Tag Archives: Independent

| Cui bono? Palestinian ambassador to Czech Republic killed in Prague blast!

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Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic Jamel al-Jamal killed in Prague blast ~ JAMES LEGGE,  The Independent.

The Palestinian ambassador to the Czech Republic has died after an explosion at his apartment in Prague, police have said.

Jamel al-Jamal, 56, was moving a safe around the flat, having only recently moved in.

Reuters news agency cited a Czech government source as saying the explosion was probably caused by a security device on the safe, and that the government did not believe it was a terrorist attack.

Al-Jamel was taken to hospital after the blast, which happened before midday on Wednesday. He was in the flat, in the city’s northern Suchdol neighbourhood, with his family at the time of the explosion.

Police cordoned off part of the street and a half dozen police vehicles, firetrucks and two ambulances were there.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said it would send a delegation to Prague “to help with the investigation”.

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| Don’t be Fooled by Mainstream Media Journalists, “Independent” Experts and the CIA!

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Don’t be Fooled by Mainstream Media Journalists, “Independent” Experts and the CIA ~

Global Research.

“Under CIA manipulation, direction and, usually, their payroll, were past and present presidents of Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay and Costa Rica, “our minister of labor”, “our vice-president”, “my police”, journalists, labor leaders, student leaders, diplomats, and many others. If the Agency wished to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, cause dissension in leftist ranks, or have Communist embassy personnel expelled, it need only prepare some phony documents, present them to the appropriate government ministers and journalists, and – presto! – instant scandal.”
(William Blum, CIA Manipulation: The Painful Truths Told by Phil Agee, Anti-Empire Report 27 June 2013)

Independent media outlets are increasingly challenging the powers that be and, thanks to social media, the truth about what is really happening in our world can be shared at the click of a button.

Sadly, the imperial war machine continues to rear its violent head in exponential proportion under the guise of democracy and “War on Terrorism”.

This war machine is promoted by the mainstream media who cannot be trusted for many reasons. It is a well documented fact that the CIA has used journalism as a cover for its agents and has planted stories in the media.

According to CIA documents, “more than 400 American journalists … in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency“, wrote Carl Bernstein in 1977.

In this episode of Alternative views, former CIA agent John Stockwell explains “how CIA ‘disinformation’ tactics manipulate public opinion by planting stories in the press and by financing and supporting right-wing newspapers“.

Planting stories in the media is a standard CIA technique:

A common Agency tactic was writing editorials and phony news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of the CIA authorship or CIA payment to the media. The propaganda value of such a “news” item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or heard by unknowing North Americans. (Blum, op. cit.)

Moreover several journalists are members of the very influential foreign policy think tank Council on Foreign Relations, which has among its corporate members:

1. Major financial institutions such as:

Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Citi

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

JPMorgan Chase & Co

The Nasdaq OMX Group

2. All the companies part of what is known as Big Oil:

BP p.l.c.

Chevron Corporation

ConocoPhillips Company

Exxon Mobil Corporation

Shell Oil Company

TOTAL S.A.

3. Major defense and security contractors which largely rely on military sales (figures from SIPRI) and government subsidies, among others:

DynCorp International (70% of revenues from military sales in 2011)

Lockheed Martin Corporation (78% of revenues from military sales in 2011)

Northrop Grumman (81% of revenues from military sales in 2011)

Raytheon Company (90% of revenues from military sales in 2011)

Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. (99% of revenues from federal government)

In addition, mainstream media experts on foreign policy issues are often linked to the military-industrial complex and are very often presented as ”independent”.

During the public debate around the question of whether to attack Syria, Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to George W. Bush, made a series of high-profile media appearances. Hadley argued strenuously for military intervention in appearances on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Bloomberg TV, and authored a Washington Post op-ed headlined “To stop Iran, Obama must enforce red lines with Assad.”

In each case, Hadley’s audience was not informed that he serves as a director of Raytheon, the weapons manufacturer that makes the Tomahawk cruise missiles that were widely cited as a weapon of choice in a potential strike against Syria. Hadley earns $128,500 in annual cash compensation from the company and chairs its public affairs committee. He also owns 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate ($77.65 on August 23, making Hadley’s share’s worth $891,189). Despite this financial stake, Hadley was presented to his audience as an experienced, independent national security expert. (Public Accountability, War or No War on Syria: Conflict of Interest of “Experts” who Commented in Favor of Military Intervention, October 15, 2013)

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| Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself!

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Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself ~ , theguardian.com.

The NSA whistleblower says: ‘I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent.’

GCHQ

GCHQ‘s headquarters on the outskirts of Cheltenham. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

(Updated below)

The Independent this morning published an article – which it repeatedly claims comes from “documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden” – disclosing that “Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies.” This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it’s the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided.

That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent, stating:

I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent. The journalists I have worked with have, at my request, been judicious and careful in ensuring that the only things disclosed are what the public should know but that does not place any person in danger. People at all levels of society up to and including the President of the United States have recognized the contribution of these careful disclosures to a necessary public debate, and we are proud of this record.

“It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post’s disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act.”

In other words: right as there is a major scandal over the UK’s abusive and lawless exploitation of its Terrorism Act – with public opinion against the use of the Terrorism law to detain David Miranda – and right as the UK government is trying to tell a court that there are serious dangers to the public safety from these documents, there suddenly appears exactly the type of disclosure the UK government wants but that has never happened before. That is why Snowden is making clear: despite the Independent’s attempt to make it appears that it is so, he is not their source for that disclosure. Who, then, is?

The US government itself has constantly used this tactic: aggressively targeting those who disclose embarrassing or incriminating information about the government in the name of protecting the sanctity of classified information, while simultaneously leaking classified information prolifically when doing so advances their political interests.

One other matter about the Independent article: it strongly suggests that there is some agreement in place to restrict the Guardian’s ongoing reporting about the NSA documents. Speaking for myself, let me make one thing clear: I’m not aware of, nor subject to, any agreement that imposes any limitations of any kind on the reporting that I am doing on these documents. I would never agree to any such limitations. As I’ve made repeatedly clear, bullying tactics of the kind we saw this week will not deter my reporting or the reporting of those I’m working with in any way. I’m working hard on numerous new and significant NSA stories and intend to publish them the moment they are ready.

Related question

For those in the media and elsewhere arguing that the possession and transport of classified information is a crime: does that mean you believe that not only Daniel Ellsberg committed a felony, but also the New York Times reporters and editors did when they received, possessed, copied, transported and published the thousands of pages of top-secret documents known as the Pentagon Papers?

Do you also believe the Washington Post committed felonies when receiving and then publishing top secret information that the Bush administration was maintaining a network for CIA black sites around the world, or when the New York Times revealed in 2005 the top secret program whereby the NSA had created a warrantlesss eavesdropping program aimed at US citizens?

Or is this some newly created standard of criminality that applies only to our NSA reporting? Do media figures who are advocating that possessing or transmitting classified information is a crime really not comprehend the precedent they are setting for investigative journalism?

UPDATE

The Independent’s Oliver Wright just tweeted the following:

“For the record: The Independent was not leaked or ‘duped’ into publishing today’s front page story by the Government.”

Leaving aside the fact that the Independent article quotes an anonymous “senior Whitehall source”, nobody said they were “duped” into publishing anything. The question is: who provided them this document or the information in it? It clearly did not come from Snowden or any of the journalists with whom he has directly worked. The Independent provided no source information whatsoever for their rather significant disclosure of top secret information. Did they see any such documents, and if so, who, generally, provided it to them? I don’t mean, obviously, that they should identify their specific source, but at least some information about their basis for these claims, given how significant they are, would be warranted. One would think that they would not have published something like this without either seeing the documents or getting confirmation from someone who has: the class of people who qualify is very small, and includes, most prominently and obviously, the UK government itself.

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HypoMeterC

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| US man briefly becomes world’s richest person after PayPal ‘credits’ him with $92 quadrillion!

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US man briefly becomes world’s richest person after PayPal ‘credits’ him with $92 quadrillion ~ ROB WILLIAMS, The Independent.

 Chris Reynolds became one thousand times wealthier than the total combined GDP of the whole planet.

A US man briefly became the world’s richest person – with a wealth one thousand times greater than the GDP of the whole planet – after PayPal erroneously credited him with $92 quadrillion (£60 quadrillion).

The online money-transfer firm admitted that they credited Chris Reynolds, 56, of Pennsylvania, with $92,233,720,368,547,800 briefly before correcting their error.

The mistake briefly made Mr Reynolds the world’s richest man on paper and also the world’s only quadrillionaire.

Mr Reynolds’ wealth easily eclipsed that of the current world’s richest man Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim – who is worth a mere $67billion.

Paypal withdrew the money after realising their error but offered to make a donation to a charity of Mr Reynolds’ choice.

Mr Reynolds told the Philadelphia Daily Newsthe statement made him feel “like a million bucks”, adding, “At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.”

He also told the paper that being a “very responsible guy”, the first thing he would do with the money would be “pay the national debt down first.”

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| Aleppo: Syrian rebels execute teenager Mohammad Kattaa in front of his parents!

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Aleppo: Syrian rebels execute teenager Mohammad Kattaa in front of his parents, say reports ~ ALISTAIR DAWBER, The Independent.

A teenage boy from the Syrian city of Aleppo is reported to have been executed in front of his family by an Islamist rebel group, which accused him of blasphemy.

Graphic images of 15 year-old Mohammad Kattaa, a coffee seller in the war torn city, appeared on the internet yesterday. They appeared to show that the boy had been shot in the mouth and through the neck.

Several reports suggest that he was found arguing with another boy on Saturday, during which he used the name of the Prophet Mohammed flippantly. One report suggested that the other boy had attempted to get a free coffee, leading to Mr Kattaa to say that, “even if Muhammad comes down, I will not give it as debt.”

He was later said to have been detained by an extremist group in the area, beaten and then shot when his mother and father had been found so that they could be forced to witness the execution.

“An unidentified Islamist rebel group shot dead a 15-year-old child who worked as a coffee seller in Aleppo, after they accused him of blasphemy,” said Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman.

“They spoke classical Arabic, not Syrian dialect. They shot the boy twice, once in the mouth, another in his neck, in front of his mother, his father and his siblings,” he said.

Later reports suggested that the group that is said to have carried out the killing had links to a number of al-Qa’ida cells operating in Syria.

According to the AFP news agency, Syrian government forces are likely to target the area around Aleppo after taking the rebel-held town of Qusair last week. With support from the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, Syrian forces have made significant gains in recent weeks and now have rebel strongholds in the north of the country in their sights.

“It is likely the battle for Aleppo will start in the coming hours or days, and its aim is to reclaim the towns and villages in the province,” the source told AFP.

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Mushroom 3

 

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| Hubris: Iraq may be broken, but it is our political class that is bankrupted!

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Iraq may be broken, but it is our political class that is bankrupted ~ GEORGE GALLOWAY, The Independent.

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Virtually nothing has been learned, and now history is repeating itself.

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The finest of all journalists in the English-speaking world, Claud Cockburn, said:

“Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.” This basic rubric of the trade was all but abandoned a decade ago in the run-up to the war on Iraq, when every official claim was assumed to be true and those who denied it were treated as bad, or even mad. One honourable exception was Cockburn’s son, Patrick, in The Independent, an exception continued in his magisterial look back in anger in this newspaper over the past week. If journalism is history’s first draft, then Patrick Cockburn’s work on Iraq will prove to be close to the finished article.

I mention this not just because I remain bitter at the role of the fourth estate in helping to bring about such slaughter and, a decade later, such ongoing misery in Iraq. But because virtually nothing has been learned, and history is repeating itself over and over again – in Libya, Mali, Syria.

Bob Dylan said in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” that “you have to pay to get out of, going through all this twice…”. For the most part, the bill continues to be paid by others, and elsewhere. For now.

Even for someone with my experience, such militarised mendacity can still take the breath away. How many times did you read and listen in the past few days to pontificating pundits tell you that Hugo Chavez had “wrecked” the Venezuelan economy, without a whiff of self-consciousness about the state of our own and that of the United States? That Chavez’s Venezuela was a “divided” society; as if Bush, Obama, Cameron, and Osborne led governments of national unity?

To briefly recap; a huge right-wing conspiracy was mounted 10 years ago to manufacture a case to wage aggressive war (pace Nuremberg, the “ultimate crime”) upon Iraq. It involved government ministers (some still swilling around profitably in the detritus they created); intelligence agencies and the spin doctors controlling them; craven parliamentarians scarcely worthy of the name; and a veritable army of scribblers, autocue readers, laptop bombardiers and think-tankers.

Add a sprinkling of useful idiots calling themselves “liberals”, and the blue touchpaper was lit. A million died, thousands of them British and American. Millions spread as refugees around the world. A country was dismembered, never to be reassembled. Extremism cascaded around the world, blowing itself up even aboard London buses.

The whole “humanitarian” show is best remembered in the pictures from Abu Ghraib. A female American soldier, cigarette dangling from her curling lip, leading a hooded naked Iraqi prisoner like a dog on a chain. Piling naked helpless Iraqi prisoners on top of each other and forcing them to commit indecent acts, videoing it all for the entertainment of the barracks later. Those tempted to imagine this was American exceptionalism should read the proceedings of the London court this week where, inter alia, we learned of the Iraqi corpse who may or may not have walked into British custody alive, but who surely was handed back to his family minus his penis. It doesn’t get much uglier than this, especially when it’s all dressed up in the livery of liberal “intervention”.

Millions of us knew that it would end this way, even before it became clear that the entire conspiracy was built on the tower – bigger than Babel – of lies around “weapons of mass destruction”. There were none. But the weapons of mass deception deployed by the conspirators remain in fine fettle. And none of them has even been properly inspected yet. No one has been held to account; not a single head has rolled. Except those of a million Iraqis.

When the Chilcot Inquiry was announced, I denounced it in Parliament as a parade of establishment duffers, two of whom at least had been among the intellectual authors of the disaster, one of whom had described Bush and Blair as the Roosevelt and Churchill de nos jours. I pointed out that there was not a single legal personality on the Inquiry, or a soldier. And not a Douglas Hurd or a Menzies Campbell among them either. That no one could be summoned, nor their papers either. That no one would be testifying under oath. That must have been three years ago now. Little did I know that the Chilcot report would be as slow in coming as the judgement day.

Iraq is broken now, and as Cockburn’s recent reports show, Iraqi hearts haven’t mended either. It was a disaster, the greatest British policy failure since the First World War.

But for as long as its lessons are not learned, the Iraqis will not be the last such victims. The Iraq war bankrupted the British and American political class. They no longer speak for the people they claim to represent. Few believe any longer anything they say. Long before Leveson summed up the venality of much of the media – the echo chamber of that class – the people were abandoning that media in droves. Like our other institutions – the banks and the police, to name but two – their credibility stands in ruins. Devastated even more starkly than were Fallujah, Amariyah and Baghdad.

Saddam’s presidential palaces turned out to be bare, but not as bereft as the democratic political leaders who propelled him to the gallows. The trap door has opened for them. And they are still falling.

George Galloway is the Respect MP for Bradford West

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| UK PMQ’s: Rich boy Cameron’s foot in mouth: ‘We are raising money for the rich!’

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Cameron: ‘We are raising money for the rich’ ~ ANDY MCSMITH, The Independent.

David Cameron made a revealing slip of the tongue at Prime Minister’s Questions today as he answered Ed Miliband’s familiar charge that the government has tax cuts for the rich. “We are raising more money for the rich,” the Prime Minister exclaimed.

This classic Freudian slip is accurately reported in the on line version of Hansard, though Downing Street may yet see to it that it is not in the printed edition available tomorrow.

The quote is about half way down this page.

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House of Commons: HANSARD

Today’s Commons debates – Wednesday 12 December 2012

Edward Miliband:“I must say, I have heard everything when the boy from the Bullingdon club lectures people on bullying. Absolutely extraordinary. Have you wrecked a restaurant recently?

The Prime Minister does not want to talk about the facts, but let us give him another one. He is hitting working families, and the richest people in our society will get a massive tax cut next April—an average of £107,000 each for people earning over £1 million. Is he the only person left in the country who cannot see the fundamental injustice of giving huge tax cuts to the richest while punishing those in work on the lowest pay?”

The Prime Minister:“The tax take for the richest under this Government will be higher in every year than it was for any year when the right hon. Gentleman was in government. He has obviously got a short memory, because I explained to him last week that under his plans for the 50p tax rate, millionaires paid £7 billion less in tax than they did previously. The point of raising taxes is to pay for public services. We are raising more money for the rich, but where he is really so profoundly wrong is in the choice that he has decided to make. The facts are these: over the last five years, people in work have seen their incomes go up by 10%, and people out of work have seen their incomes go up by 20%. At a time when people accept a pay freeze we should not be massively increasing benefits massively, yet that is what he wants to do. A party that is not serious about controlling welfare is not serious about controlling the deficit either.”

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| Why do journalists and media companies pretend the battle between Israel and Hamas is an even one?

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Why do journalists and media companies pretend the battle between Israel and Hamas is an even one? ~ MARK STEEL, The Independent.

On one side you’ve got three generations of a family wiped out. On the other, a woman’s got to ring Autoglass. And we act like this is a battle whose fate is in the balance!

To start with, why do the news channels ask Tony Blair for his advice on conflict in the Middle East? It’s like asking Gary Glitter for advice on what to do about Jimmy Savile.

But somehow it fits with the rest of the coverage. A report yesterday morning began with the sentence: “Rockets have continued to be fired from both sides…” Then, to illustrate this, we saw a demolished building in Gaza in which 11 people had perished, and a woman in Israel standing next to her car with a smashed windscreen. Which goes to show everyone’s suffering, what with three generations of a family getting wiped out on one side, and a woman having to ring Autoglass on the other. Honestly, they’re all as bad as each other.

By tomorrow, a spokesman for Israel will be on the news channels saying: “No other country would put up with this. We have citizens worried about losing no claims bonuses. If we don’t flatten their cities, what will we have to put up with next? Broken wing mirrors? Dents in passenger doors? Have you tried getting body repairs in Tel Aviv at short notice? So we have no choice but to destroy a hospital.”

Then we’ll see the funeral for the Palestinians, followed by the car owner wailing “O my beautiful laminated darling” as her windscreen gets tipped into a bin.

The reason so many get killed, says Benjamin Netanyahu, is that Hamas “hides behind civilians”. Because it’s the duty of anyone who gets assassinated to make sure they’re in a clear, open space at all times so the cruise missile aimed at them doesn’t bump into anyone else. That’s basic health and safety, that is.

But Hamas have become even more cunning in this conflict, because the commander the Israelis were aiming at in the building in which those 11 civilians were killed wasn’t there at all. At least if he’d bothered to be where the Israelis thought he was, the civilians would have died for a reason. Now, because he had the cheek to NOT hide behind civilians, they’ve been killed for nothing. There’s no end to their devilish methods is there?

But some Israelis are working for a solution. For example ex-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s son, Gilad, wrote in The Jerusalem Post: “To accomplish victory, you need to achieve what the other side can’t bear. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.”

Even if they did drop a nuclear bomb, Netanyahu would say: “The reason so many were killed is Hamas hid Gaza behind its civilians. If they’d moved Gaza to somewhere safe like Greenland, the population would hardly notice a thing, but, as usual, Hamas cared only about propaganda.”

Then The Jerusalem Post would report “We’ve done Gaza a huge favour. Now none of their vehicles can move, so they’re spared the misery of trying to repair a broken windscreen.”

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