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[Note: The following news and opinions primarily came from email sent by our friends. Thank you Sirius and all the others who have forwarded these messages to us. Due to the large volume of email we are receiving, we can only post a sampling here, but we thank everyone for sending stories like this. We read them all and post what we can as time permits.]

In Post Sept. 11 America, the ‘un-free’ news media is even more un-free (Ray Hanania, Media Monitors Network)
“In America, the news media has never been ‘free.’ It is ‘un-free.’ The American media is dominated by individuals of hypocrisy who have two contradictory messages, one that ennobles free speech when it suits their beliefs and one that denies it brutally to those who challenge them. . . . The unfree American media hypocrites continue to stoke the emotions of the American people and dance around a bonfire of hysteria, bigotry, and distortions. This exclusively American system of media hypocrisy continues to mutate into an uglier atmosphere of restrictions making a mockery of democracy that exposes the American news media's double standards to those who wish to open their eyes. . . . It is the result of the purest form of evil politics, a politics that is so weak in moral legitimacy that it must deny anyone the right to challenge its foundations because its foundations are weak and indefensible. In the American news media, the most effective way to defend the indefensible is to take away the right of those to challenge it. . . . But Americans are not free. They are captive to the demagoguery of an un-free news media that self-celebrates in a cesspool of un-professionalism and hypocrisy.”

[Editorial Note: The following comment was sent by a friend in the U.K. who included a link to the acompanying graphic of a proposed new U.S. flag.}

“When an American spokesman on the BBC TV news was asked if America will contribute to peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan, he replied, “We don't do peace-keeping. We do war!”

Stop the Presses (Alan Pittman, Eugene Weekly, November 21, 2001)
“In ‘America's New War’ the first U.S. casualty may be the First Amendment. The military, Bush administration propaganda, and the media itself have squelched news in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Asked at a press conference whether he would lie to the media about the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quoted Winston Churchill about disinformation around the D-Day invasion. ‘Sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies.’ . . . With patriotism running high, the military may reason that the public isn't likely to complain. A recent Pew Research Center poll showed 59 percent of respondents want more military control over reporting the war. . . . Government censorship has even moved into space. The Pentagon has bought exclusive rights to commercial satellite imagery of Afghanistan, blocking media from using the images, the Times reported. . . . Bush's moves to sacrifice civil liberties in the war on terrorism has been chilling, the Village Voice reported. Paul McMasters, of the Freedom Forum, said that ‘In such an atmosphere, voices of dissent grow silent, probing questions by the press are viewed as unpatriotic and subversive, and whistle-blowers within the government are quieted.’ With public opinion polls registering a patriotic 80 percent or more support for Bush, the President is seeing few limits to his power to bend the First Amendment and other rights to his will. Tim Lynch, of the conservative Cato Institute, told The Washington Post that the high polling numbers have fostered ‘an arrogance at the White House.’ He said officials believe they can take presidential power ‘farther than it's gone before.’ . . . But ABC President David Westin warned in a speech that ‘unless we are diligent our enemy could use our own patriotism against us by encouraging us to shut down independent thinking and open mindedness.’ . . . America cannot risk losing the First Amendment to war, said NYU Prof. Crispin. ‘If we allow the government and media to keep us all in nervous ignorance, American democracy will not prevail against the terrorists; it will have been destroyed regardless of the outcome of this latest war.’ ”

Bush's Hollow Victory (David Corn, AlterNet, November 26, 2001)
“Because he announcd a war of global proportions and said it was a conflict that would last for years, Bush is obligated to keep the fight going -- even if he succeeds in defeating the ‘evildoers’ directly responsible for 9/11. Might he now be saying to himself: ‘What was I thinking?’ . . . The day before Thanksgiving, Bush spoke to thousands of members of the 101st Airborne Division in Fort Campbell, Kentucky -- not a tough audience -- and said, ‘Afghanistan is just the beginning on the war against terrorism.’ He reiterated his global designs: ‘Across the world, and across the years, we will fight these evil ones.’ He again rattled his saber against nations that harbor terrorists, in essence saying, you may be next. . . . Be prepared for an intensified conservative crush on Bush. The more-war crowd will argue that if Bush is serious about his campaign against global terrorism, he has no choice but to blast Iraq. There's plenty of baggage in this imbroglio. Bush's old man was lambasted for not finishing off ‘Sad-um.’ Bush the Younger -- surrounded by alumni of the 1991 war against Iraq -- may be particularly sensitive to the charge he is soft on Hussein. . . . As Cato Institute's Tim Lynch complained, ‘The power President Bush is wielding today is truly breathtaking. A single individual is going to decide whether the war is expanded to Iraq. A single individual is going to decide how much privacy American citizens are going to retain.’ ”

Army Working on Weapons-Grade Anthrax; Utah Facility Quietly Developed Formulation; Spores Sent Back and Forth to Md. (Rick Weiss and Joby Warrick The Washington Post, December 13, 2001)
“An Army biological and chemical warfare facility in Utah has been quietly developing a virulent, weapons-grade formulation of anthrax spores since at least 1992, and samples of the bacteria were shipped back and forth between that facility and Fort Detrick, Md., on several occasions in the past several years, according to government officials and shipping records. . . . Shipping records obtained by The Washington Post indicate that the June shipment from Dugway to Detrick involved two small vials, one containing 180 milliliters and the other 160 ml. The return shipment contained five vials, each with 150 ml, for a total of 750 ml. An Army spokesman yesterday could not explain the discrepancy. . . . New revelations about the technical sophistication of the material used in the letters to Daschle and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) have only deepened the debate over who could be behind the attacks. Some prominent anthrax experts believe the signs point to an American scientist with connections to the U.S. biological weapons program or one of its contractors. . . . ‘The quality of the product contained in the letter to Senator Daschle was better than that found in the Soviet, U.S. or Iraqi program, certainly in terms of the purity and concentration of spore particles,’ Spertzel said.”

US warplanes now targeting civilians (Rahimullah Yusufzai, The International News, December 12, 2001)
“Having run out of military targets in Afghanistan with the exception of Tora Bora near Jalalabad, the US warplanes wanting to get rid of their payloads, have in recent days bombed vehicles carrying civilians and flattened villages that have nothing to do with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda's Arab fighters. . . . An entire family comprising Ghulam Shah, his wife and four children was wiped out in the bombing raid. It was the second time that Mashkhel village was bombed. Two weeks ago, the US jets killed four civilians when their bombs missed an abandoned Taliban base and instead fell on a populated area. . . . Though the Taliban officials and Khrum villagers claimed that about 200 people were killed in the US aerial strikes, it would be safe to conclude that the death toll was about 100. In Chokar Karez, about 50 villagers perished in two revengeful bombing sorties by US jets and helicopter gunships. . . . Almost all the journalists, included those from the West, who visited the two villages felt that there were no military targets in the area and that the US pilots had erred in their judgement while offloading their payloads. Earlier, a mosque was bombed in a village near Herat killing several people. . . . Another dangerous element introduced by the Americans in Afghanistan is the misuse of hundreds of satellites phones doled out by them to anti-Taliban commanders. These commanders are increasingly settling personal scores by misleading the Americans to bomb villages and homes of their opponents by claiming that these were Taliban or Arab hideouts. . . . It is feared that this trend would increase now that the US has assembled an awesome military force in the Arabian Sea and in countries neighbouring Afghanistan but the targets to be hit have dwindled to just a few.”

One Out Of Three Americans Suspect The Latest Osama Tape Is Another Fraud (WhatReallyHappened.com)
“The C-SPAN poll surprised a great many people when fully one third of all respondents expressed doubts about the tape's authenticity, or that it actually said what the government claimed it said. . . . There is clearly reason to doubt the tape. There is excessive noise on the audio track, making it impossible to really hear what is being said. Given that the tape was recorded in an area supposedly devoid of audio urban signature, there should have been little ambient noise, yet the speech is masked with a great deal of noise. Then there is that gap in the audio track, reminiscent of Nixon's missing 18 minutes, and the truths it once contained which are lost forever to history. . . . As quoted in the Associated Press, Al-Muhajiroun is reporting that the video tape is actually years old; the target being discussed is not the World Trade Towers, but a target inside Saudi Arabia. Even hard line secular Pakistanis are unconvinced. Iqbal Haider, a former senator from the party of ousted prime minister Benazir Bhutto, said he found it hard to believe that bin Laden would allow himself to be filmed confessing to the crime. ‘It is hard to believe that a man who masterminds the September attacks which such secrecy and finesse could be that stupid and imprudent,’ he said. ‘I hate Osama and the Taliban because they inflicted incalculable damage on Muslims ... but it is hard to digest that he can be such a fool.’ . . . What the C-SPAN poll reveals is that the government of the United States finds itself in a huge credibility crises. Far more people doubt the official story than anyone dreamed!”

There is another America (Bonnie Greer, The Observer, December 16, 2001)
“African America knows something about the ugly face America presents to the world. To friends here in Britain I always say that if you don’t like American foreign policy, try American domestic policy. Try being an American citizen with the full backing of the constitution yet by word and deed having to feel like an outsider. . . . I went back to talk to the people I came from - my family and friends, all of them working class and lower-middle class black and Muslim people. They, too, were shaken by what had happened, but here’s the difference: while they did not condone in any way what happened, they clearly understood how it could have happened. . . . Muhammad Ali’s retort as to why he was not going to fight in Vietnam (‘No Vietcong ever called me a nigger’) is the point that ethnic America tries to make in relation to the ‘war against terrorism’. But no one is listening. . . . Ethnic America, like ethnic Britain, doesn’t count when it comes to what Americans call ‘the real deal’. We are treated as women have always complained they are treated - shunted into the background and told to keep quiet while the men go out and do what the men gotta do. . . . Until that other country that Baldwin wrote about is accepted as real and legitimate, its citizens respected as capable human beings, and allowed to live in peace, Baldwin’s ‘another country’ will continue to look at Ground Zero and see not rubble, but chickens coming home to roost.”

John Pilger on Washington’s war crimes ‘This gang in Washington is out of control’ (Alan Maas, Socialist Worker Online, December 7, 2001)
“Since September 11, the U.S. mainstream media has been saturated with pro-war propaganda straight out of the Pentagon and the State Department. . . . Not a hint of an antiwar opposition has been allowed to leak in, even on editorial pages. Opponents of the war who want to know the facts have had to search for alternatives--often in the media of other countries, via the Internet. . . . The former Pakistani prime minister has disclosed that he was told by U.S. officials in July that there was going to be an attack on Afghanistan in October. . . . There’s now plenty of evidence to suggest that there was going to be an attack on Afghanistan. The September 11 events have simply been a trigger to what would have happened anyway. . . . And that’s the tragedy of September 11. Apart from the terrible loss of life, it has been a provocation to probably the most rapacious bunch of terrorists in my lifetime to go ahead and pursue their project--and I’m talking about the present gang in Washington. . . . The attack on Afghanistan is entirely racist because it’s saying that only the deaths of one set of civilians are abhorrent. The deaths of other civilians are acceptable. That’s the double standard that we’ve had to take as long as I can remember. . . . And I don’t think that people are taking it anymore. I think that throughout the world--though it may not look like this in the United States--the double standard is now being exposed. . . . I think it’s significant that in most of the world, according to Gallup International, public opinion is, and has been, against the attack on Afghanistan. I’m pretty confident that, as this campaign of accelerating U.S. hegemony in the world goes on, people will speak out. . . . That doesn’t appear to be the case in the U.S. at the moment. But I think there’s a large body of people that’s questioning all this, but is afraid to do so publicly. . . . I think encouraging those people to speak out--breaking the silence--is the urgent task right now.”

Reading Between The Lines, The Pentagon’s media lapdogs (Lance Selfa, Socialist Worker Online,December 7, 2001)
“On the eve of the Northern Alliance’s capture of Kabul, U.S. warplanes bombed the Al Jazeera network news office. After first calling the bombing a mistake, Pentagon flacks said they attacked the offices because of intelligence indicating a link to the al-Qaeda network. . . . In other words, the bombing of Al Jazeera, the only major non-government-controlled television network in the Arabic-speaking world, was deliberate. . . . Of course, no al-Qaeda operatives were hiding in the Al Jazeera offices. But it’s no secret that Al Jazeera has irritated the Pentagon. In contrast to the U.S. media’s flag-festooned, pro-war coverage, Al Jazeera has aired coverage of civilian casualties and interviewed critics of the war. . . . It’s no surprise that the Pentagon and the government use every trick they can--from news management to censorship to blatant lies--to justify going to war. When you watch the current television coverage, you wonder why the Pentagon even bothers. The U.S. media are so gung ho on the war that they practically write the Pentagon’s stories for it. . . . U.S. journalists will no doubt say they’re just ‘giving the people what they want.’ That’s not the case. Three-quarters of Americans said the media should include the views of U.S. enemies in news reports and a majority said journalists should ‘dig hard’ for facts, rather than simply trust what the government tells them, according to a late November Pew Center poll.”

Egypt Leader Says He Warned America (Associated Press, 7 December 2001)
“Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says he warned the United States that ‘something would happen’ 12 days before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington. . . . ‘We expected that something was going to happen and informed the Americans. We told them,’ Mubarak said. He did not mention a U.S. response.”

A fairy tale at Christmas (Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, December 17, 2001)
“The coverage of this war raises more questions than any other war I can remember (and I'm not even talking about the video tape). Of much more concern has been the way the coverage has been heavily skewed towards the military conflict . . . Very occasionally, we've glimpsed that people are getting killed - the images of the castrated Taliban fighter pleading for his life before he was shot, and the massacre at Qala-i-Janghi. But our sympathy for these near-feral wildmen is limited - they got what they deserved, they were Taliban after all. . . . What has been strikingly absent is the humanisation of this war. Unlike in Bosnia and Kosovo, our screens and newspapers have not been filled with the terrible trauma of recognisable individuals and their families. The cameras haven't hovered on the faces of shocked tearful children, and the impotent anguish of their parents and grandparents. . . . But the even bigger story that has barely surfaced in recent weeks is the huge dislocation the war has caused to the entire population. The World Food Programme estimates that as many as 3-4 million people have fled their homes because of the bombing. . . . Maslakh - a name that should be on every newspaper front page - is the biggest refugee camp in the world. The few aid workers there haven't even been able to assess its population, which is believed to be somewhere between 200,000 and 800,000 and growing; new arrivals have recently shot up from 20 a day to 1,200.”

Maidens and Warriors (Israel Shamir, Media Monitors Network, December 16, 2001)
“I did not expect the US immigration to copycat Israeli Border Police. . . . ‘I do not read Koran a lot’, said I. The officer Gomez, a big dark man, did not relent. ‘But you read Koran?’ ‘Occasionally’, I tried again. This pusillanimous response was a beginning of my undoing. I was searched, verbally abused; every piece of my luggage was checked and double-checked. . . . Even good friends of Muslims began to hesitate, as the powerful brainwashing machine began to produce its hateful output. Islam is accused of being the faith of Jihad, the permanent war with infidels, of intolerance and cruelty, of providing theological basis for terrorism. The allegations do not stop at politics. . . . Islam is a form of Christianity particularly close to the Jews. While Eastern Orthodox Church was influenced by Greek culture, and Catholics partook of Roman world, Islam returned the ideas of Christianity into the Semitic milieu. The Prophet, peace upon him, upheld the Jewish concepts of strict monotheism, of fear of graven images, of protectiveness towards women and integrated them with the universal message of Christ and apostles. The cowardly enemies of Islam besmirch it, as they fear its unbroken spirit, courage of its warriors and chastity of its maidens.”

US urged to detail origin of tape (Steven Morris, The Guardian, December 15, 2001)
“There was growing doubt in the Muslim world about the authenticity of the film while special effects experts said computer technology made it possible to fake such a video. Unless the US gives more information about how the tape was found or provides more technological details about it, doubts are bound to linger. . . . Some opponents of the war theorise that the Bin Laden in the film was a lookalike, others claim images of him had been manipulated. . . . It was also pointed out that it was surprising that a man with the ability to organise the attacks on America would be naive enough to confess on tape. And some observers point out that Bin Laden appears to be wearing a ring on his right hand. In previous film of Bin Laden released by him, he has worn no jewellery apart from a watch. . . . Henry Hingson, a former president of the national association of criminal defence lawyers, said: ‘In this day and age of digital wizardry, many things can be done to alter its veracity.’ . . . Sean Broughton, director of the London-based production company Smoke and Mirrors and one of Britain's leading experts on visual effects, said it would be relatively easy for a skilled professional to fake a video of Bin Laden. . . . Bob Crabtree, editor of the magazine Computer Video, said it was impossible to judge whether the video was a fake without more details of its source. ‘The US seems simply to have asked the world to trust them that it is genuine.’ ”

Americans ‘covered up massacre of 280 Taliban’ (Justin Huggler, The Independent, 15 December 2001)
“Afghan anti-Taliban forces acknowledged that more than 280 fighters had been holding out in the airport, but claimed that only about 20 were killed. The rest, they claimed, escaped alive. But one of the Afghan soldiers who took part in the fighting said yesterday that he was ordered to return to the airport a day after it was captured, where he says he helped bury the bodies of about 280 mostly Arab fighters. . . . Reporters were allowed into the airport for the first time yesterday. . . . But not included in the guided tour was the grave site, a short distance away, where Mr Gul said he helped to bury the foreign fighters. The Americans have sealed off the entire airport site, making it impossible to reach the alleged grave.”

Disaster that lives in this triumph (Natasha Walter, The Independent, 13 December 2001)
“This new kind of warfare seems to be a wonderfully positive experience for Americans. No wonder, then, that American politicians and military top brass have been talking about extending the war. What a dream it would be to go ahead in Somalia by using air strikes against terrorist camps while backing a group of local warlords to hunt down Islamic groups. What a joy it would be to play an even grander game in Iraq – to back Kurdish and Shia dissidents to do the messy stuff on the ground while they hover above, smashing Saddam Hussein's palaces and factories. . . . But the most scary aspect of American triumphalism is that it seems not to recognise the need for this long-term commitment to peace. That is why George Bush can talk so enthusiastically of extending the commitment to war. He said in a recent speech that Afghanistan was ‘only the beginning’, and that American forces would take on the ‘evil ones’. The targets generally referred to are in Somalia, where al-Qa'ida supporters are said to have found refuge among warlords, and Yemen, where the government is being pressed to move against suspected al-Qa'ida camps. . . . Perhaps it is merely unfounded anti-Americanism to think that George Bush and his friends are prepared to bomb and walk away, not just in Afghanistan but in other countries in Africa and the Middle East, leaving millions of civilians to try to rebuild their ruined lives without help. I hope so. I hope there are no grounds for these fears.”

David Barsamian interviews Edward Said, author and spokesperson for Palestinian rights (International Socialist Review, June-July 2001)
“You have a massive propaganda effort on the part of Israel, which has employed two, some say three, public relations firms in the United States, has the entire U.S. Senate at its beck and call, and has an enormous amount of financial, political, and other resources blocking any effort at the United Nations to protect Palestinian civilians against Israeli military onslaught. . . . The net result is that there is a very skewed situation in which Palestinians are dying. There are now more than 400 dead and upwards of 14,000 seriously injured, without any political benefit. It’s a tragic and, to me, absolutely unacceptable situation. . . . Americans have no idea what their money is financing. All of this is paid for by the United States. All of the oppression of the Palestinians is taken out of the $5 billion that American taxpayers are giving Israel without any strings attached, along with the power to use arms that are meant for defensive purposes for offensive purposes. . . . Most people are having a terrible time economically to put food on the table for their children. Most people are unable to work. There’s 60 or even 70 percent unemployment. There’s a sense in which we are alone. We are surrounded by enemies, and the world is paying us no attention . . . I think we have to go beyond survival to the battle of culture and information. And there are people in Israel who are also very anxious to hear what we have to say. We have to provide them with a message that Zionism has never done anything for them. More Israelis are beginning to understand that Israel, despite its enormous military strength and economic and political power, is more insecure than it ever was. There’s a reason for that.”

The War for Public Opinion (Tamara Straus, AlterNet, December 10, 2001)
“The Bush administration has justified its bombing campaign against Afghanistan not with a Congressional declaration of war, but with polls indicating that close to 90 percent of Americans want military action. How easy it must be to point at those numbers and claim, ‘The public made us do it!’ . . . Public opinion is a fickle thing, sometimes turning on as little as one horrific image or triumphant speech. A few well placed media messages can cause sea changes in national opinion: think of Southern cops turning dogs and fire hoses loose on desegregation marches; or the videotape of Rodney King; or napalmed villagers in Vietnam. . . . The Pentagon's tactics in the media war have been less than subtle. For starters, they bought up access to all commercial satellite photographs of the region, preventing any news outlets from obtaining them. They also have prevented journalists from accompanying soldiers or airmen on most missions, or even from interviewing them afterward. Meanwhile, television news has been behaving more like a wing of the military than an objective Fourth Estate, with anchors like CBS Dan Rather pledging his allegiance on air: ‘Wherever [Bush] wants me to line up, just tell me where.’ CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson ordered news staff to limit reports of Afghan war casualties and use World Trade Center deaths to justify the killings. Newspaper editors have admitted to taking dead civilian Afghans off their front pages for fear of appearing unpatriotic. . . . However, the Bush administration has had to contend with a new set of media forces arising from the ‘Information Revolution.’ The war on terrorism is the world's first war for the Internet and foreign news outlets. Never before have so many people ostensibly had access to so much news and opinion from so many sources. Never before has it been possible to gauge so many views -- not only in the U.S. -- but from Europe and the Middle East. That is the quandary the Bush administration faces in ‘winning the war on ideas,’ as Bush phrased it. Public opinion is now vulnerable to what is reported outside the U.S.'s news borders. . . . The reason for this wane in European support was fairly clear: the Europeans saw disturbing images of civilian casualties from the U.S. bombing campaign that Americans did not.”

U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil Say Authors (Julio Godoy, Inter Press Service, November 15, 2001)
“Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism, while it bargained with the Taliban the delivery of Osama bin Laden in exchange for political recognition and economic aid, two French intelligence analysts claim. . . . Brisard claim O’Neill told them that ‘‘the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it’’. . . . The two claim the U.S. government’s main objective in Afghanistan was to consolidate the position of the Taliban regime to obtain access to the oil and gas reserves in Central Asia. . . . They affirm that until August, the U.S. government saw the Taliban regime ‘‘as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia’’, from the rich oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. . . . Until now, says the book, ‘‘the oil and gas reserves of Central Asia have been controlled by Russia. The Bush government wanted to change all that’’. . . . The last meeting between U.S. and Taliban representatives took place in August, five weeks before the attacks on New York and Washington, the analysts maintain. . . . Bush’s family has a strong oil background. So are some of his top aides. From the U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, through the director of the National Security Council Condoleeza Rice, to the Ministers of Commerce and Energy, Donald Evans and Stanley Abraham, all have for long worked for U.S. oil companies.”

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