In November 1993, I was on a mission. At the age of 21, I wanted to change the world, starting with Birzeit University, the second largest Palestinian university in the West Bank, situated near Ramallah, in the heart of the occupied territories.

Back then I had made a name for myself with my nationalist poetry and my first poetry collection was published a year earlier in Gaza. It was called The Alphabets of Decision. Each assortment of verses started with a letter in the Arabic alphabet, going in order. “It was time for the poor and peasants of Palestine to articulate their political agenda, rejecting the entire culture of political defeat,” I wrote something to that effect in the introduction.

Birzeit was my platform and my audience quickly multiplied. My last performance was in front of a crowd of thousands, who cheered, chanted and, once I concluded my call for rebellion against Oslo’s “Gaza-Jericho First” agreement, and the assured defeat it heralded, we marched outside the campus, only to be greeted with Israeli army bullets and tear gas.

A powerful new film on what's wrong with the U.S. media is now being screened around the country. It's called Shadows of Liberty and you can set up a screening of it as part of an upcoming international week of actions for whistleblowers called Stand Up For Truth. Or you can buy the DVD or catch it on Link TV. (Here in Charlottesville I'll be speaking at the event, May 19, 7 p.m. at The Bridge.)

Judith Miller is on a rehabilitative book tour; the Washington Post recently reported that a victim of Baltimore police murder broke his own spine; and recently leaked emails from the State Department asked Sony to entertain us into proper war support. The proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner was just blocked, for now, but the existence of those mega-monopolies in their current form is at the root of the problem, according to Shadows of Liberty.

When you book some dates at a recording studio, it’s fairly common practice for the engineer to ask you what bands you sound like. It isn’t intended as an insult to your originality, it’s just them making sure the right microphones or whatnot are available. An engineer friend of mine periodically exhibits frustration with bands that insist that they absolutely don’t sound like anybody else. It is these bands, he says, that 99 times out of 100 sound exactly like someone else.
  And that’s a pretty good rule of thumb, in music and perhaps in life generally. I would expect that it’s actually a fairly widespread belief, even among degenerate Free Press readers. But humor me for a second, folks, while I review a record from a band that honest-to-God doesn’t sound like anybody else.
  A year and a half ago I did a concert review of a band called the Devil Doves, who I stumbled into following a Blue Jackets game. They’ve finally gotten around to putting out an eponymous debut album, which is, like, fantastic. And also very hard to adequately explain.

Seven prominent national security whistleblowers Monday called for a number of wide-ranging reforms — including passage of the “Surveillance State Repeal Act,” which would repeal the USA Patriot Act — in an effort to restore the Constitutionally guaranteed 4th Amendment right to be free from government spying.

Several of the whistleblowers also said that the recent lenient sentence of probation and a fine for General David Petraeus — for his providing of classified information to his mistress Paula Broadwell — underscores the double standard of justice at work in the area of classified information handling.

Speakers said Petraeus’s favorable treatment should become the standard applied to defendants who are actual national security whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Jeffrey Sterling (who has denied guilt but who nevertheless faces sentencing May 11 for an Espionage Act conviction for allegedly providing classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen).