violently forced them off the sidewalk and out onto the road. Protesters were shoved, punched and thrown to the street and pain compliance holds used on several protesters to get them to move. Several were punched in the face, including veteran activist John Minto who was shoved to the ground by several officers, smashing and breaking the megaphone he was chanting through. Two protesters were arrested and one man was left bleeding from the neck and wrist.

Agents of war: How British papers did Bush's dirty work
Posted on MEDIALENS, November 22, 2008

Morning Star 21/11

SOLOMON HUGHES investigates how British papers did Bush's dirty work.

IF YOU or I told the editors of the Times, Telegraph or Sun that their coverage of the "war on terror" was just a lot of US Department of Defence propaganda, I am sure that they would say that we were crass and crude and conspiracy theorists to boot.

The intelligent and well-educated journalists on those newspapers would be proud to say that they swallowed all the lies about weapons of mass destruction and failed to see the truth of secret US torture camps entirely of their own accord.

Well, actually, it turns out that they were helped to these rotten conclusions over drinks and dinners in smart London clubs and the US Department of Defence picked up the tab.

Since 2003, the nominally private Policy Forum on International Affairs has invited British journalists to meet top US politicians in London clubs and restaurants.

However, the organisation, which introduced British editors and columnists to mostly neoconservative politicians who were arguing for the "war on terror," was actually funded by the US Department of Defence.

The Policy Forum is a British-based company with two directors - low-profile London multimillionaire Zac Gertler and high-profile New York rightwinger Devon Gaffney Cross.

They say that they wanted to counteract the way that "American foreign policy and its goals and motivations in undertaking the war on terror were increasingly subject to caricature and worse in the European media."

The organisation, "based in London," says that it "began hosting a series of roundtable discussions, often off-the-record, with key American policy-makers and leading columnists, editors, writers and producers from the UK."

People like James Woolsey and Paul Wolfowitz were introduced to British journalists at posh clubs and restaurants. The Forum says that "editors of The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The London Times, The Economist, The Sun and The Spectator have all participated in our discussions" as well as "leading columnists."

Gertler and Gaffney Cross are independently very wealthy, but they didn't pay for the dinners after all. At the end of last year, the US Department of Defence paid the Policy Forum around $80,000 for "consulting services for public liaison and media outreach services in support of the diplomacy mission, including addressing and informing European and Middle Eastern audiences on the challenges facing US national security policies."

Three months later, the Policy Forum officially dissolved itself. It seems that the Department of Defence was actually paying for the previous five years of private diplomacy aimed at British journalists.

The forum looks like yet another way that the Bush administration ran foreign policy outside official structures. As a private organisation, the forum could invite speakers mostly from the neocons rather than represent the whole of the US leadership to all British papers. However, the initiative was ultimately funded by the US government, although, as with other Bush schemes, through the Department of Defence rather than the State Department.

Obama's election presumably means the end of this kind of clandestine diplomacy.

Devon Gaffney Cross's brother Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan official, wrote in the press that Obama's election would lead to "global theocratic rule under shariah and the end of our constitutional, democratic government." His sister Devon may not have made similar comments, but it is hard to imagine her being invited to run secret lobbying of the British press for president Obama.

The dinners-with-neocons scheme also shows yet again how London was central to Washington's propaganda effort over Iraq and the war on terror.

The US government liked placing stories in the British press to pass its dubious stories out to Europe and the Middle East and back to the US.

Placing lies in the US newspapers was too obvious. Tall tales about terrorism in the US media look like US propaganda. However, if the same stories are "confirmed" in supposedly independent British papers, the propaganda is sanitised.

Our newspapers acted as a laundering scheme to wash the US government fingerprints from official lies. If we ever get a real inquiry into the Iraq deception, that inquiry should concentrate on what was written in British newspapers as well as by British officials.