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Media Spin can Separate War from Death

A dozen years after the Gulf War, public perceptions of it are now very helpful to the White House. That's part of a timeworn pattern. Illusions about previous wars make the next one seem acceptable. As George Orwell observed: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."

It's not unusual to hear journalists and politicians say that the Gulf War had few casualties. Considering the magnitude of media spin, that myth is hardly surprising. "When the air war began in January 1991," recalls Patrick J. Sloyan, who covered the Gulf War as a Newsday correspondent, "the media was fed carefully selected footage by (Gen. Norman) Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and (Gen. Colin) Powell in Washington, DC. Most of it was downright misleading."

In an essay written as a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation this year, Sloyan describes "limitations imposed on reporters on the battlefield" in 1991: "Under rules developed by (Defense Secretary Dick) Cheney and Powell, journalists were not allowed to move without military escorts. All interviews had to be monitored by military public affairs

BDSM

The weapons inspection team massing in Baghdad under the indomitable Hans Blix is possibly the first such unit to be graced, if that's the word, with an experienced torturer. The Washington Post set the ball rolling last Thursday with a story by John Grimaldi to the effect that Harvey John "Jack" McGeorge of Woodbridge, Va., then in New York waiting to be sent to Iraq as a munitions analyst, is a figure of consequence in the world of BDSM, aka bondage, domination and sado-masochism.

Co-founder and past president of Black Rose, a Washington-area pansexual S&M group, and the former chairman of the board of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, McGeorge is also a founding officer of the Leather Leadership Conference Inc., which "produces training sessions for current and potential leaders of the sadomasochism/leather/fetish community," according to its Web site.

Grimaldi noted that "several Web sites describe McGeorge's training seminars, which involve various acts conducted with knives and ropes." McGeorge was interviewed in person by Blix and joined the team as a temporary staff member in December 2001.

Violations of United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights

We feel that the United States is violation of the following articles, for the following reasons:

Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

If Commercial Radio Actually Trafficked in News

Listeners don't get much news these days if they tune into commercial radio stations. Coverage of national and global events is scant at best, while local news -- once the pride of many AM radio stations -- is now an endangered species. The remaining community news is usually the "rip and read" variety from wire services.

But let's give credit where it's due. In the United States, thousands of radio outlets are doing a good job of gathering one particular type of news. The coverage is often meticulous and dependable as stations devote substantial resources to providing reliable up-to-the-minute information: If you want the latest news about traffic, in all kinds of weather, turn on the radio.

Using an array of helicopters, mobile phones and other assorted information relay systems, radio stations keep listeners posted on vehicular fender-benders, glitches, snarls and alternative routes. Where I live, a local "all news" CBS affiliate -- owned by the giant Infinity broadcasting conglomerate -- hypes "traffic and weather together" every 10 minutes, round the clock. And the quality of the traffic reports is impressive.

Justice

AUSTIN, Texas -- Judge William Wayne Justice, the man who brought the U.S. Constitution to Texas for 30 years, is retired. That makes a lot of stupid clods happy, including most in the Legislature, since they have never forgiven Justice for desegregating the schools. But the rest of us lost a towering public figure, a man whose record on the bench is so magnificent and whose personal conduct is so irreproachable that he is, verily, a secular saint.

(That'll cause him to choke on his coffee. Modesty is one of his many virtues.)

I know it's a painfully obvious point, but if ever a man lived up to his name, William Wayne Justice does. His decisions have changed our racial relations, our prisons and our juvenile detention facilities, improved the ability of a poor man to get justice, and given us "one man, one vote" in our elections, and that's just a small part of the record.

Justice is so revered in the world of the law that as a designated iconoclast, I naturally feel called upon to puncture his reputation. Personally, I think his single greatest trait is the ability to listen to poisonous piffle with a straight face.

Big Brother's been around along time

So let's join Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Edward C. "Pete" Aldridge at a recent Pentagon press briefing, where he's addressing concerns about the Pentagon's bold new plan to have Admiral John Poindexter personally review exactly what you bought in Safeway last week and all the dirty movies you ordered up in Motel 6 last time you were on the road.

Poindexter, you'll recall, is the bespectacled seadog who, as one of Reagan's National Security chieftains, instrumented another bold effort in synergy, later known as Iran/Contra, which involved shuffling money and guns along the axis of evil from Iran to the Nicaraguan contras in defiance of U.S. laws at the time. Poindexter got nailed for lying to Congress but was later pardoned.

Answers to your questions

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following letter was submitted in response to an article in the Fall 2002 issue of the The Free Press: Questions that won’t be asked about Iraq.

To those of you who for whatever reason deem yourselves holier than thou, I am going to answer some of your questions. I don't expect you to read this and doubt seriously if you would understand it if you did. Liberals always ask questions that they really don't want answers to, but here goes. Let me preface this that I am a 50 yr old male and consider myself as a conservative, not necessarily a republican, and these are my opinions. Oh, by the way some of my answers are questions that I am sure no self respecting liberal has the integrity to answer!!!

1. Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War>> No we did not bomb them because we knew it would lead to virtual destruction of civilization

2. which just confirms that there is no real threat?>> What leads you to claim there is no threat?

SATIRE: Leaked White House Transcript: Bush, Cheney, Rove & Ridge (1)

EXCLUSIVE: THE FOLLOWING TRANSCRIPT CAME UNANNOUNCED TO THE E-MAIL ADDRESS OF THE COLUMBUS FREE PRESS. WE MAKE NO DEFINITIVE STATEMENT AS TO ITS TRUE ORIGIN:

SECRETARY RIDGE: Good Afternoon, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Tom, how are you.

SECRETARY RIDGE: I'm fine, sir. And how are you Dick? Karl?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Fine, Tom.

KARL ROVE: We're great, Tom. Especially since that election. Pretty much Katy Bar the Door now, don't you think.

SECRETARY RIDGE: You betcha, Karl. It's all over but the shouting, and given what we've done to Nancy P. there won't be much of that either.

VICE-PRESIDENT CHENEY: Yeah, gotta hand it to you on that one, Karl. One minute that Pelosi broad is a raving liberal, the next she's a whiny little lap dog.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, hey guys, yeah but what's with little Tommy Daschle over there in the Senate. All of a sudden he's yapping again about the war. What do we gotta do, send him some more anthrax?

Unilateral Power -- By Any Other Name

Ever since the U.N. Security Council adopted its resolution about Iraq on Nov. 8, American politicians and journalists have been hailing the unanimous vote as a huge victory for international cooperation instead of unilateral action.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was close to ecstatic. "For a brief, shining moment last Friday," he wrote, "the world didn't seem like such a crazy place." The United Nations had proven its worth -- by proving its value to Washington. Among the benefits: "The Bush team discovered that the best way to legitimize its overwhelming might -- in a war of choice -- was not by simply imposing it, but by channeling it through the U.N."

But if the United Nations, serving as a conduit of American power, is now worthwhile because it offers the best way for the United States to "legitimize its overwhelming might," how different is that from unilateralism?

Behind all the media euphemisms and diplomat-speak, a cold hard reality about Resolution 1441 is already history: The resolution was fashioned to provide important fig leaves for domestic politics and foreign

Total Information Awareness

AUSTIN, Texas -- Readin' the newspapers anymore is eerily reminiscent of all those bad novels warning of the advent of fascism in America. "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis was a bad book, and the genre shades off into right-wing paranoia about black helicopters, including the memorably awful "Turner Diaries." I don't use the f-word myself -- in fact, for years, I've made fun of liberals who hear the approach of jackbooted fascism around every corner. But to quote a real authority on the subject, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini.

Paul Krugman recently quoted "the quite apolitical website Corporate Governance, which matter-of-factly remarks, ‘Given the power of corporate lobbyists, government control often equates to de facto corporate control anyway.'" It's gettin' downright creepy out there.

The most hair-raising news du jour is about Total Information Awareness, a giant government computer spy system being set up to spy on Americans and run by none other than John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame.

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