Nation in the News. July 2, 2010 See at original site here
Nation in the News
July 2, 2010
"Imagine for a moment our country elected a bunch of people who thought rape should be legal…" This is what Nation Washington editor Christopher Hayes asks us as guest host of The Ed Show. He says that the pro-rape people know that just coming out and promoting rape would not be accepted by the general populous. So instead, they get everyone to call it "unilateral, physical intimacy." But Hayes knows, "this is not a neutral phrase, this is propaganda."
Guest-hosting The Ed Show, Nation Washington Editor Christopher Hayes examines the GOP's farcical cross-examination of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.
Hayes uses the same argument for the pro-torture euphemism, "enhanced interrogation techniques." He refers to a Harvard University study that compares how the media described the practice of waterboarding before the Bush administration and after. From the 1930s to the early 2000s, the New York Times called or characterized waterboarding as torture, 82 percent of the time. From 2002 to 2008, it was only 1 percent of the time. As for the Los Angeles Times: from the 1930s to the early 2000s waterboarding was called or characterized as torture 96 percent of the time and only 5 percent of the time from 2002 to 2008. During that later period, USA Today never referred to it as torture. "The term enhanced interrogation technique from the beginning was designed to fuse our moral circuitry," Hayes says. "It’s the job of the independent press to trigger our moral alarms. The New York Times and the LA Times failed this basic duty."
—Melanie Breault
Nation in the News
July 2, 2010
Just IN from Christopher Hayes via Twitter reported that Rachel Maddow will be on The Today Show and also live on The Rachel Maddow Show from Kabul. See my blog:
No More Crusades for more information GO - here
Related: Jon Stewart points out the hypocrisy of withholding the torture photos here
Guest-hosting The Ed Show, Nation Washington Editor Christopher Hayes here
The Ed Show - msnbc.com
Guest host Chris Hayes discusses a new report showing newspapers giving soft ... Veteran talk radio host Ed Schultz hosts 'The Ed Show' from 6 p.m. EST to 7 here
Plotting Terrorism
ReplyDeletePosted by Stephan Salisbury at 10:45am, July 6, 2010.
Excerpted:
Barack Obama may not have come into office pledging to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, but he did pledge one thing: to close the Bush-era prison at Guantánamo within a year. That couldn’t have been clearer. And as I wrote back then, it was also a reasonable basis on which to judge whether a democratic administration could do anything significant to roll back our Bush-created Homeland Security Nation and alter American policy abroad.
Now, we have our answer -- and it couldn’t be clearer either. No, he can’t. Or won’t.
Just last week, under the dreary headline “Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority,” Charlie Savage reported in my hometown paper that “the Obama administration has sidelined efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, making it unlikely that President Obama will fulfill his promise to close it before his term ends in 2013.” Admittedly, it would never have been an easy thing to do, not given domestic politics and the outsized fear of terrorism that goes with it. It would, however, have been a lot easier than sweeping away much of the rest of the legacy of the Bush administration: the Global War on Terror, the Department of Homeland Security, the Fear Inc. that now rules our lives and somehow managed to convince us, even with unemployment through the roof and the Gulf of Mexico turning into a dead sea, that the main danger to this country is “terrorism.”
As it happens, the only thing the Obama administration seems to have swept away was the name, Global War on Terror. The war itself, like Guantanamo, has proven as unstaunchable as that gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. However named, that “war,” the Afghan war, and the CIA’s drone war in the Pakistani borderlands have all expanded, while the war in -- or at least occupation of -- Iraq has been shrinking ever so slowly on a schedule the Bush administration set up before it left office...
...it’s increasingly hard to tell the difference between Obama’s imperial policy abroad and the Bush version of the same...
(Check out Salisbury in Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview discussing how these cases are created via entrapment and informers by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.) Tom
Copyright 2010 Stephan Salisbury
Afghanistan: 90 killed as Petraeus takes command:
ReplyDelete'We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and ISAF forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people,' Petraeus said at the International Security Assistance Force headquarters.
http://tinyurl.com/26avnb9