Media Lens, London, 18 January 2012

News that a fourth scientist in two years, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, had been assassinated in Iran by an unknown agency generated minimal outrage in the press.

Patrick Cockburn notedin the Independent:
‘While the identity of those carrying out the assassinations remains a mystery, it is most likely to be Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad…’

The Sunday Times published a meticulous account of the planning and execution of the attack provided by ‘a source who released details’ on the actions of ‘small groups of Israeli agents’ operating inside Iran. (Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, ‘Israel’s secret war,’ Sunday Times, January 15, 2012)

Julian Borger’s article in the Guardian warnedagainst ‘Goading a regime on the brink.’

We wonder if the Guardian would have described the Iranian assassination of scientists on US or Israeli streets as ‘goading’. We also wonder if Borger would have described these as terrorist attacks.

Using the media database Lexis-Nexis we have been able to find just one example of a UK journalist describing Roshan’s assassination as an act of terror – New Statesman’s senior political editor Mehdi Hasan writingin the Guardian. Otherwise, almost all references have been limited to the use of the word by Iranian officials behind scare quotes. (After challenges from Media Lens and other activists, Borger did publisha rare example of non-Iranian use of the term.)

By contrast, in October, the US accused Iran of recruiting a used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, DC. In that case, journalists had no qualms about using the word terror without inverted commas. Karen McVeigh reported in the Guardian:
‘Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested last month, and stands accused of running a global terror plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran.’

The Daily Mail:
‘An extraordinary terrorist plot has been foiled – which would have seen the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. murdered on American soil.’

The Telegraph:
‘Iranian government officials were accused by the Obama administration of plotting a string of deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.’

On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald postednumerous similar examples from the US media. The alleged Arbabsiar plot was subsequently debunkedby analyst Gareth Porter.

As Greenwald observed, ‘accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos’. Responding to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, not unreasonably, that ‘a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person’, Channel 4′s Alex Thomson wrote:
‘Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits’ including ‘the Royal Fusilliers [sic]’. (Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005)

Is that really so absurd? After all, following the murderous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Bomber Command:
‘It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.’ (Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005)

Presumably, then, one can argue that the RAF is a terrorist organisation.

Returning to last week’s assassination, while no-one has yet suggested that Iran is now obliged to bomb Washington, Borger argued:
‘If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target [of the debunked Arbabsiar ‘plot’], the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.’

In similar vein, the aptly-named James Blitz asked in the Financial Times:
‘But even if an immediate military conflict… is averted, this still leaves a wider question: how much longer can Israel and the US wait before they bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?’

The day after Roshan’s killing, Andrew Cummings, formerly an adviser on the Middle East and US affairs in the UK cabinet office national security staff, commented in the Guardian on ‘the risks’ of ‘this audacious approach’ – he meant the murdering of scientists. The sub-heading explained:
‘The death of another Iranian scientist has led to criticism of such actions, but Tehran’s refusal to co-operate leaves little alternative.’

Cummings clarified:
‘What many people fail to recognise, though, is that a covert campaign, while rife with physical, diplomatic and legal risks, is the lesser of many evils.’

And yet, as Patrick Cockburn noted, ‘the US has found no evidence Tehran is trying to make a nuclear bomb, though US politicians [and US-UK journalists] often speak as if this was an established fact…
‘The US National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress, the collective judgement of all the US intelligence organisations, said there was no evidence Iran had been trying to build a bomb since 2003. The Defence Intelligence Agency concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme at that time was directed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and when he was overthrown by the US, it was ended.’

Compare this with Blitz’s version:
‘Some western intelligence agencies believe Iran will bide its time a little longer and enrich more uranium – but will not take the big strategic decision to race for the bomb in 2012. Still, in every other respect, the auguries are not good.’

Again by contrast, Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, toldveteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh last year: ‘there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb’.

Readers might respond that Cummings and Blitz are entitled to their baseless views, and the Guardian and FT are perfectly entitled to publish them – that’s what free speech is all about. We agree.

But a problem arises when we try to imagine the Guardian publishing a piece justifying the Iranian killing of a US scientist on a US street one day after he had been murdered. And try imagining the FT hosting an opinion piece that asked: ‘How much longer can Iran wait before launching its bombers against the US and Israel?’

In the digital age, people document and share everything – even insults to the fallen

Jonathan Jones

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 January 2012 18.17 GMT

By Arjun Janah

I wander off, from working life, to see and hear what’s new,
And here is what I find — which now is openly in view.

I see the people in two camps (though some are in-between)
And one of them is calling for an ending that’s obscene.
They’re calling for the cops to do what those for hire do best,
To beat up on the ones who dare, their binding chains, to test.
But since the ones who’re testing are these students, who are white,
Or women who are white as well, this gives the rest a fright.
For pepper spray and rods and boots, when used on those who’re darker
Or poorer may be quite okay — and safely out of sight,
Or even guns and bullets, used when we’re asleep at night,
But when it’s done in daylight, with reporters gathered near,
To those who’re lighter, richer — why, then some refuse to cheer,
Though others still approve — and only wish they’d done it sooner.
To both these camps, the other one is certifiably lunar!

And here’s what those in power are now thinking. Hear them say,
To others of their kind, “Let’s stop this wretched thing, today!

“For if some question, what was held for longest time as true,
Then what’s to save some other things from critical review?
We bomb the regions far away — and people burn in hells.
But see, there are no pictures and that story, no one tells.
But what to do when people rise up here, in this, our street,
Or merely sit — near places where we one-percenters meet?
They circumvent the ban on mikes by echoing together!
They point out things that no one did without the tar and feather!
They even give out food and books — and people pause to think…
They’re rodents! If not driven out, this ship of ours might sink!
So hear our drums of war and how we beat them, till at last
Our lust for blood is satisfied. But has the danger passed?
Oh no! These books they distribute, in public in the square,
Must now be gone! And so must those, who advocate we share!”

I wondered off, from working life, and this I saw and heard.
I wondered loud, if rich should share. But I was called a turd.

But here is what some others said, who came to my defense,
And what they said, to me at least, made somewhat better sense.

“Remember that the ones who lived, in this, our bounteous land,
Remembered those who came by ship, but did not understand
The land or cultures that were here. They were, by climate, beaten
And surely would have perished — as do all who haven’t eaten
The season long. But natives came — and gave, it’s said, of maize,
Of turkey and of other things. This did the saved amaze
And they gave thanks (as we still do) not to the ruddy “Indians”
But to their God, their Savior Christ, in these, their new “dominions”.
And natives gave them implements — and other things they needed,
For they were used to sharing all — and those, in trouble, heeded.
But when one needed something back, and asked, this raised a fever
On those who understood him not, and called him, “Indian giver!”
And so it’s been. They’re vanished now, the ones who knew to share…
But should, in turn, these folk depart — who now, to sharing, dare?

Babui / Arjun
2011 November 24th, Th. (Thanksgiving Day)
Brooklyn

Shahidul Alam on photography for change

Shahidul Alam walked on stage on Thursday wearing a marigold-colored salwar kameez, a camera over his left shoulder, and a beltpack slung around his hips. There was no mistaking his calling. The Bangladeshi photographer, activist and social entrepreneur has almost single-handedly rebalanced the world of photojournalism, long dominated by Western photographers and their worldview. He has shifted its lens eastward and southward by training legions of photographers in his homeland, creating an award-winning photo agency to sell their work and founding a prestigious international photography festival to showcase their talent. And this fall, he published a book, My Journey as a Witness, telling the story of Bangladeshi photography as an instrument of social justice. He serves as an ambassador of this movement, in the words of PopTech’s executive director, Andrew Zolli, “travelling the world leaving new cultures of art makers in his wake.” We sat down with Alam backstage in Camden, Maine.

PopTech: You founded Drik, a photo agency, and the Chobi MelaInternational Festival of Photography. Why did you feel it was important for Bangladeshi photographers, as well as their peers, to have these outlets for their work?
Shahidul Alam: Firstly, it was a question of addressing this very distorted perception people have of what I call the “majority world” countries. Our poverty is a reality, but that is not the only identity that we have. Secondly, I wanted to challenge a very unidirectional form of storytelling that has — to a large extent — been propagated by the West. The richness and diversity of human life gets lost in a very agenda-led information distribution system. So that was the beginning.

We also wanted to celebrate our own culture. It’s not that I am against white, Western photographers producing work in Bangladesh — I think our ideas need to be challenged just as much. It’s the monopoly of dissemination that I was against. So we wanted to create a space for diversity — for both Western work and our own work. That’s where the Chobi Mela festival came in — to facilitate that cultural infusion.

Yesterday morning, in your presentation at PopTech, you showed a few examples of mobile photography exhibits — on rickshaws and tuk tuks — going places where that kind of exhibit has never been before. You called it “Taking the Gallery to the People.” Why was it important to you to get photographs out of galleries and out of the city?
In some ways, I am part of the problem I’ve been describing. I’m a middle-class male photographer. If I were in a slum, photographing a woman who probably doesn’t have a door to slam in my face in the first place, the power relationship between the two of us would not be very different than the power relationship between her and a Western photographer. We are perpetuating a situation in which the disenfranchised do not have the opportunity to tell their stories. To address this, we started doing two things: One was training women photographers; the other thing was teaching working-class children photography. I’ve very happy that today our agency has a large number of women and people who have come from a middle-class background. And they have a very different story to tell.

What kind of challenges do photojournalists in Bangladesh face today, and have they changed since you started out?
There are differences in terms of degree, but in principle they’re still the same. Let me give you an example. Several years ago there was an exhibit in London about the Millennium Development Goals, put together by Oxfam, Christian Aid, Save the Children — several major NGOs. All the work was produced by white, European photographers. So I asked one of the organizers why this was the case, and he replied to me that the curator had mentioned to him that “they” — meaning us — “did not have ‘the eye.’” A statement like that about women, people of color, people with handicaps of any form would be completely unacceptable in this day and age, yet here was a curator dismissing an entire group of cultural producers from what I call “the majority world”. In response, we collected work by majority world photographers, and they produced a calendar called “Having the Eye.”

Why did you put together your new book, My Journey As A Witness?
I thought it was important to document the phenomenal shift — the marvelous revolution that had taken place in Bangladesh. The book is also challenging in a very tactile way the fact that, still today, for many news organizations, the only answer is to send out a photographer to countries like Bangladesh.

Does the book itself chronicle your career?
It chronicles the movement — and my career as part of that. But it talks much more about political and social environment in which we’ve evolved. It’s not simply about photography, but about the geopolitical space we live in.

Do you think digital photography and the access to digital photography is democratizing the kind of storytelling you’ve been doing all your life?
I think the fact that so many people have digital tools certainly will change the predatory nature of media. But that’s only a small part of it. If I am photographing a farmer in a field in Bangladesh for, let’s say, the New York Times, the person who’s probably most knowledgeable about the situation is the farmer. Through my proximity, I know a little bit less. The person who probably knows the least is the editor at the New York Times. He or she is the most powerful person in the chain and the farmer probably has no say in how that story is told. So I think that the publishing process needs to be subverted, and until that is done, I don’t think simply producing more imagery will change things.

Image: Kris Krug for PopTech

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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The inaugural talk at the Pop Tech Conference in Maine on 20th October 2011

By rahnuma ahmed

It is not only the American corporate media which keeps the lid on the Federal Reserve System — since, contrary to what most  Americans believe, it is `not federal’, has `no reserve’, is `not even a bank’ but actually a banking cartel which serves and furthers the interests of the wealthiest men in the world – American universities too play their role. As Stephen Lendman points out, his MBA curriculum 46 years ago, had `left out the most important parts of the story and never hinted at anything sinister about how the banking system works in fact’ (The Federal Reserve, Z Magazine, June 29, 2006).

A similar situation seemingly prevails in the UK, for, when I asked a relative who teaches business and finance at a British university about who owns the Bank of England, I was told, its nationalised. Its a public organisation wholly-owned by the government.  Corroborating the official storyline secured in place by the powers-that-be, reflected in the Bank’s website:  ’As a public organisation, wholly-owned by Government, and with a significant public policy role, the Bank is accountable to Parliament.’

But this account – unfailingly subscribed to by most Brits, `You ask the question, Who Owns The Bank Of England? to one thousand Britons, and I kid you not, all of them will say that it is owned by the Government’ (The Tap Blog, February 27, 2010) – glosses over actualities. For instance, the setting up of  a wholly owned subsidiary called Bank of Nominees Limited (BOEN), a private limited company, by the Bank of England in 1977, which was granted an exemption from disclosing its shareholders. ‘It was considered undesirable that the disclosure requirements should apply to certain categories of shareholders.’ This exemption is separate to the fact that the Bank of England is also protected by its Royal Charter status, and the Official Secrets Act. To put it briefly, members of the British public are ‘not allowed to know who the shareholders are who own the company which carries out Central Banking in the UK.’

Obviously, the public’s access to such basic information in the mother of parliamentary democracies, is `undesirable.’ What was it George Orwell had said? All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

There are other powerful banks as well, these include the Bank of Japan, and the European Central Bank (consisting of the 12 European countries which adopted the singe euro currency in 1999). But the mother of these powerful central banks which serve and further the interests of the wealthiest men in the world, is a little-known bank — ‘a bank never heard of’ — the Bank of International Settlements (BIS). Founded in 1930, based in Basle, Switzerland, it is `the central banker to its member central banks.’ The BIS and the dominant central banks, writes Lendman, wield their influence in a `cartel-like alliance with each other to assure they all benefit more than they otherwise would without such a cozy arrangement’ (The Federal Reserve, June 29, 2006).

The `concentration of financial power into the hands of a small group of powerful banking and investment firms on Wall Street’ through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature From Jekyll Island, interview, April 2, 2004) was preceded by longer term historical changes which ‘switched’ money from wealth to debt. As monetary researchers at Discover the Secret of Our Money System blog explain, the real issue is not gold and silver vs. paper, commodity money vs. fiat money. The real issue is wealth money vs. debt money. It is honesty vs. fraud. A close look at the trail of United States money reveals how previous notions and practices of gold and silver commodity money which was `put into circulation as a wealth to the people, by the people’ was later replaced by ones of `monetized debt, put into circulation by the banks, as interest bearing debts to the people, for the personal profit of bankowners.’ These, are current.

Gold and silver had worked earlier, say Byron Dale, Gregory Soderberg and Thomas Hedin,  because people had produced the gold and silver, a raw resource of the earth, through their labour. It was a wealth to `ourselves’, the people, it was spent into circulation as a benefit to all of society, there was no debt attached to it. But, it was not the depositing of gold and silver coins at the Treasury for the sake of convenience, in lieu of Treasury notes (paper money), that signalled the shift because there was still `good, honest, wealth money with no debt, no excessive profit, nor excessive purchasing power to anyone.’

It was the depositing of gold and silver coins in a fractional reserve bank, which clinched the switch: `The bank held the coins as a reserve and expanded the money supply by making new loans equal to 10 times the face value of the coins deposited.’ Wealth switched to debt, as all new money was formed not by creating wealth, but by creating debt.

What might have seemed a good idea to many at the outset, leading to all round benefits, banks get more profits, people get quicker and easier loans, more capital is available for commerce, for production, increasingly turns into a nightmare as `sooner or later, more and more people can not make their loan repayments.’ As increasingly, what Thomas Jefferson foresaw — when banks are allowed to control the issuance of their currency the American people are gradually deprived of all property, until their children one day wake up homeless — becomes a reality.

Another Founding Father, James Madison, a main draftor of the US Constitution, had  called bankers ‘Money Changers,’ a reference to the Bible which says Jesus twice drove the Money Changers from the Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. ‘History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.’

The US Congress and the President’s agreement to privatise the nation’s money system, says Lendman, to relinquish what should have remained the government’s exclusive power led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, an all-powerful privately owned banking cartel which has the right to print money in any amount, to control its supply and price. To ‘benefit hugely by loaning it out for a profit including to the government itself that must pay interest on the money it should never have to if it simply printed its own.’

The Federal Reserve Act was possibly, and still is, illegal as Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution – the inviolable law of the land — states that the Congress shall have the power to coin (create) money and regulate the value thereof. The US Supreme Court in 1935 ruled that the Congress `cannot constitutionally delegate its power to another group or body.’

The American public is harmed in several ways because of the Fed, points out Lendman. Through the invisible tax of inflation: newly-created money entering the system dilutes the purchasing power, it reduces the value of dollars already present. The dollar’s weakness since 2002 is possibly the result of excessive printing to fund the Bush administration’s `endless wars and reckless tax cuts for the rich.’ Through the banking cartel’s practice of usury, its power to artificially move rates up or down to any level it chooses.  Through the taxes the public must pay, `to cover the interest on the huge national debt’, well over $8.4 trillion, which has accumulated from the money the Fed printed and loaned to the government. Through the cartel getting the public to bail out the system with more of its tax dollars. Through — contrary to what the public had been fed (pun intended) about the Fed, that it would stabilise the economy, smooth out the business cycle, maintain sustainable growth, keep prices steady, benefit all – the crashes since its creation in 1913, `with them in charge’ are: 1921, 1929, the Great Depression years, recessions of 1953, 1957, 1969, 1975, 1981, 1990 and 2001.

The manner in which the Fed and European central banks operate to impoverish their own people, bears parallels to how the World Bank and the IMF does to `the rest’, but that is another story.

Controversy over whether the United States official gold reserves (over 4,500 metric tons) actually exist in the United States Bullion Depository, widely known as Fort Knox, or have been spirited away, have raged over the past decades. Edith Roosevelt, the grand-daughter of president Theodore Roosevelt is often quoted by many, ‘Allegations of missing gold from our Fort Knox vaults are being widely discussed in European circles. But what is puzzling is that the Administration is not hastening to demonstrate conclusively that there is no cause for concern over our gold treasure – if indeed it is in a position to do so.’

These concerns were revived in 2009 when rumours spread virally of tungsten i.e., fake gold bars of Fort Knox origin, having been discovered in Hong Kong. Informed sources say, hours after the scam was identified, Chinese officials caught the perpetrators. And reportedly uncovered, during the Clinton administration ‘between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 thousand metric tonnes].  Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day.’ Stock market analyst Robert Prechter claims to know people who have ‘copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of ‘tungsten’ bars shipped to Ft. Knox’ (Market Oracle, November 12, 2009).

The Fort Knox gold story got murkier middle of this year, when rumors circulated that a report prepared by the Federal Security Service for the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin says, the former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged and jailed for sex crimes in the US on May 14 because he had discovered that all of the gold held at Fort Knox was `missing and/or unaccounted’ for. This was reported in the EU Times, May 31, 2011 (nothing to do with the European Union by the way, the online publication does not enjoy credibility with many, according to wiki_rational, it is ‘xenophobic,’ ‘anti-semitic,’ ‘racist’), and I have no means at my disposal of verifying whether the Federal Security Service had actually reported any such thing to the Russian prime minister. However, other news items reported in the feature are verifiably true. That Putin had posted a defense of Strauss-Kahn on the Kremlin’s official website, alleging that he was the victim of a US conspiracy, ‘It’s hard for me to evaluate the hidden political motives but I cannot believe that it looks the way it was initially introduced. It doesn’t sit right in my head.’ That Ron Paul, a top Congressman and 2012 Republican presidential candidate (of Libertarian views) is worried that the Fort Knox gold is gone. That, when directly asked by reporters, he had replied, ‘I think it is a possibility.’

With the US Treasury’s debt to China having reached the $1.2 trillion mark, with the largest creditor of the world’s superpower having advised the latter to ‘live within its means’ (Huffington Post, August 6, 2011), the US targets China in classic warfare fashion: encirclement, seige, more or less clandestine support for internal disorder (Global Research, November 18, 2010).

As sounds of `End the Fed‘ voiced by Occupy Wall Street-ers reverberate across the world, as I ponder Madison’s Biblical reference to the Money Changers, I come across a recent interview of Eric Walberg, author, Post-modern Imperialism. Walberg, who dislikes slots and -isms, who makes use of Marx, who describes himself as being `a freelance monotheist’ (Eric Walberg and Jonathan Reynolds, Global Research, November 10, 2011), suggests something with which I would like to end my two-part series:

‘The Judaic prophets, followed by Jesus and Muhammad, and the nineteenth century secular prophet of revolution Marx, rejected usury and interest, as representing ill-gotten gain, with good reason. Marx condemned this mode of extraction of surplus as the highest form of fetishism, based on private property and exploitation of labor. They all rejected this exploitation on a moral basis as unjust, insisting that morality be embedded in the economy, a principle which was abandoned when capitalism took hold. While Judaism and Christianity adapted, Islam did not.

‘Interest, and today’s money based on US military might alone, are the root cause not only of the current world financial crisis, but, as a corollary to Rothschild’s dictum ['Give me control of a nations money supply and I care not who makes its laws']… and Clausewitz’s dictum [Politics is the womb in which war develops], the primary instrument facilitating (and benefiting from) the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the world political crisis.’

Whether believers and secularists can unite to fight this battle, is anyone’s guess.

Published in New Age, Tuesday, November 15, 2011