Ejaz Asi - Information Designer from Karachi, Pakistan

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Lately the likes of Minister of Information, Durrani (bay-eemani) and Shaikh Rasheed have been condemning local media channels and have been going on and on about how great media west really has. They have been actually giving examples of CNN and other news channels in America who think of national security and interest first and give news accordingly.

Well, what do you expect from retards who have seen nothing but the Raja Bazar of Rawalpindi or GHQ of Pakistan? To see or illustrate the great free western media which is known as Corporate Media’s responsibilities and reporting news that matter, let’s read on Ten important things Americans were not told about.

The fact that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and want the president impeached, is testimony to the native intelligence and common sense of the citizens of this nation.

It sure isn’t thanks to the quality of the news Americans’re getting here in America!

1. Most Americans would like to see this president and vice president impeached and removed from office. Newsweek magazine published a scientific poll last October showing that 51 percent of us favor impeachment (including 29 percent of Republicans!), but the corporate media, which normally haven’t met a poll they won’t publish, didn’t publicize this one. And now, when the numbers supporting impeachment are surely even higher, you can’t even pay a polling outfit to ask the question. No wonder most people who favor impeachment still think they’re odd ducks.

2. There is a bill, filed in the House of Representatives on April 24 by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), calling for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney. Since it was filed, it has gained six co-sponsors, including a member of the House Democratic leadership, Rep. Janice Shakowsky (D-IL). Most major media have ignored this important story completely. Most Americans also don’t know that the Vermont State Senate voted overwhelmingly this spring to call on Congress to impeach the president.

3. The president has been declared a felon in federal court. Yet even after Federal District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled last August that President Bush and the National Security Agency were committing serial Class A felonies and were violating both the First and Fourth Amendments by spying on Americans’ communications without first obtaining warrants, Bush continued ordering the NSA to continue the patently illegal program for at least half a year. In reports on the spying program, the corporate media never mention that it has been declared a felonious activity by the federal court.

4. Fifteen Democratic state party organizations have passed impeachment resolutions calling on Democrats in Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings against the president and vice president. The most recent of these, the Democratic Party of Oklahoma, passed its resolution at the party’s annual convention on May 19. Other Democratic Party conventions, in states from Nevada and California to Massachusetts and North Carolina, have passed similar resolutions. Most have been ignored by the corporate media even in their own states.

5. Bush’s so-called “coalition of the willing” is not so willing and is not really much of a coalition either. When’s the last time you’ve heard how many countries are on board with the US in the war and occupation of Iraq? The reality? Britain, the only significant contributor of combat troops besides the U.S., is pulling out, as Italy and Spain did earlier, and many other countries, like Denmark, Lithuania and others, plan to be out of Iraq by August or at the latest December. One indication of the seriousness of situation: the Pentagon no longer lists the countries that are members of the “coalition.” The only mainstream report I’ve seen laying out this collapse in international support for Bush’s war was in USA Today last February.

6. The Homeland Security Department last year awarded Halliburton $385 million in a no-bid contract to construct prison camps designed to hold tens of thousands of unspecified prisoners in the event of domestic unrest. Meanwhile, President Bush has signed a bill altering the insurrection act so that he can declare martial rule and order active duty troops to take charge anywhere in the domestic US in the event of “public disorder.” No one in the corporate media has reported on these developments or asked the White House to explain what it’s all about.

7. There is evidence that Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, was a patron of the Washington Madam whose client book of high-class call-girls is causing many in Washington political circles—mostly Republicans it appears, who apparently need to pay for their sex—to sweat. So far no mention of the Cheney angle in the corporate media, though they’ve been having fun with the broader story of a political sex scandal. No mention either of how a brave West Point cadet a few weeks ago refused to shake Cheney’s hand on stage when the vice president was handing out this year’s diplomas at the Army’s premiere officer academy.

8. Among the “worst of the worst” of the “evildoers” captured and held as “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo were children, some of them preteens and kids who were under 15 when captured and brought to the island of Cuba–so many in fact that the military had to set up a special facility, called Camp Iguana, just for adolescent and pre-pubescent “fighters.” The corporate media have barely reported on this atrocity (the New York Times ran only one article mentioning child captives, in June 2005). The only wider coverage of this outrage came recently when the government tried to prosecute one such alleged child “terrorist”–Omar Khadr–only to have the military judge in charge toss his case out because the government had misclassified him. Khadr, we learned, was captured in 2001 in Afghanistan at the ripe age of 15, making him one of the older child captives brought to and interrogated at Guantanamo. Under international law, the U.S. was supposed to treat this and other child soldiers as victims, not as war criminals. Khadr, a Canadian by birth, instead has spent five years doing hard time in US captivity.

9. Well-researched reports on the rampant theft of both the 2000 and 2004 elections, and on Republican plans for theft of the 2008 election, such as Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again, have gone unmentioned in the corporate media. Books on the subject, like Miller’s and like Greg Palast’s best selling Armed Madhouse, have never been reviewed.

10. And of course, there’s my own book. The Case for Impeachment, despite its having sold over 20,000 copies in hardcover, and despite its having now come out in a mass-market paperback edition, in both cases printed by a mainstream publisher, St. Martin’s Press, has not received a single review in the corporate media. In this, my co-author Barbara Olshansky and I are not alone. None of the books on the impeachable crimes of this administration, including one by Nixon-era impeachment panelist and former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, and one by Judiciary Chair Rep. John Conyers, has been reviewed by a mainstream media outlet.

What we’re talking about here is nothing less than a media blackout of important stories and news.

Thanks to the internet and to the grapevine, and thanks to their basic native intelligence, most Americans seem to understand that we’re being lied to and cheated. What the media blackout of important news does manage to do, however, is keep us all thinking that we are in a minority in opposing things like illegal wars, a trampled Constitution, and stolen elections.

In fact, however, we’re actually the majority. Once we realize this, maybe we will have a movement, instead of a just nation of isolated cynics and complainers.
______________________________

DAVE LINDORFF, a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist, is co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, and now out in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

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The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angles Times have all published editorials in recent days taking the Bush administration to task for its unabashed and unequivocal support for Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.

In an editorial titled “Musharraf’s follies: When will the US hold the Pakistani president accountable for his abuse of power?” the Los Angeles Times compared the Bush administration’s support for Musharraf to the “terrible mistake” the US made in propping up three Cold War dictators who were ultimately swept from power by popular upheavals—the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

“Replace,” said the LA Times, “the words ‘reliably anti-communist’ with ‘reliable US ally in the war on terror,’ and despair at the Bush administration’s willingness to excuse heinous repression from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Azerbaijan. Worst of all is its policy toward Pakistan, where the administration refuses to distance the US from the increasingly errant autocrat Pervez Musharraf.”

Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration made no fuss in the fall of 1999 when Musharraf, then as now the chief of Pakistan’s armed services, seized power. After all, the Pentagon has enjoyed an intimate partnership with Pakistan’s military since the early 1950s and Washington’s political establishment, for almost as long, has held the military to be the chief bulwark of a “stable Pakistan.”

But the Bush administration has not just acquiesced to military rule in Pakistan. It has lavished praise and gobs of money on the Musharraf regime, declared Pakistan a “major non-NATO ally” of the US, repeatedly hailed the general as a pivotal leader in the war on terror, and proclaimed the various maneuvers he has taken to perpetuate military rule and run roughshod over the country’s constitution as steps on the road to “full democracy.”

Till now the US media has essentially peddled the administration’s line. Certainly there has been no chorus of media voices pointing out the incongruity and downright absurdity of the Bush administration’s claims to have restored democracy in Afghanistan by entrenching military rule in Pakistan.

The New York Times inadvertently admitted its only complicity when in its May 23 editorial, “Propping up the General,” it counseled the Bush administration to “use the leverage it gets from [providing Islamabad] roughly $2 billion a year in aid to encourage an early return to democratic rule.” An early return—after seven years and seven months of military dictatorship!

If sections of the press have now “discovered” that Musharraf is a despot, it is because they fear that the general is losing his grip and are anxious about the consequences for US interests and influence in Pakistan, as well as for the US’s larger strategic ambitions in South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Since March, Pakistan has been convulsed by a mounting political crisis—a crisis that has precipitated the largest anti-government protests since Musharraf seized power and that has split the legal establishment.

The trigger for this crisis was Musharraf’s sacking of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, whom the general feared could not be relied upon to rubber stamp his phony “reelection” as president. But the opposition to the trumped-up corruption case against the chief justice is fueled by the absence of democracy, neo-liberal economic policies that have resulted in deepening social inequality and economic insecurity, and Musharraf’s support for US imperialism in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq .

Desperate to stamp out the mounting challenge to his authority, Musharraf unleashed murderous violence on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan’s principal city, on May 12-13. More than 40 people were killed in two days of violence orchestrated by the thugs of the pro-Musharraf MQM in connivance with the authorities of Karachi and Sind province.

This bloodbath has only served to underscore the popular feeling that the Musharraf regime has become intolerable. As for Musharraf’s political cronies, they are publicly fighting amongst themselves as they seek to escape public opprobrium.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, has remained steadfast in its support for the general-president, issuing not a word of criticism of the Pakistani government in the wake of the violence in Karachi.

The editors of the New York Times, LA Times and Post are alarmed by what they perceive to be the Bush administration’s myopic policy of tying the fortunes of US imperialism to the hated and increasingly isolated Musharraf. Yet none of the three editorials calls for the US to repudiate Musharraf, let alone cut off relations with his government. They merely counsel Washington to broker a deal between the military and the principal bourgeois opposition parties, warning that otherwise a regime hostile to the US may ultimately come to power in Pakistan.

In fact, the Bush administration has signaled that it would like Musharraf to reach a deal with Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). But such a deal has floundered over the division of the prerogatives and spoils of office, and the Bush administration fears that without the iron fist of military rule Pakistan could become embroiled in class and ethnic conflicts menacing to US interests.

There is also, undoubtedly, concern in the Bush administration that a change of regime in Islamabad could endanger various sordid, secret operations that US military and security forces are currently carrying out in Pakistan, including the warehousing and torture of alleged terrorists and training exercises for an attack on Iran.

Whilst fear that Musharraf is stoking a popular rebellion that could threaten US interests is the principal reason sections of the press are now calling for the Bush administration to distance itself from the general and begin planning for a “post-Musharraf Pakistan,” it is not the only reason.

Put bluntly, many sections of the US establishment don’t think they are getting their money’s worth from Musharraf. That is to say, they do not think he has been sufficiently pliant in acting on US demands that his government root out Taliban operatives who have found refuge in Pakistan’s border areas with Afghanistan and violently suppress a growing indigenous tribal/Taliban insurgency in north and western Pakistan.

All three editorials combine complaints about Musharraf’s authoritarian rule with sniping that the general has proven a poor bargain for US imperialism. “Congress,” declared the New York Times, “must insist that future payments [to Pakistan] be linked to actual counterterrorist activity and results, as some American military officials now recommend.”

The Pakistani people have suffered horrendously under the yoke of a string of US armed and sponsored military regimes. The regime of General Ayub Khan (1958-69) ruthlessly suppressed the working class and toilers, while pursuing an industrialization policy that enriched a tiny elite, the so-called 20 families. US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger encouraged his successor, Yaya Khan, in mounting a campaign of bloody repression against the Bangla-speaking people of East Pakistan (Bangladesh), who had been denied their basis rights within the Pakistan federation. This campaign resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and caused millions more to seek refuge in India.

But in many ways it was the dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq (1977-88) that has proven the most destructive to the social fabric of Pakistan. The US made Zia’s regime the pivot of its strategy of fanning, in alliance with the Saudi regime, an Islamic fundamentalist rebellion against Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet government and ensnaring the Soviet Red Army in a counterinsurgency war. Pakistan’s role in arming and organizing the Islamicist insurgency in Afghanistan dove-tailed with Zia’s own efforts to use Islam to legitimize his regime and to promote the religious right as a bulwark against the working class and all progressive thought.

Two decades on, Pakistan continues to lives with the consequences of the US-backed dictator Zia’s Afghan adventure and promotion of Islamicist politics—everything from deep and oftentimes violent cleavages between different Muslim sects and a widespread drug and Kalashnikov culture, to the existence of a well-organized and financed network of Islamicist institutions, political parties and militias.

“One reason” General Musharraf “is unpopular, conceded the Washington Post, “is his alliance with the United States.”

Yet the PPP, Nawaz Sharif’s PML (N) and the rest of the bourgeois opposition clutch to the coattails of the US, hoping—seven-and-a-half-years of rebuffs notwithstanding—that they can convince the Bush administration they can better serve the US’s predatory interests than Musharraf.

The venal Pakistani bourgeoisie has always sought to gain money and geopolitical influence by serving imperialist interests. Before Washington, it looked to London.

But the opposition’s appeals to Washington are above all grounded in its fears that any popular mobilization against the Musharraf regime could escape its control, undermine the military, and become a threat to the bourgeois order. Second only to the Pakistani military itself do the Benzair Bhuttos and Nawaz Sharifs look to the imperialist powers, and above all the US, as the bulwark of their own privileges, of a socioeconomic order that condemns the vast majority of Pakistanis to a life of poverty, ignorance and squalor.

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