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canichangemyblogname · 2 months ago

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I believe @/zionistcunt blocked me after I pointed out their reliance on propaganda and misinformation. I originally replied to K’s (@/jedi-valjean) thread with these tags:

#some 10% of the Gazan civilian population has become a casualty statistic #K— don’t argue with this person #they are not engaging in good faith #They prove precisely why you should never argue with fools #because despite what all the intl human rights organizations say and all the warnings from intl govt organizations #this person is attempting to bring you down to their level (ignoring the facts on the ground and the testimony and word of… #experts on genocide and ethnic cleansing) and then beat you with experience (knowledge of basic geography) #to turn this back on you and paint you the fool instead #so they can continue to ignore the facts on the ground and the reports from human rights groups and the testimony of genocide experts #and avoid the fact that the burden of responsibility for the disproportionate use of force is on those who support #the Zionist colonial project #much like how it is on the Catholic Church. the Manifest Destiny ideology and the Colonial US occupier for the decimation of the land #and it’s population on turtle island #it’s why all they’ve got are right-wing ‘edgy’ memes as a comeback/answer for your question(s) #because you passed the arbitrary tests of ‘experience’ and now they have nothing of substance to argue in return #besides memes divorced from historical context and a political understanding of what is happening on the ground #like— their PFP is literally a Rosie the Riveter meme; a symbol of US colonial expansionism. war. profiteering. arms manu. & capitalism #they ain’t gonna listen when you tell them peace has been and will be the most effective way to get the hostages #they supposedly care so much about home. because they support war and the death and destruction being seen #they literally follow people who describe themselves as ‘formerly leftist; now right-wing’ #who’ve compared the Israeli bombing of Gaza to civil-rights sit-ins #and unironically believe that the only reason Black peoples do not have their own ethnostate and colonial project #is because they were too weak to create it— so these are not serious people #they are right-wing troll accounts #doing the same work as the conservative op-ed writers of the NYTimes: writing think pieces about how Jews love the republican position on #Israel & prefer right-wing news outlets for their coverage on Palestine. Tuning in to Antisemitism. us: Fox News & ‘legit’ considering DJT #they’ve been more effective at getting historically progressive people to consider voting for DJT #than pro-peace land-back Free Palestine rhetoric has been at getting people to NOT vote for Harris

After identifying them as a right-wing troll account, I then called them out for posting falsified news and misinformation with right-wing bias on their blog.

Here’s a run-down:

Their response to my tags—

My response to their misinformation and blatant use of a propaganda machine for information—

^^^ Further proof you are a conservative troll posing as someone who cares about this issue as a way to feed people the narrative that the right-wing is and should be the authority on I/P and would better handle it.

Here are some accredited and trustworthy sources:

^^^ Or are you another one of those Tumblrinas who is going to argue that these reports are all a result of the “Hamasnik world order” that controls the international courts, institutions of higher learning, world governments, banks, international aid agencies, doctors, marxists, students, I/P peace groups and the likes?

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Also— what are you trying to argue/accomplish here? What is your point in linking that article? To argue that the death toll is justified? I say that 10% of the Gazan population has become a casualty statistic and that this is caused by a disproportionate, illegitimate, and unjustifiable use of imprecise force and your answer is to… tell me that the people killed in the carpet bombing of Gaza are related, at least tangentially, to Hamas members? What is the implication here if not that you think the over 15,000 CHILDREN dead is justified, legitimate, and proportionate *because* they share blood with a member of the Gazan ministry or military?

If that’s your argument, then you are admitting that Palestinian non-combatants are expressly being targeted for their blood; their ancestry, their relation, their ethnicity. Because the VAST majority individuals who have been killed ARE NOT militants; they are non-combatants, children and elderly, specifically. But, then again, I suppose it is a leftist position to argue that civilians *should not* be explicitly and directly and purposefully targeted. I thought it was simply a rational, humane thing to believe killing people for who they’re related to, because if their membership to a group, is wrong.

Imagine trying to argue that the casualty toll is justifiable because some 6 year-old’s third-cousin twice removed worked in the Gaza ministry/government or picked up a gun. “They have a second cousin who met with a Hamas” apparently means that Israel has a right to exterminate the members of that family, including the children who have no ability to control who the adults in their extended family associate with, plus any and all non-combatants in the family. You understand how this is a war crime, yes? Collective punishment is a war crime. Targeting non-combatants because of their blood relations is a war crime.

Now I *KNOW* you wouldn’t make such an argument that *I* should be exterminated because the uncle I haven’t seen in 15 years served in the US marines, would you? Yet Palestinian non-combatants deserve to die because of their membership to a group; because of their blood and their relations? We have a word for that, and you’re not gonna like it: genocide.

Why am I afforded grace that Palestinian non-combatants are not? What makes me different? The fact I’m not Palestinian? We have a word for that, too: racism.

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Also. Do you know where this statistic comes from? This statistic—which has exclusively and only been published by JNS (🚩)— reportedly comes from a Palestinian associated with Hamas (I could not independently verify if this is true as none of the sites actually link the original source). You will trust Hamas on this figure but turn around and say things or reblog things or source things that say something like “unverified Hamas casualty figures” and “unverified Gaza Health Ministry data.” This claim that 80% of casualties are members of Hamas’ ministry or military or people tangentially related to them, primarily family, is quite literally one of those “unverified Hamas casualty figures” (although, I’m dubious that the Gazan Health Ministry actually reported on this internally like JNS claimed). You can’t use their data when it serves your point and then write it off when it doesn’t.

Also, the Gazan Health Ministry’s most recent reports still state that the majority of those who are dead are not of combatant-age (link provided by OCHA). Children and those 59+ still make up the majority of the casualty figures. Human rights organizations dedicated to investigating the deaths of civilians and armed violence against civilians (also HERE and HERE) and trustworthy news agencies say the Ministry's data SEVERELY undercounts the number of dead, mostly due to the vast damage to healthcare infrastructure in the Strip. Accredited news agencies cite the Gaza ministry and put the number around 42,000. Human rights organizations put the number higher. They also put the number of those injured at over twice the number killed and the number of those starving in the hundreds of thousands. <<< But I don’t expect you to read any of what I linked because 1.) you aren’t engaging in good faith, and 2.) It seems you don’t have the bandwidth to process/read anything longer than 500 words.

But, simply put, the majority of dead are non-combatants; civilians. There is no justifiable excuse to kill civilians, no matter who you are or who the civilian is, and that includes their potential blood relation to a possible member of the Hamas-run Gazan ministry or military. (Yes, they are a ministry and military, even Israel admits that Hamas is the defacto and dejure authority of the enclave.)

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I also looked up the statistic you provided to see if I could find the original broadcast, and the only site to publish this (supposedly) “internal Hamas statistic” is JNS. Every other site that has released something on this has exclusively used JNS’ article (🚩). JNS cites Israel’s Channel 12 news, but I have been unable to independently verify if Channel 12 made this claim (I even watched their broadcasts from Oct. 6/7– they focused on stories of recovery and of remembering the dead a year later). It is additionally hard to verify because 1.] no site links to the original broadcast or agency this statistic comes from (🚩 accredited and trustworthy news agencies link back to who originally reported on this), 2.] every site that has republished/reuploaded the JNS article uses the same vague statements like “statistics expert” (🚩 accredited and trustworthy reports and agencies always cite and name their experts), 3.] every site that has republished/reuploaded the JNS article claims this came from a private Hamas source (which is mostly a point of irony given they spend the entire article casting doubt on the legitimacy of Hamas’ data).

^^^ Before you go blindly posting things that supposedly support your world-view (it doesn’t; killing non-combatants because they’re related to militants is still a war crime), you should be doing this with EVERY article you come across that makes bold and sweeping statements or dubiously vague ones. The JNS article does both.

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I post this in the hopes it helps others identify blatant propaganda and break down the implications of certain rhetoric. Always check how your sources cite their sources and gather their data.

#Zionism #Palestine

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wolgraugorimilir · 7 months ago

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An email I just sent to a reader, answering questions about Tepwat Manu.

(I just felt like sharing, since this is kind of my corner of the internet where I like to dump all my excitement about Tepwat Manu)

My goal is to finish editing and posting one chapter a week until it's all online. Now that I'm back in Minneapolis, I've slowed way down. I lost my job when I was out of town, so I'm pretty busy trying to make ends meet, but I still find the time to write.

Left Hand of Darkness: Excellent book!!

Biati's curse is vague. The burning brand on her arm reads something like "you are going to die". This is significant only because the written word was sacred in ancient Egypt, and all writing was understood to be imbued with potent creative force. Ancient Egyptian depictions of massive offerings to the gods were understood to be equivalent to actual offerings of spiritual food. In this vein of magical thinking, the writing on her arm is a manifestation that she is imminently going to die. Of course, the wording is vague. And you're absolutely right to point out that her curse is also our curse. I bet it would help the story for me to explain that better.

Haerharu and Waradum are foolish people who earnestly believe that they can go to Manu - to the door which opens up to let the sun into the netherworld - and intercept Biati's soul before she goes beneath the earth - thus preventing her from dying. This is, of course, impossible. They haven't thought it through. Their plan falls apart under scrutiny, and all the people they'll meet along the way will try, gently, point this out. They are single-mindedly determined to see this through, however, because of how strongly they love her. They'll have to learn acceptance on the road to the west.

^ This parallels a potent theme from a lot of the ancient literature in this part of the world, which inspires me. In the story of Orpheus and Euridyce, and in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a hero wants to cheat death, and obviously it's a doomed quest from the start, because we're all going to die. But there is something heartbreakingly noble about trying to do it anyway.

Re. diction: I'm grappling with my choice of alternating between different narrative styles, which has seemed strange to most my readers. My reasoning for the idiomatic slang is, one, to humanize my characters, and two, to address the artificial nature of trying to reconstruct the past. If that makes any sense. Obviously Ancient Egyptians didn't act like American midwesterners. But they didn't act like their high-minded ritual texts either. Almost all the surviving literature from the period is either royal propaganda, or ritual magic - commissioned by members of the royal retinue. Well, most Ancient Egyptians weren't kings. Most were farmers. Farmers cuss, joke, and slur. None of that is possible to accurately reconstruct, but I think my choice to use familiar anachronisms in my characters' speech is closer to the spirit of accuracy.

Mostly, it's a pet peeve of mine when Ancient Egyptians are depicted en masse as taciturn, superstitious, and law-abiding - like ten-thousand identical worker-bees putting up their pyramids. I wanted to push back against that. They were people for God's sake.

That being said, I don't want to make this difficult for my readers. Maybe wanting both grandeur and groundedness is wanting to have my cake and eat it too.

A thousand blessings. Thanks for listening, and for making my day. <3

-T

#Tepwat Manu #The Journey to Ilvelinir #ancient egypt #my writing #The sunshine's got me writing again #praise Ra

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shut-up-rabert · 2 years ago

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Okay so

1.) change your family priest because wtf, that person is just soaking in caste superiority, aise aadmi se dharm gyaan loge khud bhi paap lagega.

2.) well, I do think Dravidian seperatism had a part in all this aswell and was surprised it wasn’t mentioned here, though I was looking for other reasons too. Likes of M Karunanidhi and others basically propagated this narrative like fuck, not to mention that they were athiests (read: evangelical sympathisers) so the religion, which was a pan India thing had to be out of equation and ethinicity and language had to be made the agenda here (No I do not believe in Hindi imposition but it is what it is). This is actually part of the reason a lot of snobs in different comment sections boldly proclaim their superiority to the “north indians” (I’m not speaking about the majority ofc., our people are nice that way and patriotic but this propaganda has been going long enough to fool some)

3.) well, the caste bit definitely has had its effects aswell, but the time the system was implemented caste or varna was pretty flexible and could be changed with occupation, as some texts had decipted and by the time it became rigid (I’m assuming by Dharmashatra the earliest) there should have been enough mixed races in both, but I’m actually confused here. And that is strictly speaking of the north like you said, in the south they actually had more similarities I deduce so ethnicity should not have been an issue.

Another thing is that the texts you refer to are the dharma shastras I believe, but Manu contradicts itself enough for people to think it is corrupted overtime, and it was not really implemented If I know well, because Hinduism reached Indonesia after this time and the priests in Bali are by caste shudras, other than the fact that Vijaynagra and few other kingdoms were started by Shudras afterwards. Other books of the time (religious texts and not rulebooks) actually do not share the sentiment sans interpolations, Ramayan and Geeta for example.

I’m not trying to defend anything (okay, maybe I am ;-;) but the difference in Upper and lower castes phenotype actually fascinates me and the claim here distorts what I have learned. How big a difference we speaking of?

4.) Well yeah, the Right wingers did wrong, but I find this reasoning (no offense my boy) somewhat weak because its simply based on correlation, is their something backing it up?

5.) idek what I’m thing anymore, I’m sleepy ;-;

Stupid questions incoming:

How exactly is Aryan Migration different from like, other migrations? Is it the fact that they did not have a homeland? Was this the place they finally settled at after leaving Africa or were they actually native to someplace else before?

Everyone came from Africa, right? And if so, what is the difference between Dravidians finding this land and what exactly makes Aryans foreigners in some people’s eyes?

oh yes THIS

i should have touched on this that day but the post was getting too long,

no difference at all, in the grand scheme of things, people have been migrating here and there since the beginning, the ethnoclutural backgrounds of places change all the time.

also, they did have a homeland, the pontic steppes, they just didnt build buildings, canals, citadels like many other contemporary societies did. and they did have attachment to the land they lived on, prithvi and her homologues are one of the most important godesses afterall.

and noone actually knows if the first place that dravidians settled was india, or any other society for that matter because by the most agreed upon definition, homo sapiens left africa somewhere around 70-50,000 years ago.

[also, there is no set definition of "human", many consider all the species of the homo genus to be humans, in which case homo erectus (dont laugh) left africa 2 million years ago, and also homo sapiens also left africa once or twice before 50000 ago but those were not permanent and they died off]

so we arrive in asia 70-50,000 yars ago. the oldest settlements are 10,000 old, and the oldest civilisation is egypt at around 5000 years old. now you notice the 65-45,000 year long window between exodus out of africa and starting of the first nation? between this time EVERYONE was nomadic. gunter gatherer at first and then pastoralists and then some places became agriculturists.

there have been so many waves of migrations that cant possibly claim that xyz was the original place of abc people after coming out of africa, i mean just imagine, youre a hunter gatherer, rain doesnt happen on time and the plants are drying, now youll want to get out of that place and go somewhere else, you have no particular place in mind, just somewhere that has food will do. so migrations were the norm for most of histroy, until like two hundred years ago you could just leave a country and go live somewhere else and noone would bat an eye

and everyone was moving around, the americas were settled TWICE, by crossing through the berring strait (which was frozen as an ice bridge back then).

so there is no fundamental difference between aryans and dravidians arriving in india, its just that due to coincidence the dravidians came first.

and i can not claim to know anyones mind unfortunately,

but it might be because right wing hindu conservatives consider muslims and british descendents to be foreigners, so someone promptly pointed out that technically youre a foreigner as well, (though they were wrong in saying that, because no genetically pure aryan is living today, all of us are mixed race, though the hindus are obviously also wrong in claiming that the palce theyve been living in for generations, almost a millenium in some cases is "not their country")

and theres also the caste thing, see in the northern plains (wont make any claims about other places, this is how things are percieved as here) (also im not saying that the following is true, but only that most people believe it too be true, i dont have enough knowledge to support or deny this) upper caste people tend to have more "aryan" phenotype whereas lower caste people have more native phenotypes. so many lower class people feel like that they were the originals owners of this land and in came these foreigners, oppressed us, destroyed our religion, implemented their own oppressive culture etc etc you get the gist.

to some extent this is true (just look at our beauty standards, and no the british didnt cause this) as lower caste were objectively oppressed and kept out of any well do to position under the hindu laws (we had a katha a few days back and the "priest" had the fucking audacity to say that "those who feel like they can be with god by reading the scripture and reciting it dont know that only brhamins can read it in a meaningful way" like what the fuck you bastard)

umm yeah thats it.

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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ON DECEMBER 11, 1981 in El Salvador, a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet. The final death toll was over 800 people.

The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told the Senate, were “not credible,” and the whole thing was being “significantly misused” as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.

This past Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named Abrams as America’s special envoy for Venezuela. According to Pompeo, Abrams “will have responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy” in the oil-rich nation.

The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America’s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors — the brutality and the unctuousness — is Abrams’s core competency.

Abrams previously served in a multitude of positions in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, often with titles declaring their focus on morality. First, he was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs (in 1981); then the State Department “human rights” position mentioned above (1981-85); assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs (1985-89); senior director for democracy, human rights, and international operations for the National Security Council (2001-05); and finally, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy (2005-09).

In these positions, Abrams participated in many of the most ghastly acts of U.S. foreign policy from the past 40 years, all the while proclaiming how deeply he cared about the foreigners he and his friends were murdering. Looking back, it’s uncanny to see how Abrams has almost always been there when U.S. actions were at their most sordid.

ABRAMS, A GRADUATE of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, joined the Reagan administration in 1981, at age 33. He soon received a promotion due to a stroke of luck: Reagan wanted to name Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, but Lefever’s nomination ran aground when two of his own brothers revealed that he believed African-Americans were “inferior, intellectually speaking.” A disappointed Reagan was forced to turn to Abrams as a second choice.

A key Reagan administration concern at the time was Central America — in particular, the four adjoining nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. All had been dominated by tiny, cruel, white elites since their founding, with a century’s worth of help from U.S. interventions. In each country, the ruling families saw their society’s other inhabitants as human-shaped animals, who could be harnessed or killed as needed.

But shortly before Reagan took office, Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua and a U.S. ally, had been overthrown by a socialist revolution. The Reaganites rationally saw this as a threat to the governments of Nicaragua’s neighbors. Each country had large populations who similarly did not enjoy being worked to death on coffee plantations or watching their children die of easily treated diseases. Some would take up arms, and some would simply try to keep their heads down, but all, from the perspective of the cold warriors in the White House, were likely “communists” taking orders from Moscow. They needed to be taught a lesson.

The extermination of El Mozote was just a drop in the river of what happened in El Salvador during the 1980s. About 75,000 Salvadorans died during what’s called a “civil war,” although almost all the killing was done by the government and its associated death squads.

The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. El Salvador is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. The equivalent number of deaths in the U.S. would be almost 5 million. Moreover, the Salvadoran regime continually engaged in acts of barbarism so heinous that there is no contemporary equivalent, except perhaps ISIS. In one instance, a Catholic priest reported that a peasant woman briefly left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister. When she returned, she found that all five had been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their bodies were sitting around a table, with their hands placed on their heads in front of them, “as though each body was stroking its own head.” The hand of one, a toddler, apparently kept slipping off her small head, so it had been nailed onto it. At the center of the table was a large bowl full of blood.

Criticism of U.S. policy at the time was not confined to the left. During this period, Charles Maechling Jr., who had led State Department planning for counterinsurgencies during the 1960s, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the U.S. was supporting “Mafia-like oligarchies” in El Salvador and elsewhere and was directly complicit in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”

Abrams was one of the architects of the Reagan administration’s policy of full-throated support for the Salvadoran government. He had no qualms about any of it and no mercy for anyone who escaped the Salvadoran abattoir. In 1984, sounding exactly like Trump officials today, he explained that Salvadorans who were in the U.S. illegally should not receive any kind of special status. “Some groups argue that illegal aliens who are sent back to El Salvador meet persecution and often death,” he told the House of Representatives. “Obviously, we do not believe these claims or we would not deport these people.”

Even when out of office, 10 years after the El Mozote massacre, Abrams expressed doubt that anything untoward had occurred there. In 1993, when a United Nations truth commission found that 95 percent of the acts of violence that had taken place in El Salvador since 1980 had been committed by Abrams’s friends in the Salvadoran government, he called what he and his colleagues in the Reagan administration had done a “fabulous achievement.”

The situation in Guatemala during the 1980s was much the same, as were Abrams’s actions. After the U.S. engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the country had descended into a nightmare of revolving military dictatorships. Between 1960 and 1996, in another “civil war,” 200,000 Guatemalans were killed — the equivalent of maybe 8 million people in America. A U.N. commission later found that the Guatemalan state was responsible for 93 percent of the human rights violations.

Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as Guatemala’s president in the early 1980s, was found guilty in 2013, by Guatemala’s own justice system, of committing genocide against the country’s indigenous Mayans. During Ríos Montt’s administration, Abrams called for the lifting of an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Guatemala, claiming that Ríos Montt had “brought considerable progress.” The U.S. had to support the Guatemalan government, Abrams argued, because “if we take the attitude ‘don’t come to us until you’re perfect, we’re going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfect human rights record,’ then we’re going to be leaving in the lurch people there who are trying to make progress.” One example of the people making an honest effort, according to Abrams, was Ríos Montt. Thanks to Ríos Montt, “there has been a tremendous change, especially in the attitude of the government toward the Indian population.” (Ríos Montt’s conviction was later set aside by Guatemala’s highest civilian court, and he died before a new trial could finish.)

Abrams would become best known for his enthusiastic involvement with the Reagan administration’s push to overthrow Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government. He advocated for a full invasion of Nicaragua in 1983, immediately after the successful U.S. attack on the teeny island nation of Grenada. When Congress cut off funds to the Contras, an anti-Sandinista guerrilla force created by the U.S., Abrams successfully persuaded the Sultan of Brunei to cough up $10 million for the cause. Unfortunately, Abrams, acting under the code name “Kenilworth,” provided the Sultan with the wrong Swiss bank account number, so the money was wired instead to a random lucky recipient.

Abrams was questioned by Congress about his Contra-related activities and lied voluminously. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information. One was about the Sultan and his money, and another was about Abrams’s knowledge of a Contra resupply C-123 plane that had been shot down in 1986. In a nice historical rhyme with his new job in the Trump administration, Abrams had previously attempted to obtain two C-123s for the Contras from the military of Venezuela.

Abrams received a sentence of 100 hours of community service and perceived the whole affair as an injustice of cosmic proportions. He soon wrote a book in which he described his inner monologue about his prosecutors, which went: “You miserable, filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers!” He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on the latter’s way out the door after he lost the 1992 election.

While it’s been forgotten now, before America invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega in 1989, he was a close ally of the U.S. — despite the fact the Reagan administration knew he was a large-scale drug trafficker.

In 1985, Hugo Spadafora, a popular figure in Panama and its one-time vice minister for health, believed he had obtained proof of Noriega’s involvement in cocaine smuggling. He was on a bus on his way to Panama City to release it publicly when he was seized by Noriega’s thugs.

According to the book “Overthrow” by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, U.S. intelligence picked up Noriega giving his underlings the go-ahead to put Spadafora down like “a rabid dog.” They tortured Spadafora for a long night and then sawed off his head while he was still alive. When Spadafora’s body was found, his stomach was full of blood he’d swallowed.

This was so horrific that it got people’s attention. But Abrams leapt to Noriega’s defense, blocking the U.S. ambassador to Panama from increasing pressure on the Panamanian leader. When Spadafora’s brother persuaded North Carolina’s hyper-conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms to hold hearings on Panama, Abrams told Helms that Noriega was “being really helpful to us” and was “really not that big a problem. … The Panamanians have promised they are going to help us with the Contras. If you have the hearings, it’ll alienate them.”

Abrams also engaged in malfeasance for no discernible reason, perhaps just to stay in shape. In 1986 a Colombian journalist named Patricia Lara was invited to the U.S. to attend a dinner honoring writers who’d advanced “inter-American understanding and freedom of information.” When Lara arrived at New York’s Kennedy airport, she was taken into custody, then put on a plane back home. Soon afterward, Abrams went on “60 Minutes” to claim that Lara was a member of the “ruling committees” of M-19, a Colombian guerrilla movement. She also, according to Abrams, was ”an active liaison” between M-19 ”and the Cuban secret police.”

Given the frequent right-wing paramilitary violence against Colombian reporters, this painted a target on Lara’s back. There was no evidence then that Abrams’s assertions were true — Colombia’s own conservative government denied it — and none has appeared since.

Abrams’s never-ending, shameless deceptions wore downAmerican reporters. “They said that black was white,” Joanne Omang at the Washington Post later explained about Abrams and his White House colleague Robert McFarlane. “Although I had used all my professional resources I had misled my readers.” Omang was so exhausted by the experience that she quit her job trying to describe the real world to try to write fiction.

Post-conviction Abrams was seen as damaged goods who couldn’t return to government. This underestimated him. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the one-time chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tangled fiercely with Abrams in 1989 over the proper U.S. policy toward Noriega once it become clear he was more trouble than he was worth. Crowe strongly opposed a bright idea that Abrams had come up with: that the U.S. should establish a government-in-exile on Panamanian soil, which would require thousands of U.S. troops to guard. This was deeply boneheaded, Crowe said, but it didn’t matter. Crowe presciently issued a warning about Abrams: “This snake’s hard to kill.”

To the surprise of Washington’s more naive insiders, Abrams was back in business soon after George W. Bush entered the White House. It might have been difficult to get Senate approval for someone who had deceived Congress, so Bush put him in a slot at the National Security Council — where no legislative branch approval was needed. Just like 20 years before, Abrams was handed a portfolio involving “democracy” and “human rights.”

By the beginning of 2002, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, had become deeply irritating to the Bush White House, which was filled with veterans of the battles of the 1980s. That April, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Chavez was pushed out of power in a coup. Whether and how the U.S. was involved is not yet known, and probably won’t be for decades until the relevant documents are declassified. But based on the previous 100 years, it would be surprising indeed if America didn’t play any behind-the-scenes role. For what it’s worth, the London Observer reported at the time that “the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams” and he “gave a nod” to the plotters. In any case, Chavez had enough popular support that he was able to regroup and return to office within days.

Abrams apparently did play a key role in squelching a peace proposal from Iran in 2003, just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The plan arrived by fax, and should have gone to Abrams, and then to Condoleezza Rice, at the time Bush’s national security adviser. Instead it somehow never made it to Rice’s desk. When later asked about this, Abrams’s spokesperson replied that he “had no memory of any such fax.” (Abrams, like so many people who thrive at the highest level of politics, has a terrible memory for anything political. In 1984, he told Ted Koppel that he couldn’t recall for sure whether the U.S. had investigated reports of massacres in El Salvador. In 1986, when asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee if he’d discussed fundraising for the contras with anyone on the NSC’s staff, he likewise couldn’t remember.)

Abrams was also at the center of another attempt to thwart the outcome of a democratic election, in 2006. Bush had pushed for legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza in order to give Fatah, the highly corrupt Palestinian organization headed by Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, some badly needed legitimacy. To everyone’s surprise, Fatah’s rival Hamas won, giving it the right to form a government.

This unpleasant outburst of democracy was not acceptable to the Bush administration, in particular Rice and Abrams. They hatched a plan to form a Fatah militia to take over the Gaza Strip, and crush Hamas in its home territory. As reported by Vanity Fair, this involved a great deal of torture and executions. But Hamas stole a march on Fatah with their own ultra-violence. David Wurmser, a neoconservative who worked for Dick Cheney at the time, told Vanity Fair, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.” Yet ever since, these events have been turned upside down in the U.S. media, with Hamas being presented as the aggressors.

While the U.S. plan was not a total success, it also was not a total failure from the perspective of America and Israel. The Palestinian civil war split the West Bank and Gaza into two entities, with rival governments in both. For the past 13 years, there’s been little sign of the political unity necessary for Palestinians to get a decent life for themselves.

Abrams then left office with Bush’s exit. But now he’s back for a third rotation through the corridors of power – with the same kinds of schemes he’s executed the first two times.

Looking back at Abrams’s lifetime of lies and savagery, it’s hard to imagine what he could say to justify it. But he does have a defense for everything he’s done — and it’s a good one.

In 1995, Abrams appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” with Allan Nairn, one of the most knowledgable American reporters about U.S. foreign policy. Nairn noted that George H.W. Bush had once discussed putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity. This was a good idea, said Nairn, but “if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed” — which would mean also prosecuting officials like Abrams.

Abrams chuckled at the ludicrousness of such a concept. That would require, he said, “putting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.”

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elcorreodetorreon · 6 years ago

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Legendary journalist John Pilger on Assange's arrest

The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.

That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.

But to hell with that. Let the thugs go in. Directed by the quasi fascists in Trump’s Washington, in league with Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno, a Latin American Judas and liar seeking to disguise his rancid regime, the British elite abandoned its last imperial myth: that of fairness and justice.

Moreno: A Latin American Judas.

Imagine Tony Blair dragged from his multi-million pound Georgian home in Connaught Square, London, in handcuffs, for onward dispatch to the dock in The Hague. By the standard of Nuremberg, Blair’s ��paramount crime” is the deaths of a million Iraqis. Assange’s crime is journalism: holding the rapacious to account, exposing their lies and empowering people all over the world with truth.

The shocking arrest of Assange carries a warning for all who, as Oscar Wilde wrote, “sew the seeds of discontent [without which] there would be no advance towards civilization.” The warning is explicit towards journalists. What happened to the founder and editor of WikiLeaks can happen to you on a newspaper, you in a TV studio, you on radio, you running a podcast.

Assange’s principal media tormentor, The Guardian, a collaborator with the secret state, displayed its nervousness this week with an editorial that scaled new weasel heights. The Guardian has exploited the work of Assange and WikiLeaks in what its previous editor called “the greatest scoop of the last 30 years.” The paper creamed off WikiLeaks’ revelations and claimed the accolades and riches that came with them.

With not a penny going to Julian Assange or to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie. The book’s authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, turned on their source, abused him and disclosed the secret password Assange had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing leaked US embassy cables.

Revealing Homicidal Colonial Wars

When Assange was still trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, Harding joined police outside and gloated on his blog that “Scotland Yard may get the last laugh.” The Guardian then published a series of falsehoods about Assange, not least a discredited claim that a group of Russians and Trump’s man, Paul Manafort, had visited Assange in the embassy. The meetings never happened; it was fake.

But the tone has now changed. “The Assange case is a morally tangled web,” the paper opined. “He (Assange) believes in publishing things that should not be published …. But he has always shone a light on things that should never have been hidden.”

These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the exposé of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It is all available on the WikiLeaks site.

The Guardian is understandably nervous. Secret policemen have already visited the newspaper and demanded and got the ritual destruction of a hard drive. On this, the paper has form. In 1983, a Foreign Office clerk, Sarah Tisdall, leaked British Government documents showing when American cruise nuclear weapons would arrive in Europe. The Guardian was showered with praise.

When a court order demanded to know the source, instead of the editor going to prison on a fundamental principle of protecting a source, Tisdall was betrayed, prosecuted and served six months.

If Assange is extradited to America for publishing what The Guardian calls truthful “things,” what is to stop the current editor, Katherine Viner, following him, or the previous editor, Alan Rusbridger, or the prolific propagandist Luke Harding?

Even the propagandist Harding could be at risk.

What is to stop the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post, who also published morsels of the truth that originated with WikiLeaks, and the editor of El Pais in Spain, andDer Spiegel in Germany and The Sydney MorningHerald in Australia. The list is long.

David McCraw, lead lawyer of The New York Times, wrote: “I think the prosecution [of Assange] would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers … from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and the law would have a very hard time distinguishing between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”

Even if journalists who published WikiLeaks’ leaks are not summoned by an American grand jury, the intimidation of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning will be enough. Real journalism is being criminalized by thugs in plain sight. Dissent has become an indulgence.

In Australia, the current America-besotted government is prosecuting two whistle-blowers who revealed that Canberra’s spooks bugged the cabinet meetings of the new government of East Timor for the express purpose of cheating the tiny, impoverished nation out of its proper share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea. Their trial will be held in secret. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, is infamous for his part in setting up concentration camps for refugees on the Pacific islands of Nauru and Manus, where children self harm and suicide. In 2014, Morrison proposed mass detention camps for 30,000 people.

Journalism: a Major Threat

Real journalism is the enemy of these disgraces. A decade ago, the Ministry of Defense in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.

The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.”

What if Assange and Manning and others in their wake — if there are others — are silenced and “the right to know and question and challenge” is taken away?

In the 1970s, I met Leni Reifenstahl, close friend of Adolf Hitler, whose films helped cast the Nazi spell over Germany.

She told me that the message in her films, the propaganda, was dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the public.

“Did this submissive void include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?” I asked her.

“Of course,” she said, “especially the intelligentsia …. When people no longer ask serious questions, they are submissive and malleable. Anything can happen.”

And did. The rest, she might have added, is history.

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manu-is-my-ray-of-sunshine · 4 years ago

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About the "he is gay" anon. All this rumors appeared initially from putin and Russian sources. And they were used by the opponents, linked to Russian politics or business, and, of course, never were proved. So, if there are people who believe in that as a part of a "slash culture", it's one thing, there we are in fact, separated from the reality. And if somebody believes that it's really true, so, it means that putin's propaganda, sadly, works.

We do not know exactly what the origin of these rumors is. Some suspect the Russians, others close to Valls, Sarkozy or Fillon. What is certain is that Manu's opponents quickly appropriated this completely stupid rumor to ensure that Manu did not win the presidential election. Since Manu was ahead in the polls, they had to find a loophole for him. He is young, ambitious, good-looking, rich, brilliant, and has an unusual marital situation with a woman who is 24 years older, when they are usually half a century younger than their husbands. It's easy then to start the craziest rumors. We were even told at the time that compromising photos would be published in the press any day now, except that of course, as this rumor is totally false, no proof was ever provided. And of course, if Manu was gay, given the number of photographers and journalists who watched Manu night and day, we would easily have had material evidence. Honestly, I don't understand why some people continue to believe such bullshit and, more importantly, how such rumors could have been invented. It must have been so hurtful for Manu and his wife because in the end, it's as if they were accused of forming a fake couple. Finally, it must be said that prejudices have a hard life and that some people are really ready to believe anything, which is really sad.

#thank you for your message #if we could now stop talking about this subject i would be delighted because i was very upset about it #asks

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democratsunited-blog · 6 years ago

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Devin Nunes clashes with 'Democratic Party propaganda' CNN over FISA documents

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=6750

Devin Nunes clashes with 'Democratic Party propaganda' CNN over FISA documents

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., clashed with CNN as the cable news network pressed the House Intelligence Committee chairman to answer for a memo his panel released earlier this year on alleged surveillance abuse.

“He attacked CNN,” said senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju said Monday evening after tailing Nunes on Capitol Hill and failing to get the response he was seeking about whether he still stood by the memo.

“Do you really think I’m going to talk to the leading Democratic Party propaganda?” was Nunes’ response, according to a clip aired on CNN.

youtube

Raju was asking the congressman to comment on the Justice Department’s weekend release of more than 400 pages of highly redacted, top-secret documents related to the 2016 application for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant taken out on one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page, in addition to three renewal applications.

Following the release of the FISA applications, journalists and politicos have offered divergent takes about whether they adds credence or detracts from the HPSCI majority’s memo, released in February, which was based on the intelligence. That memo found that the dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Page and that the research’s Democratic financial supporters, the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, were omitted from the FISA applications.

At the time, Nunes said the FISA court was misled and berated the media for the negative coverage of the memo.

With the release of the highly redacted FISA applications, Nunes has indeed stuck by his memo — and has seen support from conservative media.

However, Democrats and other members of the media have declared Nunes’ memo a bust.

The documents “are not kind to Congressman Devin Nunes’ claims” that the FBI was biased, said CNN’s Anderson Cooper on his show Monday evening, after noting Nunes has repeatedly refused to appear for an interview. He added that the documents show the FBI had good reason to believe Page was subject to targeted recruitment by the Kremlin and that four Republican-appointed judges agreed.

Asked by Cooper — after showing a clip of his tense engagement with Nunes at the Capitol — if all the Republican did was accuse CNN being Democratic propaganda, Raju replied, “That’s pretty much it.”

In a tweet Tuesday in response to a shortened clip of the exchange, Nunes excoriated CNN for not mentioning a quote provided by his office: “CNN’s slavish adherence to the Democrats’ comical talking points is an amazing sight to behold.”

“Guess what? They refused to run the statement,” Nunes added. “This is another great example of ‘Fake and fraudulent news.'”

Also when asked my office gave them this quote…”CNN’s slavish adherence to the Democrats’ comical talking points is an amazing sight to behold.”…..Guess what? They refused to run the statement…This is another great example of “Fake and fraudulent news” https://t.co/ML7z0etx9T

— Devin Nunes (@DevinNunes) July 24, 2018

Raju did mention in brief, while speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during the afternoon Monday, that Nunes’ office “attacked” the question and CNN instead of focusing on the “apparent contradictions” about which they were asked.

Nunes, who in the past couple days has called for all redactions to be eliminated, accused “certain members of the press” of working for the Democratic Party during a Fox News interview Monday evening.

He also stressed that Page, who has not been charged with any crimes and denies having worked as a Russian agent, “had his rights abused” and condemned federal officials for using a “word puzzle” to obfuscate certain facts in their FISA warrant applications.

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#Democrats

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newssplashy · 7 years ago

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NPP Government: Don't believe the media- Mac Manu charges NPP supporters

The former 2016 campaign chairman of the president urged them to verify media reports about the president with New Patriotic Party (NPP) bigwigs.

The Board Chairman of the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority, Peter Mac Manu, has urged President Nana Akufo-Addo's supporters to believe everything the media says about the president.

READ MORE: "Fake news": Mac Manu slams reports Jubilee House has 998 staff

The former 2016 campaign chairman of the president urged them to verify media reports about the president with New Patriotic Party (NPP) bigwigs.

He also urged them to protect the government from opposition propaganda that seeks to sink the image of the government.

He was addressing delegates of the NPP in the Western Region who had gathered for the party's regional election on Saturday.

READ MORE: Martin Amidu suggests he'll leave office if MPs who took double salaries are not prosecuted

"Protect Akufo-Addo government and don't believe any story that will be put into the media until you verify from the party bigwigs," Mac Manu said.

source https://www.newssplashy.com/2018/04/npp-government-dont-believe-media-mac.html

#News

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uniteordie-usa · 7 years ago

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Making Fake News: The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages

http://uniteordiemedia.com/making-fake-news-the-u-s-media-suffered-its-most-humiliating-debacle-in-ages/ http://uniteordiemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Fake-News-Trust-Me-600x464.jpg Making Fake News: The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened FRIDAY WAS ONE of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, and countless pundits, commentators, and operatives joining the party throughout the...

Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened

FRIDAY WAS ONE of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quite a long time. The humiliation orgy was kicked off by CNN, with MSNBC and CBS close behind, and countless pundits, commentators, and operatives joining the party throughout the day. By the end of the day, it was clear that several of the nation’s largest and most influential news outlets had spread an explosive but completely false news story to millions of people, while refusing to provide any explanation of how it happened.

The spectacle began Friday morning at 11 a.m. EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News™ spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the Democratic National Committee emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email that CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” — someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify — to Donald Trump Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 — 10 days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online — and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness, and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump-Russia collusion story:

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There was just one small problem with this story: It was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story — and then hyped it over and over and over — the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 — which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks — as everyone by then already knew — had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.

How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as false, the journalist who originally presented it, congressional reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s P.R. department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email, while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but only had sources describe its purported contents:

youtube

All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question — one that CNN refuses to address: How did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?

It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely plausible that multiple sources could all innocently and in good faith misread the date in exactly the same way, all to cause the dissemination of a blockbuster revelation about Trump-Russia-WikiLeaks collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.

WHY DOES THIS matter so much? For so many significant reasons:

To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far, and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives, and journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia (through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was retweeted thousands and thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).

Glenn Greenwald

This tweet is from a member of Congress today. It was RT’d more than 7,000 times (and counting), and liked more than 15,000 times. It’s based on a completely false claim, from a debunked CNN story. This happens over and over. This seems damaging. And still no retraction. https://twitter.com/tedlieu/status/939129798793793536 …

Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes, whose star has risen as he has promoted himself as a friend of former FBI Director Jim Comey, not only promoted the CNN story in the morning, but did so with the word “boom” — which he uses to signal that a major blow has been delivered to Trump on the Russia story — along with a GIF of a cannon being detonated:

Benjamin Wittes

boom http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/08/politics/email-effort-give-trump-campaign-wikileaks-documents/index.html …

Incredibly, to this very moment — almost 24 hours after CNN’s story was debunked — Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false, even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly 250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added noting that the whole thing was false.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived — filled with false news and propaganda — by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump-Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy — which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots, and the like — would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that he had independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes in U.S. journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct knowledge” told him about all this. Please watch this — again, not just the content but the tenor and tone of how they “report” — as it is Baghdad Bob-level embarrassing:

Think about what this means. It means that at least two — and possibly more — sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial information to the public: Which “multiple sources” acted jointly to disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s largest news outlets?

Just last week, the Washington Post decided — to great applause (including mine) — to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well-established principle of journalism — one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in D.C. — that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.

View image on Twitter

Glenn Greenwald

The Post made the right call to report off-the-record comments given they were offered with fraudulent intent. This should be done far more often to actually powerful-in-DC people who spread lies while hiding behind anonymity https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-woman-approached-the-post-with-dramatic–and-false–tale-about-roy-moore-sje-appears-to-be-part-of-undercover-sting-operation/2017/11/27/0c2e335a-cfb6-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.b6e35306506c …

Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN, but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened — what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” — it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are — just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody in D.C., rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible sequence of events could possibly have happened.

Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: Rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by P.R. executives and lawyers.

How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?

THE MORE SERIOUS you think the Trump-Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the U.S. media as “Fake News,” the more you should be disturbed by what happened here, the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding. If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them. It is debacles like this — and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate — that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.

Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend — one could say a constant — when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks. I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential, and reckless stories that have been published — and then corrected, rescinded, and retracted — by major media outlets when it comes to this story.

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained the DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump-Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times yesterday in its news report on CNN’s embarrassment:

It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”

Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.

The report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr. Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.

Several news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a subpoena from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for President Trump’s financial records.

The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.

That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the Trump-Russia story, always in the same direction, toward the same political goals. Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected, walked back, or retracted — often long after the initial false claims spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:

Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)

An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)

WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)

A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)

RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)

Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)

Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)

Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most devoted critics — such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow — are constantly warning that the U.S. media’s unhinged, ignorant, paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of ways, in the process destroying the credibility of the U.S. media in the eyes of Putin’s opposition (who — unlike Americans who have been fed a steady news and entertainment propaganda diet for decades about Russia — actually understand the realities of that country).

U.S. media outlets are very good at demanding respect. They love to imply, if not outright state, that being patriotic and a good American means that one must reject efforts to discredit them and their reporting because that’s how one defends press freedom.

But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic, and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny. It certainly means that all of these “errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction, pushing the same political outcome or journalistic conclusion.

But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we witnessed yesterday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering transparency and accountability. In this case, that can’t mean hiding behind P.R. and lawyer silence and waiting for this to just all blow away.

At minimum, these networks — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS — have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks — the reason those attacks resonate — is themselves and their own conduct.

Update: Dec. 9, 2017 Hours after this article was published on Saturday — a full day and a half after his original tweets promoting the false CNN story with a “boom” and a cannon — Benjamin Wittes finally got around to noting that the CNN story he hyped has “serious problems”; needless to say, that acknowledgment received a fraction of retweets from his followers as his original tweets hyping the story attracted.

#CBS #CNN #Donald trump #fake news #MSNBC #wikileaks

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

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Are Islamic State recruits more street gang members than zealots?

http://bit.ly/2vS7Ukv

A makeshift memorial to the victims of the terrorist attack in Barcelona. Police killed five men August 18 believed to have been involved. AP Photo/Manu Fernandez

The recent terrorist attacks in Spain and Finland once again compel us to ask: Who joins the Islamic State, and why?

As a professor of modern Middle Eastern history, I have spent the majority of my professional life studying the region, its culture, society and politics. In recent years, I have researched and written about IS and its terrorist activities. While other experts and I have looked at how radicalization occurs, some new ideas are emerging about how and why men are attracted to IS.

Where do the recruits come from?

We know that IS recruits people from within the territory under its control and neighboring areas as well as from abroad. According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as of 2013 – that is, before Islamic State’s major push in the region – there were between 17,000 and 19,000 IS members in Iraq and Syria.

This is probably a low estimate, however. As of 2015, there were about 30,000, more than enough to replace the 15,000 killed by the American-led bombing campaign during the first year of that campaign.

A majority of IS recruits came from the Middle East. The largest number of Arabs who hail from places other than Iraq and Syria came from Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. Other fighters came from as far away as North America, Europe (Belgium has supplied the largest per capita contingent from Europe), Australia and the Caucasus (particularly Chechnya).

Why do they join?

Social scientists cite a number of reasons people join IS. Some of those recruited in Iraq and Syria, they assert, join because they believe in the Islamic State’s message. Others, however, join because they are compelled by IS to do so or for reasons to do with revenge, money, sectarian sentiments, camaraderie, the promise of power or the promise of sex slaves such as captured Yazidi women and girls..

Some social scientists claim that the sense of empowerment that comes from joining a group noted for its ultra-violence, disaffection from society, and just plain sociopathy might also factor into the calculations of European Muslims who face discrimination and impoverishment in their adopted homes.

The list of potential reasons for joining is so long that one is reminded of something the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said: “[I]nterior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.”

Of lone wolves, flaming bananas and machismo

Many ISIS attacks around the globe are carried out by individuals the media have dubbed “lone wolves” – that is, freelancers who act without the direct knowledge of the IS leadership. To avoid glamorizing them, the RAND Corporation prefers the term “flaming bananas”.

There are two theories why these individuals – or, indeed, those who travel to the caliphate to join IS – pledge allegiance to the group. The first is that they get “radicalized.”

Radicalization refers to a step-by-step process whereby individuals become increasingly susceptible to jihadi ideas. First, they cut themselves off from social networks such as family, which provide them with support and a conventional value system. They then immerse themselves in a radical religious counterculture. They might do this on their own, or a jihadi recruiter might bring them into the fold. Either way, the result is the same.

Most attempts to counter IS base their efforts on this model. For example, the U.S. Department of State has released a short video titled, “Run – Don’t Walk – to ISIS Land.” The video shows graphic images of crucifixions, beheadings, suicide bombings and the destruction of mosques perpetrated by ISIS members. It ends with a warning: “Think again – turn away.”

Interestingly, the video mimics IS propaganda, which, some observers claim, plays a key role in recruitment. Rather than presenting a religious rationale for the group’s actions, IS propaganda tends to focus on the violence the group perpetrates. IS has even released a video game based on Grand Theft Auto 5 in which, rather than stealing cars and battling the police, the player destroys advancing personnel carriers and shoots enemy soldiers.

Perhaps, then, the radicalization model is wrong or not universally applicable. Perhaps there’s something other than religious zealotry at play.

There is other evidence that the radicalization model is, at best, only part of the story. For example, there is the widely reported story of two would-be jihadists who, before they left Birmingham, U.K., for Syria, ordered “Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for Dummies” to fill the gaps in their knowledge.

Newspaper stories time and again puzzle over the problem of how it happens that individuals who go on to join IS were found in bars, even gay bars, or had Western girlfriends and smoked and drank almost up to the time they committed some act of violence for the group. The most common explanation is that their dissolute lifestyle was a cover.

After the driver of a truck ran down and killed 84 people in Nice, France, for example, the French interior minister was at a loss to explain how someone who drank during Ramadan (which had ended a week and a half before) could have radicalized so quickly.

Former French President Francois Hollande in Paris in September 2016 at a memorial service for victims killed by terrorism in France. AP Photo/Michael Euler

A number of experts have thus argued that the radicalization model should be replaced by or supplemented with a different model.

Rather than joining a radically different religious counterculture, individuals are attracted to IS, these experts argue, because its actions reaffirm the cultural values of those who are marginalized, or those who exhibit what psychiatrists call “social personality disorders.”

Could it be that IS volunteers are drawn to a value system that asserts an aggressive machismo, disparages steady work, and sustains the impulse for immediate gratification? Are they attracted to a culture that promotes redemption through violence, loyalty, patriarchal values, self-sacrifice to the point of martyrdom and the diminution of women to objects of pleasure?

In this reading, IS more closely resembles the sort of street gang with which many of its Western and Westernized enlistees are familiar than its more austere competitor, al-Qaida.

James L. Gelvin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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wesonerdy · 7 years ago

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Ronvolio’s adventures get underway as they try to uncover who is sabotaging a Capulet/Montague peace. Get a sneak peek of this week’s Still Star-Crossed!

Courtesy of ABC/Manu Trillo

Fellow Still Star-Crossed fans, it’s been awhile since we last visited fair Verona. In this interim period, we’ve learned some unpleasant news. The show has been moved from Mondays to Saturday evenings (at 10/9c). According to Deadline, this is a clear signal that the show has been essentially cancelled. This is further corroborated by Torrance Coombs tweets that Still Star-Crossed won’t be back for Season 2, even though the rest of Season 1 will air.

This news is particularly hard because I don’t know that the show was ever given a fair chance. The scant promotion, the initial decision to air at 10pm, and then to launch the show during the NBA finals all out Still Star-Crossed at a disadvantage. And the truth of the matter is that broadcast networks are beholden to ratings in a way that cable isn’t. So, unfortunately, Still Star-Crossed won’t be afforded the time and support to build an audience.

Still Star-Crossed is clearly a unique take on period drama. The fabulously inclusive and talented cast coupled with an interesting pan-Shakespearean world have made for a really entertaining show. As for me, I’ll be live tweeting until it goes off air and hoping-wishing that another network/platform will pick it up!

The last time we were in Verona, both Rosaline and Benvolio decided to follow through with the constraints placed on them by family and politics.

“All The World’s a Stage” begins with Rosaline visiting Isabella. As they enjoy some refreshments, Rosaline questions the plan for her to marry Benvolio. It won’t surprise us that Isabella shares her support of Escalus’ plan. They’re interrupted by Escalus, who has come to share some news of his own. Since the Montague/Capulet feuding is still underway, he wants Rosaline and Benvolio to have a betrothal ceremony sooner than planned. This will be a public show of unity between familes. Surely, this will help to calm things down. Interestingly, Rosaline says she’s thrilled with the plan… in fact, the more she’s gotten to know Benvolio the more she’s impressed with his wit and handsomeness. Yes, Rosaline says this all with a straight face, but we know it’s all to make Escalus jealous. And I think her digs to make some impact on the Prince.

Soon after, Lords Capulet and Montague debate Rosaline’s dowry. Escalus intervenes to tell Montague to pay Capulet’s price of 40,000 ducets. We know that Lord Capulet is desperate for those funds, but in exchange, Escalus is clear that Rosaline must willingly participate in the spectacle of her relationship with Benvolio.

Rosaline’s pretending is taking a toll on her. She confides in Livia that marriage to a Montague, the same people who killed their father, is unconcionable. As usual, Livia is optimistic… it has to be better than being a nun or a servant. They’re interrupted when a letter arrives from Benvolio inviting Rosaline to a picnic and sharing a sonnet, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day…” *giggles* because Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18! Rosaline is not impressed…

…and Benvolio is scandalized because it’s Lord Montague that had the sonnet written and sent to Rosaline. Now Benvolio is a laughingstock because the town believes he’s a sap. For Lord Montague, it’s all part of the propaganda. He’s adamant that Benvolio must follow through with the marriage and an heir, Capulet blood with the Montague name. Things get heated when Benvolio laments that if only Romeo and Juliet would have lived, things would be better for them all. As he drinks his misfortune away at the local pub, Benvolio continues to be mocked by the people of Verona, this time by a boistrous man name Petruchio (of course, Taming the Shrew pops into my mind, and I’m like, is this before or after Petruchio meets his Kate?) When Petruchio mocks Romeo (and his marriage to Juliet), a fight breaks out, one Benvolio wins.

Later at their (very public) picnic, Benvolio takes the opportunity to make a bargain with Rosaline. He will help her get away to the nunnery. Once she’s Sister Rosaline, there’s no way a marriage to Benvolio could go through. Rosaline agrees, at first, but rethinks it. She makes a bargain with her uncle: Rosaline will be a willing participant in the spectacle of her marriage, and in exchange, Lord Capulet will make Livia a lady again.

Elsewhere, after observing Isabella in this episode, my suspicions continue to escalate. It’s obvious that she doesn’t enjoy being sidelined by her brother. Does this mean Isabella wants to rule herself? Lord Montague also notices Isabella’s interest in playing a more active role and speaks to her directly about the Capulet Cathedral. With Capulet announcing that his chief architect has been killed (AKA Capulet shoved him off a balcony), construction on the cathedral is at a standstill. Montague proposes that his architect finish the cathedral with Isabella as the new patroness, an inspiration to Verona’s women. Lord Montague’s epic shade continues because you know Lord Capulet won’t be happy about being upstaged in this way.

The next day, in the town square, the show is on. Escalus performs the betrothal (despite supposedly feeling tortured by watching Rosaline with Benvolio… he doesn’t stop it though!) The scene as a whole is fascinating because, in the midst of the Ronvolio betrothal, these exchange longing looks with the one ones they actually love: Rosaline and Escalus, Benvolio and Stella (his blonde mistress from the brothel), who watches from the audience. Rosaline and Benvolio exchange vows, at least until they’re interrupted by a cloaked man who sets off a bomb in the middle of the square!

What does Rosaline do? She urges Benvolio to case after the culprit! This Ronvolio adventure becomes even more intense when the catch the guy… Petruchio! Benvolio accidentally pushes Petruchio off a roof (so maybe this isn’t the same man from Taming of the Shrew). Ultimately, Rosaline and Benvolio realize that there’s some external force who wants to keep the Capulet/Montague war going. If they can figure out who it is and stop the person who keeps sabotaging the peace, then they won’t have to get married anymore. So it seems more Ronvolio adventures are in our future and I CANNOT wait.

Other things to keep in mind:

Livia’s and Paris’ relationship is deepening and I’m so happy! The two even take a midnight stroll through the gardens to help Paris get his strength back. As they learn about each other, it seems that Paris could be willing to make a bid for Livia and help elevate her to a lady again. COME TO ME COUNTLIVIA!

Throughout the episode, we see Lord Capulet experience what many of Twitter call a “Macbeth” moment. He begins hearing and seeing ghosts, perhaps that of the architect? This makes Capulet extremely paranoid, so much so, that he doesn’t even want Lady Capulet to have a shrine to Juliet. The idea of dead spirits lingering isn’t very comforting for him. This is until Capulet finds himself in Juliet’s crypt and sees her ghost. Juliet’s message? “Beware!”

Ambassadors from Venice and Milan have arrived in Verona. News of peace in the city via Rosaline/Benvolio marriage has apparently opened up opportunities for business. But when the ambassador from Venice is killed in the explosion, both Escalus and Isabella realize that their situation has gotten even more dire.

In tonight’s episode “Pluck Out the Heart of My Mystery” (written by Linda Gase, directed by Ericson Core):

Rosaline and Benvolio work together to uncover who is responsible for pitting the Montagues and Capulets against each other. Meanwhile, Lord Montague is forced to welcome an unannounced visit from his sister, Tessa Montague, who has a manipulative plan of her own on how to deal with the Capulets . (via ABC)

You *must* watch this clip from the episode that gives us a sneak peek at Rosaline and Benvolio partnering up to solve their mystery. It’s AWESOME.

What happens in a brothel, stays in a brothel. #StillStarCrossed is all-new TOMORROW at 10|9c on ABC! pic.twitter.com/kJNgaZvTNq

— Still Star-Crossed (@StarCrossedABC) July 7, 2017

I love how these two give each other such a hard time. But you can tell that a grudging respect is emerging on both sides… and these are the perfect circumstances for me to ship, ship, ship!

Remember that “Pluck Out the Heart of My Mystery” will air tomorrow, Saturday, July 8 at 10p/9c on ABC. Take a look at 25+ images from the show and come live tweet with me!

Courtesy of ABC/Manu Trillo

PREVIEW: ‘Still Star-Crossed’ Season 1, Episode 4 “Pluck Out the Heart of My Mystery” Ronvolio's adventures get underway as they try to uncover who is sabotaging a Capulet/Montague peace. Get a sneak peek of this week's…

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pacificast · 8 years ago

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Soldiers thwart attack on Louvre, tourists held in lockdown

PARIS -- Paris was plunged into panic — again — when soldiers guarding the Louvre Museum shot an attacker who lunged at them with two machetes on Friday and shouted "Allahu Akbar!" as the historic landmark went into lockdown. The threat appeared to quickly recede after the assailant was subdued, but it cast a new shadow over the city just as tourism was beginning to rebound after a string of deadly attacks. Coming just hours before Paris finalized its bid for the 2024 Olympics, it also renewed questions about security in the City of Light. The soldiers' quick action put an end to what French President Francois Hollande said was "no doubt" a terrorist attack at one of Paris' most iconic tourist attractions. French prosecutor Francois Molins said the assailant was believed to be a 29-year-old Egyptian who had been living in the United Arab Emirates, though his identity has not yet been formally confirmed. "Everything shows that the assailant was very determined", Molins told a news conference, adding that the attacker, who was shot four times, was in a life-threatening condition in a hospital. Anti-terrorism prosecutors took charge of the investigation as police carried out raids near the tree-lined Champs-Elysees linked to the attack, which came two months after authorities carried out a special anti-terrorism exercise around the Louvre. Molins said the attacker was not carrying any identity papers but investigators used his cellphone and a national data base of visa applicants containing their photos and fingerprints to determine that he was a resident of the United Arab Emirates who arrived in Paris on a tourist visa on Jan. 26. Two days later the suspect bought two military machetes at a gun store in Paris, the prosecutor said. He also paid 1,700 euros for a one-week stay at an apartment in the chic 8th arrondissement of the French capital, near the Champs-Elysees. In the apartment, police found an Egyptian passport and 965 euros, as well as a residence permit, driver's license and a credit card all issued from the UAE, Molins said. He said the suspect's return flight to Dubai was scheduled for Sunday. Friday's attack targeted an entrance to a shopping mall that extends beneath the sprawling Louvre, a medieval former royal palace now home to the "Mona Lisa" and hundreds of other masterpieces. Waving two machetes over his head, the assailant lunged at the soldiers patrolling in the mall, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is great!" Molins said. One soldier fought him off and was slightly injured in the scalp. Another soldier fell to the ground as the assailant tried to slash him, then opened fire, shooting the attacker in the stomach. When that didn't stop him, the soldier fired three more times, gravely wounding him. The backpack the man was carrying contained cans of spray paint, but no explosives, Molins said. The 1,200 people inside the Louvre — one of the world's biggest tourist attractions — were first shuttled into windowless rooms as part of a special security protocol before being evacuated. The museum in central Paris remained closed for the rest of Friday but will reopen on Saturday, Culture Minister Audrey Azoulay told reporters. Hollande, speaking at a news conference in Malta where he was attending a European Union summit, said that while the Louvre incident was quickly contained, the overall threat to France remains high. He said the incident showed the need for the increased security patrols deployed around France since attacks in 2015. Those patrols — numbering about 3,500 soldiers in the Paris area — were first deployed following the January 2015 attack on Paris' satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and reinforced after the November 2015 bomb-and-gun attacks that left 130 people dead at the city's Bataclan concert hall and other sites. The country has been under a state of emergency since. READ France remembers the 130 killed in Paris attacks Interior Minister Bruno Le Roux praised the soldiers involved in Friday's attack, saying "to wear a uniform, as we can see in the propaganda of those who want to attack us, is to be a target." Restaurant worker Sanae Hadraoui, 32, said she was waiting for breakfast at a McDonald's in the Louvre's restaurant complex when she heard the first gunshot, followed by another and then a couple more. "I hear a shot. Then a second shot. Then maybe two more. I hear people screaming, 'Evacuate! Evacuate!'" she said. "They told us to evacuate. I told my colleagues at the McDonald's. We went downstairs and then took the emergency exit." Parisian Makram Chokri, who was shopping in the mall, described hearing a "boom, boom, boom over a few seconds. ... We thought it was an exercise at first but you know, you have a lot of scenarios going through your mind." Police sealed off mall entrances near the Louvre and closed the area to vehicles, snarling traffic in Paris. Confused tourists were shooed away. Lance Manus, a tourist from Albany, New York, described young girls crying in panic, and had immediate thoughts of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. "That's what we're used to now," he said. "I mean we have to learn to live with it, be vigilant. So we listen to instructions from the security guards and do what they told us." Eric Grau, a high school teacher chaperoning a group of 52 students, said: "We were in one of the galleries and a voice came through the loudspeakers to alert us, saying there was an alert." He said the group was taken to safety in the African art gallery. The attack came hours before the city unveiled its bid for the 2024 Olympics. Paris is competing against Budapest and Los Angeles for the games, which it hasn't hosted since 1924. Speaking outside the Louvre, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said terrorism threatens all of the world's big cities and "there is not a single one escaping that menace." The speed with which Paris largely went back to normal after the attack, with officers gradually dismantling barricades and pulling down police tape around the Louvre just three hours later, underscored how the French city has — unwillingly but stoically — been forced to learn to live with extremist threats. Within hours, French radio stations went back to talking about storms battering the west coast and school holiday traffic.(AP) http://dlvr.it/NHVSST | #PacificastNewsfeed

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