I was invited then disinvited to discuss Bradley Manning on BBC Breakfast TV this morning. I was delighted and really surprised that the BBC were prepared to give such prime media exposure to the case against the persecution of Manning. I should have realised it would not be allowed to happen.
I was asked to appear twice, once after 7 and once after 8, and to explain why the case of Bradley Manning ought to concern people in the UK. BBC Breakfast is based in Salford. So the BBC sent me train tickets, booked a room in the Holiday Inn and organised a cab for me from Manchester Piccadilly. I had reached so far as Euston from St Pancras yesterday when I discovered, rather by chance that my slots on BBC breakfast had been cancelled. I was instead offered a single live interview at 6.40 am that would not be repeated.
I suppose the BBC are at least being more subtle; instead of management intervention outright to cancel a possible airing of dissident thought, they are pretending to give it a voice by broadcasting it before 95% of the audience are awake. I was not prepared to participate in such tokenism, so I turned round and came home.
It of course brings back memories of when I was on my way to Leeds to take part in BBC Question Time, and was cancelled en route, and replaced by another neo-con clone. A Freedom of Information Act request for the documents and emails concerning that cancellation was refused by the BBC on the grounds of a Freedom of Information exemption for journalism. Censorship is not journalism.
Good to see that the odious war criminal James Purnell is earning his £295,000 a year by keeping the air waves free of thought.
Given the extraordinary amount of time the BBC has devoted to promoting the ludicrous trumped up charges against Julian Assange, their non-coverage of the Bradley Manning trial today is chilling.
“And you could equally well say that the USA, for much of the same period, turned a {insert whichever word you wish} into a superpower which provided economic opportunity and the highest standard of living in the world for its people.”
The word I would insert is “republic” the rest of the sentence needs to be qualified by “on borrowed money”. As Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov (1894-1958) said of the wild animals in Razpad Atoma (1938) “winter is coming”.
“To which you might add the enslavement of Easter Europe and half of Germany fpr the trifling period of 45 years?”
So countries like Uzbekistan are free now?
Habbabkuk, why did you not mention the Soviet gulags? I think we can guess.
Habba, i was implying oppressive. Repressive is much the same thing when subjugation occurs by design as it has especially so in the present century.
Remember the good old days of the ’90’s the Berlin Wall had fallen, technology boomed, the dot-com revolution was upon us and blow jobs in the Oval Room were the order of the day. The planet was mislead that we were all marching into the rainbow at 2000 — a sense of oneness around the Globe. Where did the American Dream go?
@ Villager:
“Remember the good old days of the ’90′s the Berlin Wall had fallen, technology boomed,….”
________
Yes, of course. And there was a lot of talk of the peace dividend as well….
@ John Goss:
1/. “Habbabkuk, why did you not mention the Soviet gulags? I think we can guess”
Perhaps I’ve been fooling around on the beach for too long, but I’m genuinely puzzled. It seemed superfluous to mention them given their common noteriety, but tell me
2/. So countries like Uzbekistan are free now?
Again, not sure what you mean. I was referring to the previously independent countries of central and eastern Europe, not the constituent republics of the old USSR. But if you’re saying that the latter (or many, or most of them) are not free today – in the sense I think we mean – than I’d agree with you. However, I don’t see the relevance of that to my statement that the USSR was a supremely repressive state.
H, surely the comparison with Soviet camps and Guantanamo, plus other US prisons far away from the US and places of extraordinary rendition could only have escaped you. I bet Sophie got it.
Why the hell do you have to travel all the way to Salford Quays from Kent? Bloody stupid waste of time and money. Why can’t they interview you remotely from a local studio or by broadband from your computer at home like RT do with Annie Machon in Dusseldorf?
@ John Goss :
“H, surely the comparison with Soviet camps and Guantanamo, plus other US prisons far away from the US and places of extraordinary rendition could only have escaped you.”
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Nice try, John, but unconvincing.
GITMO and others unknown : a couple of thousand at most.
Soviet gulag : 10 million at least…..
Of course, you’ll say that there is no MORAL difference. Well, I would disagree, and in any case your original assessment was quantitative in flavour and intent, viz “..the MOST repressive country since the second world war”.
Oh! before I forget, I don’t recall the US having carried out a Holomodor against its own citizens…?
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La vita è bella, life is good!
Between 1930 and 1960 14 million Soviet citizens were sent to Gulag camps, most after just a short show trial, many after no trial at all. Over one million died from the effects of maltreatment or were worked to death. By comparison Gitmo, which has had less than 800 detainees since 2002, is a holiday camp.
Calling the US the most repressive nation since WW2 is a trendy opinion, repeated parrot fashion, which doesn’t stand up to evidence. Uzbekistan might not be free but no less free than they were under Soviet rule.
Whoops! perhaps that should have been “Holodomor”?
Habbuffoon
4:55 pm
“Oh! before I forget, I don’t recall the US having carried out a Holomodor against its own citizens…?”
Yeah. Like the Native Americans?
Oh! I forget they weren’t quite people were they?
How do you think up this stuff?
He’s a Holodomor denier. Ban him.
Suppression only works if no one knows there is ready and comprehensive contact, Craig. And then to deny it, however plausibly and/or vehemently, reveals the weaknesses sat around tables at the top of the dodgy control system and a vulnerability to exploit and export/import to others, in systems which are impossible to effectively defend, and which can be easily attacked to collapse its corrupt and perverse, indefensible and inequitable power base[s] ……… http://www.ur2die4.com/?p=4203
Because that then destroys completely the contrived myth that state and private media mogul operations have control and power with their pimping and pumping of particular and peculiar world views via the utterances and iterations of their preferred and presented puppet muppets [PMs] ….. Primed Mouthpieces.
To have alternative intelligent thought transfers and alternative intelligence thoughts transferred virtually immediately and practically unhindered, would extraordinarily render politics and its soap show operations, a mortal blow, as it reveals their aired programs to both the ignorant masses and the freely smarter educated and better entertained to be badly scripted and in support of dodgy interests with no equity in the future? And that is an abiding and indefensible, and therefore incredibly easy and catastrophically huge black hole of a cyber attack vector/zeroday vulnerability exploit opportunity to export/import into operating systems/executive administrations, for those with the ability and utility/smarter enabled facility to provide for themselves and whomever/whatever they would choose to support or deny assistance to, whatever they wanted or was deemed necessary.
Such is the Powerful Control and Controlling Power of Savvy Internet Sourcing for SMARTR Advanced IntelAIgent Systems with Global Operating Devices which be both Primed for Pimping and Pumping Provision of Creative Novel Words for Newly Ordered World Order Plays ….. in the Greater Great Game [which be following IT and Media with CyberIntelAIgent Leads in AI Revised Evolutionary and QuITe Revolutionary HyperRadioProActive Energy ProgramMING for All Future Viable Sees with AIdDefinite Vision, and which is deliberately emboldened and quarantined from the main body of shared text above which precedes it, in this bracketed box, to both either draw attention to itself, or for you to presently dismiss it from your further thoughts, thus to allow its return at a later date, as future events unfold and the truth in what is here transparently shared with you, becomes evidently apparent and mainstream news.]
“Politics is show business for ugly people” ….. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2010/12/who_says_washington_is_hollywo.html …. and the mean spirited are career austerity politicians with zero practical or virtual moral authority over anything worthwhile and desirable, which makes them all rather more than just a tad trad and sad and mad and rad and not at all fab ……. which be just plain vanilla ordinary whenever extraordinary is always all that is needed to effectively lead a following.
“Oh! before I forget, I don’t recall the US having carried out a Holomodor against its own citizens…?”
Kibo Noh mentioned the native Americans Habbabkuk. But even during the same years of the Starvation in the USSR (1932-33) the United States was suffering similarly with the Great Depression. You won’t want to believe the essence of this article because the research was done by a Russian.
http://www.infowars.com/researcher-famine-killed-7-million-in-us-during-great-depression/
I would have responded before but I had a round of decadent golf yesterday.
” … during the same years of the Starvation in the USSR (1932-33) the United States was suffering similarly with the Great Depression. You won’t want to believe the essence of this article because the research was done by a Russian. ”
Well firstly that research is nonsense. You can’t simply look at population figures and assume the missing millions all died of hunger. Inevitably the birth rate fell during the depression years and immigration also never reached pre-WW1 levels; in fact for several years immigration stopped completely. Why would anyone want to go to a country experiencing a depression?
The other big difference is that the American government spent millions (billions in todays money) trying to alleviate the effects of the depression whilst the famine in Russia was deliberately caused by state intervention. Part of Stalin’s plan to exterminate the Kulaks and was efficiently covered up.
Inevitably the birth rate fell during the depression years and immigration also never reached pre-WW1 levels; in fact for several years immigration stopped completely.
The other big difference is that the American government spent millions (billions in todays money) trying to alleviate the effects of the depression whilst the famine in Russia was deliberately caused by state intervention. Part of Stalin’s plan to exterminate the Kulaks and was efficiently covered up.
Good rejoinders Kempe; on the immigration point,in the case of the Irish there was actually net emigration from the US in the early thirties; the Free State (as it then was) offered rudimentary assistance to the destitute (a legacy from their terminated membership of the UK) whereas the Land of the Free could offer them nothing beyond private charity and soup kitchens.
Readers who ploughed through ‘Angela’s Ashes’ will recall that Frank McCourt’s parents were part of this wave of returnees during the depression years.
I personally feel bad for Manning, but I had his clearance before. It’s pretty simple, even if you’re morally opposed to what you’ve seen or know, you don’t share or release information unless you’re willing to pay the price. When you join the armed forces of the US, you essentially sign a contract before taking an oath, and you’re pretty much owned by the government until your enlistment period is finished. Top that off with being military personnel or civilian, if you APPLY for a TS/SCI clearance and are granted, you are throughly made aware of the consequences of giving secrets.
While one could say that the controls at the FOB he was based at were pretty absent (such as there was a DVD drive, and it was not disabled via the BIOS, and anyone who had access to the small shack also had essentially access to the 3 major DoD and State Dept. networks), he knew upfront that if one releases information that person should be willing to pay the price. He also should have known better than to BRAG about it to a hacker in the SFB area! Also, Manning was having a big issue in his love life which some have felt may have lead him to do what he did…..
Do you believe official economic statistics?
Do you believe the ‘war on terrorism’ is hyped up to take away the freedoms of citizens and distract citizens from economic problems?
Answer here: svy.mk/11p4EWC
http://www.scottishtimes.com
This shocking bias in our publicly funded broadcaster must be stopped! i.e. Tonight’s Question Time, a referendum special, is coming from Edinburgh, with an audience of 16 and 17 year olds. The panel? Labour (Sanwar), Tory (Davidson), Respect (a party with no representation in Scotland, George Galloway), UKIP (Farage), Lesley Riddoch who supports devo max, then ONE supporter of independence… Angus Robertson.