Media

George Orwell and modern media

The BBC, for example, refers to the armed opposition in Syria as “rebels” – a word which has a subliminal influence on the unsuspecting reader or listener as it implies ‘freedom fighters’. But in Mali, the BBC refers to Islamist fighters there as ‘militants’ which, of course, has a whole different connotation as it conjures up thoughts of extremists and violence.

The reference by the BBC to ‘rebels’ in Syria and ‘militants’ in Mali is not a case of semantics.

Rather, it is, as the foreign diplomat told me over lunch, exactly in line with how the British government sees the conflicts in Syria and Mali – in Syria, a case of freedom fighters versus a dictatorship, and in Mali, a case of al-Qaeda-linked fighters versus the legitimate government of the country.

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Massacres That Matter – ‘Responsibility To Protect’ In Egypt, Libya And Syria – Part 1

The ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), formulated at the 2005 UN World Summit, is based on the idea that state sovereignty is not a right but a responsibility. Where offending states fail to live up to this responsibility by inflicting genocide, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity on their own people, the international community has a responsibility to act. Economic sanctions and the use of military force can thus be employed as ‘humanitarian intervention’.

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Exclusive Glenn Greenwald Interview: “I Won’t Be Kept Out of My Country for Doing Journalism!”

The goal of the United States, which they are rapidly approaching fulfilling, is to be able not just to collect and monitor everybody’s electronic communications, but to store them for increasingly long periods of time. They are building a massive facility in Utah that has as its purpose storage of electronic data that they are collecting. They are collecting electronic data in such large quantities that they are incapable of storing it for very long, and they want to make sure that they can keep it for as long as they want.

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Before we Bomb Syria, Shouldn’t we Seek Proof of Guilt?

In a criminal trial, doubt simply has to be reasonable to prevent conviction. But where has reason gone in this episode? The ridiculous William Hague, who seems to have become sabre-rattler in chief just as this country has sunk to the level of a third-rate military power, talks and acts as if the matter is settled. Our Prime Minister has abandoned one of his holidays ( and who can blame him? It appears to be taking place solely for PR reasons) to hurry back to London for a meeting of the grandiosely-titled ‘National Security Council’. Not only is this name copied from the Americans. It is a body which we managed very well without for many centuries of free and independent (and secure) existence. Do these people think they are in an episode of ‘The West Wing’, that seductive drama of power-pornography, in which minor politicians imagine themselves as mighty political hunks?

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What Manning Revealed

The revelations below were compiled for the book in March 2011–many others followed, including the important Gitmo files (see my piece about them) in April 2011. Here is a NYT take on just part of those Gitmo files: “What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.” So even this accounting below is far from complete.

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Cameron should probe Miranda detention, return data

It is clear that the police officers who questioned Miranda did not suspect him of terrorism, as they focused their interrogation on Greenwald’s, Poitras’s, and the Guardian’s reporting on state surveillance programs. Rather, it appears they abused the law to circumvent routine safeguards of the confidentiality of sources and to obtain access to journalistic material. The U.S. has confirmed that it was notified of Miranda’s detention, which suggests a coordinated effort.

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Photojournalist Kate Brooks Reveals the Human Cost of War

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the then 24-year-old photographer Kate Brooks set out to document the impact of war on civilians. Since then, she has covered major conflicts throughout the Middle East and Afghanistan, including the American invasion of Iraq, the 2006 Lebanon War, and more recently the Libyan revolution. “When it comes to military force and going into conflicts, people are very short sighted about what it’s actually going to mean,” says Brooks. “Civilians are always the ones who pay the biggest price in any conflict.”

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A note from Roger Waters: To My Colleagues in Rock and Roll

Nigel Kennedy the virtuoso British violinist and violist, at The Recent Promenade Concerts at The Albert Hall in London, mentioned that Israel is apartheid. Nothing unusual there you might think, then one Baroness Deech, (Nee Fraenkel) disputed the fact that Israel is an apartheid state and prevailed upon the BBC to censor Kennedy’s performance by removing his statement. Baroness Deech produced not one shred of evidence to support her claim and yet the BBC, non political, supposedly, acting solely on Baroness Deech’s say so, suddenly went all 1984 on us.

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