We may add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government. In a well-governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitudes of crimes is a guarantee of impunity....Jean-Jacques Rousseau
With rebellion, awareness is born.......A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object....Albert Camus
Posted: 06 Sep 2013 03:54 PM PDT
6 September 2013
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On September 11, 2013, at 12 noon, we will rally on the National Mall
with our Muslim brothers and sisters from the Million American March
Against Fear, and then we will take the streets!!
We are STANDING UP to this
corrupt government, and we demand our tax dollars not be used to support
murder!! We will let the world know that concerned Americans are taking
a stand and holding truth to power!! We will surround the houses of
corruption: The White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court!!
So join us, it will be a historic day to remember!
When the PBS NewsHour covered John Kerry's dramatic presentation on the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria on August 21, reporter Jeffrey Brown (8/30/13) zeroed in on the death toll:On ABC World News (8/30/13), Martha Raddatz emphasized the numbers as well:KERRY: The United States government now knows that at least 1,429 Syrians were killed in this attack, including at least 426 children.BROWN: The chilling numbers stood out from the U.S. intelligence assessment released this afternoon. And, lest anyone doubt, the secretary of State insisted, its findings are as clear as they are compelling.
It is the images and the stories from the survivors that are clearly the most compelling. And that number 1,429–1,429 killed, including those 426 children.On NBC Nightly News (8/30/13), anchor Lester Holt said that Kerry had "revealed that more than 1,400 people had been killed in the chemical attack, including more than 400 children." Note: "revealed," not "said" or "claimed" or "alleged."
And the New York Times editorial page (8/31/13), in a piece about the need for stronger legal justification for launching an attack on Syria, wrote definitively that such action would be "in response to a chemical weapons attack in Syria that killed more than 1,400 people."
But where does that number come from–and why is substantially higher than other estimates? As the AP (8/31/13) reported:
But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization that monitors casualties in the country, said it has confirmed 502 deaths, nearly 1,000 fewer than the American intelligence assessment claimed.And Hannah Allam and Mark Seibel of the McClatchy news service (9/2/13) noted that substantially lower death tolls were released by Britain (more than 350) and France (281).
Rami Abdel-Rahman, the head of the organization, said he was not contacted by U.S. officials about his efforts to collect information about the death toll.
"America works only with one part of the opposition that is deep in propaganda," he said, and urged the Obama administration to release the information its estimate is based on.
Much of the case the U.S. is making against Syria is based on intelligence that the government is so far unwilling to make public (Washington Post, 9/2/13)–and some of what is available is not terribly convincing (Truthout.org, 9/3/13).
So journalists should, at a minimum, attribute these estimates to the government–and note that they are not in line with other reputable estimates of the death toll in Syria. Ideally, reporters should ask John Kerry to explain the discrepancy. He just made the rounds on all the major Sunday chat shows, and no one who was interviewing him thought to bring it up.
The Strange Thing About Cluster Bombs
By The New York Times has an article today (9/5/13) about a Human Rights Watch report charging Syria's government with the use of cluster bombs, a "widely prohibited weapon." Cluster bombs are munitions that release hundreds of miniature explosives; as the Times' Rick Gladstone writes, "Each bomblet detonates on impact, spraying shrapnel in all directions and killing, maiming and destroying indiscriminately."Gladstone quotes a Human Rights Watch spokesperson calling cluster bombs "insidious weapons that remain on the ground, causing death and destruction for decades." The reporter goes on to cite the Cluster Munitions Coalition peace group on the deadly effects of these weapons:
The coalition said that children make up one-third of all casualties caused by cluster munitions. It said 60 percent of the total casualties caused by the weapons are civilians going about normal activities. Read More
NSA encryption story, Latin American fallout and US/UK attacks on press freedoms
The implications of the prior week's reporting of NSA stories continue to grow
I'm currently working on what I believe are several significant new NSA stories, to be published imminently here, as well as one very consequential story about NSA spying in Brazil that will first be broadcast Sunday night on the Brazilian television program Fantastico (because the report has worldwide implications, far beyond Brazil, it will be translated into English and then quickly published on the internet). Until then, I'm posting below the video of the 30-minute interview I did yesterday on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez about our NSA encryption story and ongoing US/UK attacks on press freedom (the transcript of that interview is here).
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