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. . . about Chaos,
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Allen Ginsberg's Opinion of Time Magazine
Knowing what I do about the way they've ["Time Magazine"] exaggerated and distorted actual events which concern me, I shudder to think of what they've done to international events, news that's really important. Think of how many people read Time every week and get their picture of the world from it.
--Allen Ginsberg

posted by Lorenzo 9:08 PM

 

 

Never argue
with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.

--Anon

posted by Lorenzo 3:04 PM

 

Journalist Alex Contreras Detained Illegally by Bolivian Authorities
(Al Giordano, Narco News, October 15, 2003)
When Journalist Alex Contreras Baspineiro landed at the Viru Viru International Airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, earlier today, the police were already waiting for him. There, he was forcibly detained and his journalistic work materials were filmed against his will. . . . The agents refused to identify themselves, but claimed to be members of the anti-narcotics police. Contreras reports frequently about repression against coca growers in the Chapare region of Bolivia. Contreras showed his press credentials to the authorities, but reports that the agents responded that they had orders from above to detain him. . . . This latest attack on freedom of the press comes at a time when the regime of Bolivian President Gonzalo �Goni� S�nchez de Lozada is desperately attempting to cling to power as the nation is paralyzed by blockades, demonstrations, a General Strike, and mass dissent. The uprising, fueled by government efforts to export the nation�s natural gas supplies and its subservience to the US-imposed War on Drugs, has now grown into a widespread revolt calling for the resignation of a president who has lost the support of his people. In recent days, massacres of unarmed protestors have been committed by Goni�s military and police forces. The president�s approval rating, according to Reuters, has bottomed-out at nine percent. . . . Gustavo Guzm�n, editor of the weekly Pulso, denounced that his magazine had been seized in various regions of La Paz. The page one headline read: �In the Name of Democracy the President Must Resign.� Pulso included an investigative report documenting that four United States military officials are, in fact, directing the Bolivian military�s actions during this crisis. . . . Authorities also raided and shut down Radio Jim�nez, which broadcasts in the Aymara indigenous language from a poor neighborhood of La Paz, Bolpress reported. . . . The Narco News Bulletin warns the United States Embassy and Ambassador David Greenlee that the U.S. government, as an institution, and Greenlee, as an individual, will be held institutionally and personally responsible for any further attacks on our journalists who are reporting on the events in Bolivia. As Pulso magazine has demonstrated, US military operatives are now commanding Bolivian military and police forces in a last-ditch effort to salvage the unpopular and disgraced regime of Gonzalo S�nchez de Lozada. Therefore, the attack and illegal forced holding of journalist Alex Contreras Baspineiro today upon his return to his native Bolivia from reporting in Venezuela, could not have occurred, in our judgment, without the aid, consent, and intelligence operations of the Embassy.

posted by Lorenzo 11:44 AM

 

Deleted Political Cartoons From al Jazeera
[Click the above link to see the deleted cartoons.]
Al-Jazeera bowed to pressure from the United States government last month by immediately pulling two cartoons deemed �inflammatory� by Washington from its websites, a senior source in the news organization has told Arab News.

The two cartoons were pulled �without any hesitation� from both the Arabic and English language websites after a US government official complained about them, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

One cartoon was of so-called �green card soldiers�, young Latino men shown going through an immigration tunnel to emerge from the other side as US soldiers ready to leave for military service in Iraq. The other was of the Twin Towers imploding, and two giant fuel pumps rising to replace them from the ashes. Neither cartoon is now available in Al-Jazeera websites� cartoon archive.

�The journalists on the Arabic language website didn�t give a damn,� the source said, �but those on the English site were furious. However, their complaints were dismissed.�

The revelation that Al-Jazeera was so easily cowed by US pressure over the �offensive� cartoons will be seen by many to undermine its combative and independent image.

Officials at the US State Department contacted by Arab News yesterday refused to comment, and Al-Jazeera failed to reply to e-mails and answer phone messages.

Al-Jazeera and the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya are currently under a two-week ban from covering the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council after broadcasting material said by the US to have incited �anti-coalition violence� in the war-ravaged country. However, the ban was largely seen among Arabs as mirroring the kind of censorship that existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Al-Jazeera journalist Tayssir Alounni is also under arrest in Spain for allegedly having participated in a Syrian-dominated Al-Qaeda cell in Madrid, suspected of having links to the cell in Hamburg responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Alounni�s incarceration last month set off an outcry in the Arab world, which has interpreted the case as one where politics, religion and terrorism have converged.

But it is now clear that Al-Jazeera is buckling under US pressure, to the extent that it will compromise on its principles.

There are also reports of �a storm of controversy� over alleged attempted US interference in the issuing of religious edicts by Al-Azhar in Cairo, Islam�s foremost authority.

Al-Azhar�s Grand Imam, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, annulled an edict on Aug. 28 issued by a less senior imam which called for Arab states to boycott the Iraqi Governing Council.

Reporting an �internal Al-Azhar crisis�, the London-based pan-Arab Al-Hayat daily claimed Tantawi had issued his statement after a meeting with US Ambassador to Egypt David Welch. The Egyptian media, including Al-Arabie newspaper, accused Welch of having pressured Tantawi to annul the edict.

Both Al-Azhar and Welch have denied the allegations.

posted by Lorenzo 11:47 AM

 

An
Introduction to Swarming and the Future of Protesting

We are just now beginning to see the Internet’s
first attempt to challenge the world’s superpowers. By challenging
Bush which in this age necessitates an Internet connection we are
putting an emphasis on social-networks that activate and initiate
actions in the material, real world. The “smart mob”
we strive for is evolving before we can imagine or articulate it.
We know there is power here ... somewhere. . . . THE FUNDAMENTAL
QUESTION REMAINS, however, how exactly should we manifest ourselves
physically. And for now it seems we are stuck with one answer: visibility.
. . . Naively thinking that the media (their media) is our sword,
we forget that what makes us operate now is not the tv but the media
materialised in our computer by the Internet. . . . The recent Senate
decision to block the Total Information Awareness program is not
the first time a Bush Regime policy has been undone by the Internet
spreading information more effectively than the mass media could
silence it. The first example was the outrage directed against the
TIPS program. It wasn’t via CNN that we even heard about this
program, but via a single journalist, via a single newspaper in
Australia (“US PLANNING TO RECRUIT ONE IN 24 AMERICANS AS CITIZEN
SPIES”), then carried via Internet to every member of the movement.
. . . THE TRADITIONAL PROTEST, also, has for too long been seen
by us as our most powerful tool. . . . I propose there are at least
2 specific aspects of the traditional protest that we intuitively
know have power: . . . 1) Our Ability to Disrupt the Functioning
of Symbols of the State . . . Let’s not forget that the synchronised
movements of these actors we disrupt are the result of another by-product
of a network of shared information. . . . 2) Our Ability to Force
Our Meme, Our Thought-Virus, Into Other People’s Minds, Thereby
Increasing Our Membership - Given the emergence of everything above,
it’s clear we can safely, and more efficiently, move all these
activities under the guidance of the Internet. We no longer
need protests to be covered by the media in order to articulate
our message because we now function via a network independent of
mass media. We’re speaking into peoples’ homes every second
of every day, not just at protests. . . . Our Ability to
Disrupt the Functioning of Symbols of the State, however, is more
difficult to separate and replace with the Internet. Instead we
should seek to maximise that aspect by focusing all of our “organised”
protest energy on fine-tuning the nonviolent-citywide shutdown.
First we were centralised International ANSWER manifested us by
widely claiming a day. But it was Indymedia that de-centralised
us by bringing us down locally more accurately, nodally. Because
of Indymedia’s structure any of us are able to begin our own.
. .It’s Gene Sharp who’s given the movement the necessary
insight to even come to this discussion of swarming by way of the
military. His philosophy of non-violence is a philosophy of strategy
and tactics, and his conclusion is two part: first, that there are
dozens of sub-categories of non-violence . . . second, that non-violence
can be as tactically powerful as violence. . . . Absolute pacifism,
the type we’re taught by the mass-media that asks the believer
to become purely inactive, is not the pacifism of the true nonviolent
revolutionaries. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. both understood
that non-violence is a powerful technique, but still a sibling of
violence. They adopted non-violence not from a desire to fail to
challenge the state’s violence while maintaining moral superiority,
but in order to win. . . . The path forward is far from clear.
Perhaps paradoxically, I’m not completely convinced that we
can even entirely predict how the movement will organise itself.
But there is indication that it will choose, or be forced to choose,
a protest model based upon the simultaneous materialisation of flash-protests
specifically designed to shut down the economic flows of a city
without violence, without riots, and without giving the state any
excuse or indeed opportunity - for their obligatory retaliatory
violence. . . . I imagine waking up one morning and finding
an e-mail asking me to be at this corner at that time. I faithfully
follow the directions only to find that a couple dozen others have
materialised. Whispers through the crowd of the anonymous tell me
that such groups have materialised on every street corner across
the city. At noon, with a smile, we step into the street and stop.
. . . From the actions at the 1999 Seattle protest, which prompted
the now famous essay “Netwar in the Emerald City,” to
the zapatista movement, the theorists of RAND have been seeing something
significant. That the movement, however, may act unconsciously as
a swarm when the conditions are right will not win the larger war.
Instead, the practice of swarming must come to be a practiced, and
refined doctrine a strategy.

Fortunately, if history is any guide, the movement may be the place
whence ultimately a powerful intentional strategy of swarming will
arise. . . . Swarming, for the purposes of protesting, can be
thought of as the technique of quickly massing a large number of
individuals from all directions onto a single position in order
to attain a specific goal. There are roughly 4 different phases
in a successful swarm: locate the target, converge, attack, disperse.
. . . For these 4 phases to work correctly they must be
synchronised between a diversity of seemingly disconnected individuals.
Therefore, there must be a layer of instantaneous communication
between these individuals. This level of communication is the most
difficult aspect of swarming and a pre-requisite that has made swarming
up until now much harder to accomplish. . . . Using Your Cell Phone
to Coordinate Via Text Messaging (SMS) Upoc.com:
Two-way all-channel communication

Upoc.com allows people to join cell phone groups that receive text
messages. These groups are exactly the same as mailing lists, except
instead of receiving an e-mail you receive a text message on your
cell phone. The easiest configuration would be to encourage people
to sign up for the Upoc.com group prior to the protest. The group
could be set to accept messages from any member so that each person
would have the ability to alert the greater cell phone group of
the events in their location. The members who receive the bulletin
could then shout out the information to the individuals nearest
them and head for the flash point. This would immediately overwhelm
any police at the flash point and would be virtually impossible
to stop. After the protest people could simply unsubscribe from
the group.

[Click on the link above for
the full story, which contains additional specific information about
the details of swarming.]

posted by Lorenzo 4:51 PM