Bush Touts Successes in Rebuilding Iraq
Posted Saturday, June 21, 2003 by symbolman

By JENNIFER LOVEN - Associated Press Writer - June 21, 2003, 1:44 PM

Ten weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad, President Bush portrayed U.S. goals in Iraq -- from capturing chemical and biological weapons to restoring basic services -- as works in progress with a few early successes.

"First, we are working to make Iraq secure for its citizens and our military," Bush said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "Second, we are working to improve the lives of the Iraqi people after three decades of tyranny and oppression."

Despite the president's generally positive status report, the administration has faced a growing list of questions. ---

Weeks of sniping and ambushes around Iraq have resulted in the deaths of more than four dozen American soldiers, and Iraqis are frustrated about a lack of electricity and other necessities and a delay in self-government. --->> More

Take Back the Media has a question for you Mr Bush. ARE YOU ON CRACK? DO you seriously think that the American people are going to believe these LIES? Read a newspaper - even the ones you own are publishing the facts that at least ONE or MORE US Soldiers are DYING EVERY SINGLE DAY from your previous LIES that sold this Occupation for the oil companies using our very own troops as "Venture Capital". Support the Troops - Impeach BUSH!!

American military bans BBC crew from Guantanamo Bay for talking to inmates
Posted Friday, June 20, 2003 by vgdesign

By Vikram Dodd in Guantanamo Bay, The Guardian

The US military clashed with British journalists yesterday at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay after inmates shouted to a BBC Panorama team who had been invited to tour the maximum security camp.

As the journalists walked through camp four, detainees shouted that they wanted to tell their story and the US soldiers immediately halted the tour, ordering everyone out.

About 680 people, including around nine Britons, are being held in Guantanamo Bay naval base in US-occupied Cuba, as part of the Bush administration's war against terror.

An audio recording made by the Panorama team was seized by US forces and the BBC reporter Vivienne White was banished to a section of the bay away from Camp Delta. >>More

Galloway seeks inquiry after papers exposed as fakes
Posted Friday, June 20, 2003 by vgdesign

By Kevin Maguire, The Guardian

George Galloway yesterday demanded a government inquiry after documents alleging that he took more than $10m (£6.3m) from Saddam Hussein were exposed as forgeries.

The suspended Labour MP claimed he was the victim of a conspiracy and rejected an apology from the Christian Science Monitor, threatening to extend his legal action to British newspapers, including the Sun, which repeated the Boston-based title's accusations.

Mr Galloway, who is expected to issue a writ next week against the Daily Telegraph over further allegations - based on separate Baghdad documents - that he received £375,000 a year from UN oil-for-food deals, said he had been smeared because of his opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

"I want to know who forged these documents. I am calling on the prime minister, as head of the co-occupying power in Iraq, to investigate how this conspiracy came about," the prominent anti-war campaigner said. >>More

The FCC's Strange Non-Profit
Posted Friday, June 20, 2003 by vgdesign

FCC Chairman Michael Powell runs venture capital firm that claims it’s private
By Bob Williams, The Center for Public Integrity

A quasi-governmental corporation set up to fund telecommunications company start-ups is spending nearly as much on executive salaries and overhead as it is investing in companies, a Center for Public Integrity investigation has found.

The Telecommunications Development Fund was created by Congress in 1996 to kick-start small communications firms in hopes of spurring innovation and competition. Instead, the six-year-old fund has paid more than $7 million in executive salaries and other expenses while investing only $9.4 million of seed money in start-ups.

“It may be totally legal, but it smells to high heaven,” says Stuart Gilman, president of the Ethics Resource Center, a Washington group that advises businesses and non-profits on ethics issues. Gilman was a top official at the federal government’s Office of Government Ethics from 1988 to 2001.

The fund itself is the bizarre offspring of government and industry. There’s even dispute among government officials as to whether it is a government entity subject to public scrutiny or a private company. The fund gets its money from interest on deposits paid by large telecommunications companies that bid for licenses in spectrum auctions.

There are a number of reasons why the fund is the subject of some concern: >>More

Senate Begins Process to Reverse New F.C.C. Rules on Media
Posted Friday, June 20, 2003 by vgdesign

By STEPHEN LABATON, New York Times

Moving with unusual speed, the Senate today began the process of reversing the recent decision by federal regulators to loosen media ownership rules and enable the nation's largest newspaper and broadcasting conglomerates to grow even larger.

A broadly bipartisan group of the Senate Commerce Committee approved legislation by voice vote to restore the earlier limits on the number of television stations a network can own. The bill would also restore most of the restrictions that have long prevented a company from owning both a newspaper and a radio station or television station in the same city.

One provision of the bill would go beyond reinstating the previous ownership rules by forcing a number of big radio companies, including Clear Channel Communications, to divest themselves of some of their stations.

The Senate vote was a clear rebuke of Michael K. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who was the architect of the deregulation. >>More

Christian Science Monitor: Galloway papers deemed forgeries
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

Iraq experts, ink-aging tests discredit documents behind earlier Monitor story.

On April 25, 2003, this newspaper ran a story about documents obtained in Iraq that alleged Saddam Hussein's regime had paid a British member of Parliament, George Galloway, $10 million over 11 years to promote its interests in the West.

An extensive Monitor  investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers detailed in the April 25 piece are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries.

The Arabic text of the papers is inconsistent with known examples of Baghdad bureaucratic writing, and is replete with problematic language, says a leading US-based expert on Iraqi government documents. Signature lines and other format elements differ from genuine procedure.

The two "oldest" documents - dated 1992 and 1993 - were actually written within the past few months, according to a chemical analysis of their ink. The newest document - dated 2003 - appears to have been written at approximately the same time.

"At the time we published these documents, we felt they were newsworthy and appeared credible, although we did explicitly state in our article that we could not guarantee their authenticity," says Monitor  editor Paul Van Slambrouck. "It is important to set the record straight: We are convinced the documents are bogus. We apologize to Mr. Galloway and to our readers." >>More

Iraq Indymedia Site Launched
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

By Anne Geske, Utne.com

Activists and journalists in Iraq and volunteers in Bristol, UK, have established Iraq’s first Indy Media website, Almuajaha.com, as “a publishing forum for grassroots media activity in Iraq, Baghdad, and other cities for anyone who wants to participate.” The site can be read in English and Arabic. Al Muajaha’s newspaper, the Iraqi Witness, is expected to be published from Baghdad with no ties to U.S.-sponsored media.>>More

>>Iraq Indymedia

John Pilger:  Bush's Vietnam
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

Once more, we hear that America is being "sucked into a quagmire". The rapacious adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are going badly wrong.

America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are unravelling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has been forced out of government and is now in constant fear of her life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private armies of America's "friends", the warlords whom Washington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability.

"We are in a combat zone the moment we leave this base," an American colonel told me at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day, several times a day." When I said that surely he had come to liberate and protect the people, he belly-laughed.
...
In Iraq, scene of the second "great victory", there are two open secrets. The first is that the "terrorists" now besieging the American occupation force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed their enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's investigation, 19 March 2003, www.guardian. co.uk).

The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied. >>More

OCCUPATION: Iraqis Were Set to Vote, but U.S. Wielded a Veto
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

By DAVID ROHDE, New York Times

NAJAF, Iraq, June 18 — American marines had built makeshift wooden ballot boxes. An Army reserve unit from Green Bay, Wis., had conducted a voter registration drive. And Iraqi political candidates had blanketed the city with colorful fliers outlining their election platforms — restore electricity, rehabilitate the old quarter, repave roads.

But last week, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the American military occupation in Iraq, unilaterally canceled what American officials here said would have been the first such election in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Overruling the local American military commander, Mr. Bremer decreed that conditions in Najaf were not appropriate for an election.

Several days later, American marines stormed the offices of an obscure local political party here, arrested four members and jailed them for four days. The offense, the Americans said, was a violation of a new edict by Mr. Bremer that makes it illegal to incite violence against forces occupying Iraq. >>More

Lipton Iced Tea Dixie Chicks Ad is being pulled
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

By Hillary Chura, AdAge.com

An ad for Lipton Iced Tea that features the Dixie Chicks is being pulled, according to people familiar with the situation. The country music group's lead singer in March during a concert was made comments critical of President Bush in the days leading up to the country's war with Iraq.

A spokeswoman for Unilever, which jointly markets Lipton with PepsiCo in the Pepsi-Lipton Tea Partnership, would not comment on why the Dixie Chicks ad is not running but said, "Lipton has a number of different advertising and promotional plans in the works and has opted for now to run the commercials that currently are on air."

It's uncertain when or if the ad will run. The ads were to have debuted in May to coincide with the group's first world tour in three years. >>More

>>Lipton's Consumer Response Center

Senate Committee Votes to Roll Back Media Ownership Ruling
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

By Todd Shields, MediaWeek

The Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday moved to reverse much of the Federal Communications Commission's recent relaxation of media ownership rules, casting bipartisan votes to restore limits on TV network size and prohibitions on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations.

As part of the same bill, senators voted to force radio companies to sell stations that exceed new local market limits proposed by the FCC, even if the stations were legally acquired under the looser guidelines in effect until the FCC's June 2 ownership decisions.

The action sends the issue to the Senate floor, where supporters are hopeful of passage. No legislative action is final without concurrence of the House, and it appeared the measure faced a tougher road there. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), chair of the Commerce Committee that would handle the legislation, has voiced support for the FCC's action.>>More

>>Contact Billy Tauzin

Seumas Milne: The right to resist
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

Armed opposition to the occupation of Iraq will continue until the US and Britain withdraw.

It would have been hard to predict in advance that the US and British occupation of Iraq could go so spectacularly wrong so quickly. The words of the historian Tacitus about the Roman invasion of Scotland in the first century AD might just as well have been written about our latter-day Rome's latest imperial adventure: "They create a wasteland and they call it peace."

More than two months after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq is sinking deeper into chaos and insecurity, as US forces lash out at the Iraqi resistance, which is now killing an average of one American soldier a day. Another was shot dead in Baghdad yesterday, while US troops killed more protesters - as they have repeatedly done since the massacres of demonstrators in Mosul and Falluja in April.
...
It is an almost universally accepted principle that a people occupied by a foreign power has the right to use armed force to resist - though whether force will be the best tactic is another matter. It was the crudest self-delusion on the part of the invading states to imagine that because most Iraqis wanted an end to the Saddam regime they would accept the imposition of a foreign occupation to replace it.

The situation seems bound to get worse, as the resistance fights a war of attrition and the occupation forces win new recruits for the guerillas with brutal and misdirected counter-attacks. >>More

"Bremer is a Baathist":  In volatile Iraq, US curbs press
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by vgdesign

By Ilene R. Prusher, The Christian Science Monitor

... L. Paul Bremer, the top US official here, says a new edict prohibiting the local media from inciting attacks on other Iraqis - and on the coalition forces - is not meant to put a stopper on the recently uncorked freedom of speech.

"It is intended to stop ... people who are trying to incite political violence, and people who are succeeding in inciting political violence here, particularly against women," Bremer said at a press conference Tuesday.

Iraqi journalists are not taking kindly to the restrictions. Among the scores of new publications that have flooded Iraq's newsstands since the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the broadsheet As-Saah  is one of the most widely read. In a front-page editorial Wednesday, the paper's senior editor let readers know what he thought of the country's liberators:
"Bremer is a Baathist," the headline reads.

In an interview, editor Ni'ma Abdulrazzaq says the press edict decreed by Bremer lays out restrictions similar to those under Mr. Hussein. Not long ago, an uppity writer could easily be accused of being an agent for America or Israel. "Now they put plastic bags on our heads, throw us to the ground, and accuse us of being agents of Saddam Hussein," the editorial reads. "In other words, if you're not with America, you're with Saddam."

"Mr. Bremer, you remind us of Saddam," the column continues. "We've waited a long time to be free. Now you want us to be slaves." >>More

Shock and Jaw: Climate of a New Blacklist?
Posted Thursday, June 19, 2003 by symbolman

Garofalo Says No Thanks - by Ellen Hawkes

At 5-foot-1, Janeane Garofalo is a small target, but she looms large in the crosshairs of conservative television talk show hosts, radio shock jocks and rabid right-wing websites. While the U.S. marched to war, the actor and stand-up comedian opposed a preemptive attack on Iraq, urging diplomacy and cooperation with the United Nations instead. Given the military victory in Iraq and the triumphalism that permeates the airwaves, was she sorry for earlier predictions of the war's dire consequences? Not by a long shot.

"Why should I apologize?" she said when we spent an afternoon together at a coffeehouse near her Greenwich Village apartment. "We have more looting than liberation. We protected the Ministry of Oil but not the treasures of the National Museum. We have photographs of a statue brought down and an Iraqi kissing asoldier, but meanwhile where are the weapons of mass destruction, where is democracy? So, no, I'm not apologizing, and I'm not letting them shut me up."
>> More

Did we mention that Janeane is a member of our Advisory Board here at Take Back the Media? We are proud and honored to have her association and we are behind her 100% - She's been a great help to all of us and is a true patriot. If anyone should apologise it should be BUSH. Nearly 200 american soldiers alone, not to mention civilians for his LIES.

Crying All The Way To The Bank: Media giants bemoan FCC ruling
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by vgdesign

By JOHN GORMAN, Cleveland Free Times

Last week was a rotten one for Viacom and Clear Channel. Both companies claim they got a royal screwing from the latest round of FCC media deregulation. Viacom COO Mel Karmizan said he was "majorly disappointed." Karmazin was counting on the elimination of the dual-network rule. He had plans in place for the Viacom-owned CBS-TV network division to buy NBC. Karmazin was also short-changed by the FCC's limiting of the TV ownership cap to 45 percent of the country.

"I don't think there should be any cap at all. It should be more like radio," Mel said.

Mark Mays, Clear Channel COO, president and number one son of CEO Lowry Mays, issued a terse statement, which read in part: "Just ten years ago, nearly 60 percent of the nation's radio stations were operating in the red, cutting news budgets and laying off employees. Deregulation changed all that. But instead of letting radio stations find better and more innovative ways to serve their listeners, the FCC is intent on turning the clock back to a time when the industry was incapable of providing consumers the variety of programming that it does today."
Yes, you read that right.

Clear Channel lobbied to eliminate all caps on radio ownership. In some smaller markets, they already own all the radio stations, and what's wrong with that? >>More

Just another day in Baghdad
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by vgdesign

By Rory McCarthy in Baghdad, The Guardian

The demonstrating Iraqis have no work, no money and are desperate. Two are shot dead. Nearby, an American soldier guarding a gas station is casually killed.

Hussein Saber shook with fury as he lay on a dirty hospital bed last night and told the story of another day in Baghdad, a city torn apart by killings, misunderstanding and the startling failures of America's military occupation.

Yesterday Hussein, 33, should have collected a $50 (£30) emergency payment which all Iraq's now unemployed soldiers are due to receive. The money did not arrive and so he and hundreds of other frustrated young men poured towards the gates of the US-led authority to protest.

Within minutes he was shot in his right side by a young, nervous American soldier. Hussein survived but two other Iraqis standing next to him in the crowd were killed.

Just a few miles away in the centre of the city, gunmen in a passing car shot dead one American soldier and wounded another as they guarded a propane gas station. >>More

[Bush still lying, people still dying in our very own occupied territory.]

Reason to Deceive: WMD Lies Could Be the New Watergate
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by vgdesign

Press Clips by Cynthia Cotts, The Village Voice

If media companies want to boost ratings and credibility at the same time, they should follow the lead of New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Nicholas D. Kristof and make weapons of mass destruction the top story of the summer. Not only have President Bush and his administration exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had WMD, but now that news of their lies has leaked out, the pro-war camp is spinning like mad. The odds of exposing a major cover-up are looking very good indeed.
...
If wishful thinking fails, hawks can always fall back on blaming the messenger. In a June 10 op-ed in the New York Post, the Heritage Foundation's Peter Brookes suggested that if intelligence analysts felt bullied by the Bush administration to cook the evidence, it was their fault for not resisting the pressure. The same day, the Post's John Podhoretz weighed in with the warning that anyone who accuses Bush of planting WMD evidence will be exceeding the bounds of "taste, logic, good sense or reason."

The most cynical strategy involves expressing disbelief that our leaders are capable of lying. "Does anybody believe that President Bush [and his military brass] ordered U.S. soldiers outside Baghdad to don heavy, bulky chemical-weapon suits in scorching heat . . . to maintain a charade?" wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post on June 13.
...
In retrospect, the Bush administration's most publicized war stories have all been the products of smoke and mirrors. Contrary to the initial hype, the Hussein "decapitation strike" turned up no bodies and no bunkers. Chemical Ali walked out alive. Jessica Lynch was never shot, stabbed, or tortured by Iraqis. And despite all the hot tips Ahmad Chalabi spoon-fed to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the WMD search teams have not found a single silver bullet or smoking gun.

The war on Iraq is a Byzantine puzzle that begins and ends with a lie. The media have an obligation to expose it. >>More

The myth of Robert Byrd and the USS Abraham Lincoln
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by vgdesign

By Brendan Nyhan, Spinsanity

In what can only be described as a collective hallucination, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has been described by a wide range of journalists and commentators as having criticized the cost of President Bush's speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier returning from the Middle East.

The reality is that Byrd never mentioned the cost of the carrier event, at which Bush dramatically arrived on a Navy jet; the Democrats who most prominently raised those questions were Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and John Conyers (D-MI). But because of Byrd's well-known success at directing federal funds to his state, commentators simply attributed the statements of Waxman and Conyers to Byrd and then called Byrd a hypocrite.

This absurd political myth is now being widely repeated as fact. >>More

Amazing New Honda commercial in the UK
Posted Wednesday, June 18, 2003 by symbolman

Very important that you understand: There is no computer graphics or digital tricks in the film.

Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it. [You Need the Flash 6 plugin to view it - there is a link to a Quicktime Version at the site.]

The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn't work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again. The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. By the time it was over, they were ready to change professions. The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete including a full engineering the sequence.

In addition, it's two minutes long so every time Honda airs the film on British television, they're shelling out enough dough to keep any one of us in clover for a lifetime. However, it is fast becoming the most downloaded advertisement in Internet history. Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in "free" viewings (Honda isn't paying a dime to have you watch this commercial!).

When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten. They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real.>> See it HERE!