Rappel: nous sommes plus puissants que la CIA

Take the Boston Globe, for example. By the standards of American journalism it's a very liberal newspaper. Their book review editor a couple of years ago said publicly that she would never allow a South End book to be reviewed. The reason that she gave was that I was a South End author, and as long as I was a South End author she'd never allow a South End book to be reviewed.

In fact, sometimes it's kind of comical. For example, the National Council of Teachers of English every year gives out what they call an "Orwell Award" for exposure of doublespeak. It was awarded to me for On Power and Ideology two years ago. This year it was awarded to the book that Edward Herman and I did, Manufacturing Consent. Just at the time when that award was given, a Boston Globe columnist, a rather left-liberal columnist, incidentally, wrote a column interviewing the guy who is in charge of this award. It was a very upbeat column about what a terrific idea this is to give an award for exposure of doublespeak. She listed some of the people who had gotten it in the past, Ted Koppel, etc. There was a very striking omission: This year's award was not mentioned. It happened to go to a local person, which usually is mentioned. It also happened to be the first time, I think, that anybody had gotten it for the second time. Furthermore, both of the books in question were books about the media. It's not what Ted Koppel does. It was critique of the media. None of that could be mentioned. South End has a very hard time getting a book reviewed. It's been written up in Publisher's Weekly, in fact, which has discussed this.

If you don't have access to capital resources, advertisers, the powerful modes of public articulation, your outreach is going to be extremely limited. You can make up for it to some extent with just hard work. There are ways of compensating. Some of these ways are important. For example, dissidents in lots of societies cooperate. I spend an awful lot of time, for example, just xeroxing stuff, copying stuff for friends in other countries who are, in their countries, in roughly the situation I'm in here. They do the same for me. That means that although I don't get a research grant to work on this kind of stuff or time off or whatever, I do have access to resources that mainstream scholars or for that matter the CIA don't have. The CIA or mainstream scholars don't have a very smart and perceptive guy in Israel scanning the Hebrew journals for them picking out the things that are important, doing an interpretation and analysis of them and sending reams of this material to me.

Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent

Un Ph. D. en résistance!

Les choses bougent! Après qu'Anthony Fenton et Dennis Bernstein eurent outé la correspondante de Associated Press et du New York Times à Haïti sur Flashpoint, l'AP l'a virée! Et à Montréal:

Manif/Demo 10h lundi 2 janvier Aux bureaux de circonscription de Pierre Pettigrew (2348, Jean-Talon Est, bureau 200, Metro Iberville) et Denis Coderre (4975, Charleroi à Montréal-Nord). Spectacle 18:00 lundi 2 janvier 2006 Perle Retrouvée, 7655 20e avenue/Crémazie Admission: $5 Chavanne Clerveaux Présente: Magda, Sampol, Praize, Mac DB, Tac-Tic Polo, Kid Fleo, Meco D'Art, Asoto Spectacle 18:00 dimanche 8 janvier 2006 Club Balattou 4372 St. Laurent Chavanne Clerveaux & Joe Trouillot avec leur invité Ras-Irie (Jamaïque) Admission: $10 à l'avance, $15 à la porte

A few people have said and written that I was released from a Haitian jail on Sept. 12 because of the privilege of my skin color and my holding a valid US passport. I won't deny these privileges, which I continue to use as leverage to tell the story of Haiti's killing fields, but it should be known that the judge who ordered me arrested on Sept. 9 did so precisely because I was white and a US citizen. In his mind my presence was a challenge to his authority and threatened to expose an arbitrary and politically motivated search of Father Gerard Jean-Juste's residence at the parish of St. Claire's church. I was using my privilege against him when I thrust my press pass in his direction and claimed the right to report on his activities. He made his intentions clear after calling me a "terrorist" and a "white bandit" finally concluding, "I am going to show you that this is my country, this is Haiti. I am going to make an example out of you to teach you I am the law here. Handcuff him!"

Seething in Haiti Part 1: The Screaming Suit, Kevin Pina

La vérité est toujours bonne à dire

Jean Charest a été élu avec le plus faible taux de participation des 60 dernières années. Il a obtenu 1,755,963 voix, 11,623 de moins qu'en 1998, en dépit de 236,069 nouveaux électeurs! Plus de 68,1% des 5,490,551 électeurs inscrits n'ont pas voté pour lui! Ce qui ne l'empêche pas d'administrer 58 milliards de dollars.

Qui a voté libéral? Les personnes âgées de 65 ans et plus forment 17,5% de l'électorat, mais comme elles votent en plus grande proportion que les autres groupes d'âge, elles représentent près de 20% des bulletins dans l'urne. Sur les 3,817,764 électeurs qui ont voté, plus de 750,000 étaient des personnes âgées. Comme les 2/3 ont voté libéral, on a 500,000 votes rouges.

Les non-francophones font 18% des électeurs qui ont voté, soit près de 700,000 votes. En enlevant les 65 ans et plus déjà comptabilisés, on a 560,000 électeurs. Comme plus de 90% ont voté libéral, on a un autre 500,000 votes rouges. Les Libéraux ayant obtenu 1,755,000 votes, il ne reste donc plus que 755,000 votes parmi le 4 millions de francophones de 18 à 64 ans. En d'autres termes, plus de 81% des francos âgés de 18 à 64 ans, qui constituent le coeur de la société québécoise, qui produisent le gros du PIB et fournissent le gros des taxes et impôts, sont SYS-TÉ-MA-TI-QUE-MENT rayés du pouvoir politique !

[...]

Et c'est encore plus hallucinant à Ottawa. [...] On ne rêve pas : plus de 92% des francos âgés de 18 à 64 ans n'ont pas voté pour le parti des sympathiques Jean Lapierre et Denis Coderre, sans parler du drôlatique Stéphane Dion! Incroyable non? 92%!!

Tout le Québec sous la botte rouge , Jacques Noël, 22 décembre 2005

De notre foi que la lumière ardente

Pablo Stafforini se surpasse et nous offre une transcription du débat Chomsky-Dershowitz sur Israël au Kennedy School of Government. Et juste à temps pour oblitérer nos péchés, ou les rédemptionner. Enfin. En passant, un juif qui dit Rendez à César ce qui est à César, dans le contexte, me semble que c'est pas très révolutionnaire. M'enfin.

[...] all this smoke that was blown had to do with one fact that I mentioned, one, and you can check it, and please do.

In the first month of the Intifada -- I'm now using Israeli sources -- seventy-four Palestinians were killed, four Jews in the Occupied Territories. The first few days, this is reported in the press here, Boston Globe, Israel was using U.S. helicopters to attack apartment complexes. Clinton reacted with the biggest deal in a decade -- check it out. It's in the public record, not questioned by anyone -- to send military helicopters to Israel. There has been a database search of the U.S. -- it was reported in Europe. It was reported by Amnesty International. It's reported in Jane’s Defence Weekly, the main military magazine in the world. There was a database search of the U.S. press, and they found nothing. I know of explicit cases, and I will be glad to tell them to you, where the press was approached and asked just to report the facts.

[...]

Where do we go from here? Well, we actually have two fundamental choices. One choice is to support Washington's continued dedication to the road to catastrophe that’s outlined by Israel's four former security chiefs, namely watching in silence as Washington funds the cantonization of the West Bank, the breaking of its organic links to Jerusalem, and the disintegration of the remnants of Palestinian society. That choice adopts the advice of Moshe Dayan to his cabinet colleagues in the early 1970s. Dayan was in charge of the occupation. He advised them that we must tell the Palestinians, that we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes, may leave. That's the solution that is now being implemented. Don't take my word for it. Go check the sources I cited, very easy, all English.

There's an alternative. The alternative is to return to the spirit of the one break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. That is, the week in Taba in January 2001, before Israel called it off, and to take seriously the follow-up proposals from high-level negotiators on both sides, of which the Geneva Accords are the most detailed. There is overwhelming international support for taking them as the basis for a political settlement. It does come close to the long-standing international consensus that the United States and Israel have barred, and that I have personally been supporting for the last over 30 years. That's the road away from catastrophe, towards an end to violence and towards eventual reconciliation. Either choice is within our reach. From that point on, it's up to us.

Israel and Palestine After Disengagement, Noam Chomsky-Alan Dershowitz, 29 novembre 2005

La cohérence du Bloc

« Convergence was formed as a broad group with help from IRI [International Republican Institute, un groupe basé à Washington]... it also includes former backers of the hated Duvalier family dictatorship and of the military officers who overthrew Aristide in 1991... The most determined of these men... express their desire to see the U.S. military intervene once again... to get rid of Aristide and rebuild the disbanded Haitian army... the CIA should train and equip Haitian officers exiled in the neighboring Dominican Republic so they could stage a comeback themselves» (Washington Post, February 2, 2001).

Incredibly, this is exactly what happened 3 years later, in February 2004 ! A group of thugs trained and equipped by the CIA, led by Guy Philippe and Louis-Jodel Chamblain, crossed the Haiti - Dominican Republic border and prepared the way for U.S. Marines to enter the Haitian President's residence and complete the regime change, discussed and planned years in advance.

All the while the Canadian Armed Forces secured the Toussaint Louverture Airport to facilitate the U.S. Marines' dirty work.

Abandon this Neocolonial Adventure!, Jean St.Vil, 24 décembre 2005

Le Bloc Québécois serait anti-colonialiste pour les québécois, mais colonialiste pour les haïtiens? Yves Engler écrit:

[...] supposedly "left-wing" groups based in Quebec share a political analysis with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. While the Bloc asks questions about CIA "torture" planes landing in Canada, the separatist party criticizes the NDP for using the word "removal" to describe what happened on Feb. 29, 2004 to Haiti's elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

In a recent meeting of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Bloc MP Pierre Paquette insisted the NDP's Alexa McDonough use the word "departure" instead. This is also the position of Minister of Foreign Affairs Pierre Pettigrew and U.S. President George W. Bush. Removal is the word preferred by Haiti's neighbours in the Caribbean community (Caricom) and the African Union. Both organizations have called or inquiries into Aristide's ouster and have refused to recognize the interim government.

A Bloc MP who met with members of the Montreal Haiti Action Committee refused to see the irony of agreeing with the Bush administration on Haiti; Rice went out of her way recently in Ottawa to praise Canada's role on the island nation. Willing to condemn the U.S. war in Iraq, the Bloc remains silent on Canadian "aid" that for three years went almost exclusively to NGOs opposed to the Haitian government and now flows to groups who ignore the human rights disaster that has resulted from the overthrow of the president and thousands of other elected officials. Neither the Bloc nor the Conservatives have asked the government why the deputy minister of "justice" for the first 15 months of the interim government, Philippe Vixamar, was on CIDA's payroll for four years until July 2005.

How bad are the current human rights and social conditions in Haiti? On Aug.20, machete-wielding men, protected by Haitian National Police, chopped to death as many as 50 spectators in a crowd of 5,000 at a soccer game paid for by USAID in a poor Port au Prince neighbourhood. After UN "peacekeepers" attacked a "gang" leader in a Port au Prince slum, Ali Besnaci, head of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti, aid: "We received 27 people wounded by gunshots on July 6. Three quarters were children and women." Reuters and Associated Press have reported numerous police killings of unarmed protesters over the past 18 months. On June 28, UN undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping, Jean-Marie Guehenno, described the situation in Cap Haitien, the country's second largest city, as worse than that in Sudan's devastated Darfur region. More recently, Thierry Faggart, director of the human rights section for the UN mission in Haiti, admitted that the post-coup human rights situation is "catastrophic."

On pourrait demander à Yves Engler quelle est la cohérence d'un lobby anti-colonialiste oeuvrant in english only à Montréal. Ceci dit, sa position est correcte et aux prochaines élections je voterai spécifiquement pour May Chiu, et non pour le Bloc.

Ze liberal media

Chomsky: [...] Well how was that reported? Well a friend of mine did a database search and nothing. Zero. Only one newspaper in the country - some small town newspaper in Iowa.

Intervieweuse: So what's going on? Are they scared? I mean I've interviewed some journalists on this show and..

Chomsky: Look they've just internalized the values. They'll tell you, and they're correct, that nobody is ordering them to do anything. That's right. Nobody is ordering them to do anything. The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they're being objective. Actually this is a point that Orwell made. You and everybody else has read Animal Farm, I'm sure, but you and everybody else hasn't read the introduction to Animal Farm. There's a good reason for that: because it was suppressed. The introduction was found 30 years later in Orwell's own published papers. The introduction to Animal Farm says look this book is a satire on a totalitarian state but I'm going to talk about England, Free England. In Free England it's not that different. Without state coercion unpopular ideas can be suppressed and are. And then he described how. He didn't go in much details but he said partly it's because the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. But the more important reason, he said, was because of a good education. By the time you've gone through, you know, Oxford and Cambridge and here you could say Harvard and Princeton and so on, and even less fancy places, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things that just wouldn't do to say, and that's what a good deal of education is. So the people who come out of it - and there are many filters, if people go off and try to be too critical there are many ways of discouraging them or eliminating them one way or the other. Some get through, it's not a uniform story. There are plenty of journalists with integrity and honesty. And many of them, some personal friends, will give a much harsher picture of the media than I do, because they have to live with it. But the basic points that Orwell made are fundamentally correct. The more educated you are the more indoctrinated you are. And you believe you are being free and objective, whereas in fact you're just repeating state propaganda.

[...]

The truth of the matter is NPR [National Public Radio] is not that different. So I listen to NPR when I'm driving for as long as I can stand it, that's supposed to be the liberal media, just take a look at their reporting. So last night I was listening to the reporting on Bush's speech about how to get victory in Iraq. Just imagine - just do a thought experiment. Suppose you were in Russia under Brezhnev or let's say in the early 80s and you heard reports about the war in Afghanistan. Well, I'm sure it would have been the same thing. They would have discussed how can we get victory, how can we destroy the terrorists, will this tactic work, will that tactic work, we're losing too many soldiers and so on. Well, just like the most liberal journal in the US. Did anybody ask the question in Russia: do we have a right to invade another country? Can you imagine anyone asking that question here? But in Russia there's a difference. That was totalitarian control, if you said the wrong thing you'd go off to the gulag. Here it's just willing subordination to power.

On Fake News and Other Societal Woes, Noam Chomsky, 7 décembre 2005

Aux abris!

L'Exposition Internationale ('Exposition Internationale Reconnue') de Zaragoza se tiendra du 14 juin au 14 septembre 2008. À Montréal, le thème était 'Terre des hommes', à Zaragoza ce sera 'l'eau et le développement durable', si tant est que les deux Expos soient comparables; elles ne le sont pas tout à fait. La dernière véritable Exposition Universelle remonte à Hanovre, Allemagne, en 2000. Dont je n'ai AUCUN souvenir. Maudite boisson. En 2005, il y avait Aichi, Japon, de simple catégorie 'Exposition Internationale Spécialisée'. Puis la seule autre sur la liste est Shangai en 2010, 'Exposition Internationale', titre nébuleux, mais bon ils sont toujours en cours d'enregistrement. Montréal était de type 'Exposition Générale de première catégorie', l'ancêtre de l'Universelle, apparement. Semble en tout cas que les expositions universelles soient des bebittes rares.

Toujours est-il que. Voici la mascotte de L'Exposition Internationale de Zaragoza, via hmmm

Profitez-en pour visiter la page d'accueil du Bureau International des Expositions. Une autre petite ligne, Beubby?

Oliver Kamm, franchement

To demonstrate my "central" doctrine, Kamm misquotes my statement that, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed in the US is dissent—or denazification." The context, which he omits, is a 1968 report in the New York Times of a protest against an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry where children could "enter a helicopter for simulating firing of a machine gun at targets" in Vietnam, with a light flashing when a hit was scored on a hut. This was a year after the warning by the highly respected military historian and Vietnam specialist Bernard Fall that "Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction… [as]… the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size."

Apart from misquoting and omitting the crucial context, Kamm also fails to tell us how one should react to this performance, aside from his own standard tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes and his dedicated efforts, failing with impressive consistency, to find something to criticise in the efforts to terminate state crimes for which he and I share responsibility, particularly as in a free society, we cannot plead fear as an excuse for silent complicity.

We are All Complicit, Noam Chomsky, Janvier 2005

Who Does John Le Carré Think He Is?

"To take a risk in a poem is not to write a big sweary outburst about how crap the war in Iraq is, even if you are the world's greatest living playwright. Because anyone can do that." (Chalotte Higgins, 'Pinter's poetry? Anyone can do it,' The Guardian, October 30, 2004)

[...]

In the Independent, Johann Hari wrote an article titled: "Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize - The only response to his Nobel rant (and does anyone doubt it will be a rant?) will be a long, long pause." (Hari, The Independent, December 6, 2005)

It is significant that Hari described Pinter's speech as a "rant" before it had even been delivered - the label exists independently of the work, indeed of the author, in question. To subject power to serious, rational challenge is by definition to "rant". Hari commented:

"Ever since Pinter was a teenager, he has been relentlessly contrarian, kicking out violently against anything that might trigger his rage that day."

This is the standard, Soviet-style assertion that critics of power are afflicted by psychological disorder, with the concocted 'sins' of power randomly selected as a focus for neurotic ire.

Brilliant Fools: Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media, David Edwards & David Cromwell, 19 décembre 2005

Ils concluent:

It is a brutal fact of modern media and politics that honesty and sincerity are not rewarded, but instead heavily punished, by powerful interests with plenty at stake. It does not matter how often the likes of Pinter, Le Carré, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are shown to be right. It does not matter how often the likes of Bush and Blair are shown to have lied in the cause of power and profits. The job of mainstream journalism is to learn nothing from the past, to treat rare individuals motivated by compassion as rare fools deserving contempt.

The benefits are clear enough: if even high-profile dissidents can be painted as wretched, sickly fools, then which reader or viewer would want to be associated with dissent? Then ’normal’ - conforming, consuming, looking after ’number one’ - can be made to seem healthy, balanced, sensible and sane.

Nous avons élu Jean Charest

Greg Palast: I spoke to the former chief economist, Joe Stiglitz who was fired by the (World) Bank. So I, on BBC and with [The] Guardian, basically spent some time debriefing him. It was like one of the scenes out of Mission Impossible, you know where the guy comes over from the other side and you spend hours debriefing him. So I got the insight of what was happening at the World Bank.

[...]

[Y]ou take a country like Argentina, which is, you know, in flames now. And it has had five presidents in five weeks because their economy is completely destroyed.

Alex Jones: Isn't it six now?

Greg Palast: Yea, it's like the weekly president because they can't hold the nation together. And this happened because they started out in the end of the 80s with orders from the IMF and World Bank to sell-off all their assets, public assets. I mean, things we wouldn't think of doing in the US, like selling off their water system. [...] The water system of Buenos Aires was sold off for a song to a company called Enron. [...] You can't even get drinking water in Buenos Aires. I mean it is not just a question of the theft. You can't turn on the tap. It is more than someone getting rich at the public expense.

[...]

[L]ook, the IMF and the World Bank is 51% owned by the United States Treasury. So the question becomes, what are we getting for the money that we put into there? And it looks like we are getting mayhem in several nations. Indonesia is in flames. He was telling me, the Chief Economist, Stiglitz, was telling me that he started questioning what was happening. You know, everywhere we go, every country we end up meddling in, we destroy their economy and they end up in flames. And he was saying that he questioned this and he got fired for it.

Greg Palast interviewé par Alex Jones, 4 mars 2002

La face du mal

Merci Bryan! Le comparatif sur les yeux* démontre clairement que la haute élite femelle est d'un culte satanique pas trop différent de celui des mâles, et le langage de nos maîtres nous est de plus en plus compréhensible, non? De plus en plus... familier?

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller, commission trilatérale, juin 1991

*oui, je sais que c'est l'oeuvre du gouvernement scandinave, pas de photo-monteurs de vrais magazines féminins, duh!

M. Internet

Boing Boing nous apprenait dimanche l'existence de ce blogue tout particulier, via je ne sais où, sont vites à Boing Boing:

Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, now keeps a diary on the intermablogomosphere. Snip:

In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space.

Et vendredi, ce joli cadeau:

Here's an early holiday present: a scan of the entire first issue of bOING bOING, the print zine that preceded Boing Boing, the blog. I think most BB readers don't know that we started as a zine. Our first issue was printed in 1989, and only 100 copies were made. Now, 16 years later, I doubt more than 10 copies remain on the face of the Earth.

This 36-page issue has an interview with my hero, Robert Anton Wilson, an article about the wonders of public-key crytography, a piece about lucid dreaming, an interview with the 1988 Libertarian candidate for the US Senate, reviews of zines, comics, books, and software, and lots of comics by me and my friends. The writing is clunky and the design is even more clunky, but I think it resonates nicely with the Boing Boing of 2005. Enjoy!


Link to [11]MB PDF file

Petite note technique: je n'ai pour ma part pu le télécharger qu'en procédant directement d'Acrobat

Des prix Nobel de la paix 1973 et 1999

Et cette Diane Johnstone, comment elle le sait que les interventions humanitaires sont une nouvelle façon d’affirmer la suprématie américaine?! Quels sont ses postulats ontologiques et épistémologiques?! Avant de dire n’importe quoi, faudrait peut-être commencer par savoir de quoi est composée la matière qu’on recherche et comment on compte faire sa recherche hein ?! xfrancoisx

It looked like an imitation of Guantanamo, recalls Alvaro Gil Robles, the Human Rights Commissioner for the Council of Europe. In the largest military base in the Balkans and in Europe, camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, Robles saw between 15 and 20 prisoners. All of them were dressed in orange suits. An american soldier who was on the base told him that the prisoners had been sent from Guantanamo to Kosovo. The visit of the Human Rights Commissioner Robles to Bondsteel, that "little Guantanamo," as he called it in his report, took place three years ago. The report, however, remained almost unnoticed until a few weeks ago, when the CIA's secret prisons in Eastern Europe became international news.

[...]

Camp Bondsteel is situated in the Balkans, that "most savage and least stable corner of Europe" (The Economist), close to the small Kosovo town of Urosevac. Let's be reminded that Kosovo was liberated by NATO troops in a humanitarian operation which "forced the Serbs to reject a regime of genocide and domination" (Financial Times) and which caused 1800 civilian casualties along the way. The liberators' first humanitarian gift to the local population was the construction of a base that is considered the largest US military base built on foreign soil since the Vietnam war. It covers over 320 hectares of land. About 4000 American soldiers live there; they enjoy the use of a library, news kiosk, a beauty salon, a Burger King and a few churches. On November 29th a darts tournament was held there.

This military base is a symbol of American humanitarian interests in the Balkans, "Europe's last dirty backyard" (The Economist). It is situated directly over the future oil and gas lines which, according to plan, ought to lead from the Bulgarian port Burgas - now an American base in which it is suspected "terrorist interrogations" of the not-so-legal variety have also taken place - through Macedonia and Kosovo, all the way to Valona on the Albanian Adriatic coastline. The study for this plan was made by the company Halliburton formerly run by the American vice president Dick Cheney, which - surprise, surprise - also built Camp Bondsteel.

The Americans Are Coming! Democracy As Cooperation Between Secret Services, Andrej Grubacic, 16 décembre 2005

Nous vivons une époque formidable

Étonnant l'info de qualité et pertinente qu'on peut aller dénicher avec le fil des nouvelles les plus bloguées de Technorati. Ce soir (là là et depuis un bout) c'est pendant un moment l'article du Washington Times sur l'ordre secret émis par W en 2002 autorisant l'espionnage de citoyens par la NSA, les méchants qui voulaient engager Will

Will Hunting: Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cuz I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying, "Oh, send in the marines to secure the area", 'cuz they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cuz they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cuz he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, it ain't too long till he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starving 'cuz every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure: fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.

Durant la soirée, est aussi en vedette l'original du New York Times sur le même sujet, qui tenait le 'scoop' depuis... un an. Puis tranquillement, l'adresse à la nation de W prend le dessus, et les articles sur ce sujet, par exemple sur CNN.com, qui contient les commentaires d'un sénateur Russ Feingold qui n'en croit pas ses oreilles. Je pige un de ces blogues, comme ça:

It looks like it's the bastard's last stand.

[...]

UPDATE. DAMN! the coverup begins! The White Ho' fuckers have scrubbed the transcript. What Bush actually said and the WH transcript says he said do not add up. I will try to get independent audio/video of what really went down.

Via livejournal et donc via-1 le service sus-mentionné de Technorati, si vous suiviez ;)

On a les nouvelles, de plusieurs sources, et analysées sans la fausse objectivité des média commerciaux (ou étatiques).

Wikipedia versus Britannica

Raul654 writes "Nature magazine recently conducted a head-to-head competition between Wikipedia and Britannica, having experts compare 42 science-related articles. The result was that Wikipedia had about 4 errors per article, while Britannica had about 3. However, a pair of endevouring Wikipedians dug a little deeper and discovered that the Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's - meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's." Interesting, considering some past claims. Story available on the BBC as well.

Via Slashdot (merci Bryan!)

Retour sur Haïti

Patrick Elie, ministre de la défense et responsable de la lutte anti-drogue sous Aristide (première présidence) est interviewé pour Z Mag:

There is something ominous about this particular election. You have four candidates for the presidency and political parties who are ex-FaDH. You have Colonel Himmler Rébu, Guy Philippe, Major Dany Toussaint, and Frank Romain, who everybody should know because he’s been doing his killing since Papa Doc Duvalier late-50s. Also, there’s a political party called MUP. Even though the candidate himself is not an ex-FaDH, the power behind this party is also General Prosper Avril [who from 1988-1990 headed the military dictatorship that ruled Haiti after Baby Doc’s departure]. So I would tend to think that the ex-Duvalierist network and the FaDH network would back up these parties.

And to the ex-military, you also have to add the ex-death squad members of FRAPH, because Jodel Chamblain, who’s been judged and sentenced twice for his involvement in countless murders, is running for candidate in the party of Guy Philippe. Because they completely erased his trial for Izméry’s murder, and they’ve sprung him loose on the Raboteau massacre. So now he’s running for office. This is the kind of situation we’re in and they tell us that they are taking us to democracy, just like they’re taking cattle to the killing house.

[...]

This time, really, Canada has been acting a bit like the busboy of the US. It’s like Haiti was used as a making up gift to the US after Canada’s position on the Iraq war.

[...]

I can tell the Canadian public that the Haitian people have a PhD in resistance. They’re going to resist. They have a strong culture. And they’re not going to become a toy or modeling clay in the hands of some Canadian politicians.

Taking us to democracy like cattle to a killing house, Patrick Elie, 15 décembre 2005

Le facteur pétrole

The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror est un documentaire de 2004 qui m'était inconnu. Si j'en juge par l'extrait, c'est à voir absolument. Le vidéoclip (via-1 Spiked Humor) qui accompagne le film, avec entre autres Immortal Technique, est encore meilleur, fort crinquant. Il se termine par une admonition: "Ferme les nouvelles, et lis, lis, lis!" avec en image de fond la couverture de Killing Hope: US Military and CIA interventions Since World War II de William Blum, "Far and away the best book on the topic." -Noam Chomsky.

★★★★☆

Le futur de l'Irak: ondes Hershiennes*

Le New Yorker de la semaine du 5 décembre présentait un article de Seymour Hersh. On se rappelle de lui:

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

At an ACLU convention in July 2004, he further detailed information he had been given about sexual tortures in Abu Ghraib. He claims that there is video footage, being held by the Bush administration, of Iraqi guards raping young boys in the prison. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."

While being interviewed by KQED host Michael Krasny on October 8, 2004, Hersh claims to have spoken with a first lieutenant in charge of a unit stationed halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border.

His group was bivouacking outside of town in an agricultural area, and had hired 30 or so Iraqis to guard a local granary. A few weeks passed. They got to know the men they hired, and to like them. Then orders came down from Baghdad that the village would be "cleared." Another platoon from the soldier's company came and executed the Iraqi granary guards. All of them. "He said they just shot them one by one. And his people, and he, and the villagers of course, went nuts," Hersh said quietly. "He was hysterical, totally hysterical. He went to the company captain, who said, 'No, you don't understand, that's a kill. We got 36 insurgents. Don't you read those stories when the Americans say we had a combat maneuver and 15 insurgents were killed?' "

de Wikipedia.

On peut critiquer Hersh, comme Tom Scocca par exemple: "[He] appears to be running some sort of impromptu combination of a notebook dump and an assignment meeting, challenging other reporters to pick up his loose ends and surplus tips", cité dans le New York Magazine; mais toute personne ayant un minimum de décence et de sens de la réalité doit se demander ce qu'elle ferait avec de l'information de telle nature.

Le dernier article du Monsieur dans le New Yorker, donc, porte sur les changements de la forme d'occupation militaire de l'Irak. On connaissait déjà le retrait des forces U.S. des régions urbaines vers quelques bases géantes. Hersh ajoute que le type d'attaque changera lui aussi:

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

"We’re not planning to diminish the war", Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield."

Up In The Air: Where is the Iraq war headed next?, Seymour Hersh, 5 décembre 2005.

Tom Engelhardt reprend la balle en publiant, et commentant, bien sûr, un envoi du toujours aussi nécessaire Dahr Jamail, qui saisit fort bien lui aussi l'importance du travail de Seymour Hersh:

It is impossible, really, to miss the overt signs of the ongoing air war in Iraq when you are there, which makes the lack of coverage all the more startling. At night, while standing on the roof of my hotel in Baghdad during the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, a city some 40-odd miles away, I could see on the horizon the distant flashes of U.S. bombs that were searing that embattled city.

I often wondered how the scores of journalists in Baghdad working for major American papers and TV networks could continue to ignore the daily air campaign the U.S. military was waging right over their heads or within eyesight. Along with countless eyewitness interviews I did on the damage caused from the air, this is what prompted me to write Living Under the Bombs for Tomdispatch some ten months ago. But it has only been thanks to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, a journalist who has never even been to Iraq, that the important subject of the air campaign there has finally been brought to public awareness on a wider scale. In a recent interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman about his latest piece in that magazine, aptly titled, Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next? he commented, "Clearly there's all sorts of anecdotal reason to believe that the bombing has gone up exponentially, certainly in the last four or five months in the Sunni Triangle, the four provinces around Baghdad." But he also pointed that, when it comes to the American air campaign, "There's no statistics... We don't know what's going on with the air war."

* Avis au Voir: je suis disponible comme pondeur de titres.

Le cas MUHC

Plutôt que d'évoquer un faux déséquilibre fiscal, les Québécois devraient réaliser qu'ils vivent dans «une province très pauvre» dépendante de la générosité du fédéralisme canadien, a estimé, vendredi, l'ex-ministre et candidate libérale dans la région de Québec, Hélène Chalifour Sherrer.

«Contrairement à la croyance populaire, la province de Québec est une province qui est très pauvre», a fait valoir Mme Chalifour Sherrer, lors d'un point de presse à Québec, à l'occasion du lancement officiel de la campagne des libéraux de Paul Martin dans la capitale.

«Les gens ont encore l'impression que la province de Québec est la vache à lait de l'ensemble du Canada. Ce n'est pas le cas. La province de Québec a besoin de la péréquation et de vivre des argents (sic) de l'Alberta, de l'Ontario et de la Colombie-Britannique, faute de quoi, elle n'arriverait pas», a-t-elle ajouté.

Le Québec survit grâce au fédéralisme, croit Hélène Scherrer, Martin Ouellet, 9 décembre 2005

Après plus de 60 milliards de promesses libérales, il était presque insultant pour l'intelligence d'entendre la ministre des Affaires intergouvernementales canadiennes, Lucienne Robillard, réitérer que le déséquilibre fiscal est un mythe.

Malheureux pays, Michel David, 13 décembre 2005

[L]es autorités du CUSM jouent sur deux tableaux en même temps en tentant de justifier les investissements (au moins 800 millions de dollars) promis par Québec pour construire le «nouveau CUSM». De deux choses l'une : ou bien le CUSM est une institution qui appartient à tous les Québécois, ou bien il s'agit d'une institution qui appartient à la communauté anglophone.

Si le CUSM appartient à tous les Québécois, il est difficile de comprendre pourquoi le français n'y occupe pas une place plus importante. Mme Monroe-Blum et M. Porter soulignent que 60 % des quelque 10 000 employés du CUSM sont de langue maternelle française. Or, même si le français est la langue maternelle d'un grand nombre d'employés, il ne semble pas en être la langue de travail, comme en fait foi une étude de l'Office de la langue française qui indiquait qu'en 2001 20 % des patients étaient en contact avec du personnel ne parlant pas français dans les hôpitaux anglophones. Et qu'en est-il de la langue de recherche ? Un simple survol de l'Institut de recherche du CUSM montre que les francophones y sont largement minoritaires.

Finalement, comment expliquer que les francophones soient virtuellement absents du conseil d'administration du CUSM ? Sur 22 membres, on retrouve seulement trois francophones au c.a., dont le représentant de la Régie de la santé et celui du MSSS.

[...]

[S]i le CUSM appartient à tous les Québécois, on ne comprend pas pourquoi le français n'y est pas la première langue de travail et de recherche.

La réponse est simple : c'est que le CUSM appartient à tous les Québécois lorsqu'il s'agit de payer, mais à la minorité anglophone lorsqu'il s'agit d'obtenir des postes de prestige et de direction.

Le CUSM, l'hôpital de tous les Québécois?, Benoît Dubreuil, 13 décembre 2005

Volez, volez, il vous en restera toujours quelque chose

Je les ai vus à Montréal dans leurs bureaux avec leurs sales yeux de boss, leurs sales voix de boss, leurs sales faces de boss, hautains, méprisants, arrogants. Des crottés avec leurs chemises blanches pis leur Aqua Velva. Minables avec leurs Mercedes pis leurs raquettes de tennis ridicules. Comme des rats morts. Gras et épais avec leurs farces plates pis leurs partys de cabane à sucre. Pleins de marde jusqu'au bord à force de bêtise et de prétention. Crosseurs, menteurs, voleurs. Et ça se reproduit de père en fils. Une honte pour l'humanité! Le temps des Bouffons



M. Rivard, qui se dit l'idéateur des publicités libérales controversées utilisant le concept de la Ligue nationale d'improvisation (LNI), dit travailler bénévolement à la campagne de l'aile québécoise du PLC et soutient qu'il « y a bien des agences [de publicité] impliquées ». « Il y en a plusieurs qui restent dans l'ombre... La plupart des agences ne veulent pas être identifiées », a-t-il déclaré, cité par le quotidien La Presse.

Publicités du PLC: La controverse se poursuit, SRC, 13 décembre 2005

Suddenly a young man shouted out in Haitian Creole, "I know the Barbot family from Haiti!" Ms. Barbot smiled broadly, though just momentarily, because he added: "I'm voting Liberal because they give us lots of gifts [...]"

Separatists in Quebec Seek Immigrant Votes, Clifford Krauss, 12 décembre 2005

Harold Pinter et Alan Dershowitz

Dans l'envoi de cette fin de semaine de Counterpunch, L'habituel édito d'Alexander Cockburn porte en partie sur le remarquable discours d'acceptation du Nobel 2005 de littérature par Harold Pinter

I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. [...] Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road.

Harold Pinter is by no means the first eloquent enemy of the American Empire to have got the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1967 for example, when revulsion was rising across the world at the U.S.­inflicted bloodbath in Vietnam, the committee picked the Guatemalan writer, Miguel Asturias, whose work was notable for its savage depictions of the US-backed destruction of democracy in Guetemala in 1954, at the instigation of the United Fruit Company. (Asked for its reaction to Asturias' selection, United Fruit's high command said stiffly that it had never heard of Asturias and would have no comment.)

I can't find the text of Asturias' acceptance speech, but I would guess that it didn't rival the intensity and fury of Pinter's depictions of the ravages of the American Empire since 1945. It was as though the works of Noam Chomsky had been compacted into one searing rhetorical lightening bolt. It will go into the history books, alongside such imperishable excoriations of empire as the speeches Thucidides put into the mouths of the Melians, and Tacitus into the mouth of Calgacus.

All the News That's Fit to Buy, Alexander Cockburn, 10 décembre 2005

Dans ce billet, indirectement celui-ci, je tentais de cerner le cas Dershowitz, dont la performance (échantillon tout autre à 49:55) contre Chomsky n'a pas étonné: 'comportement immature, scandaleux et mensonges flagrants', tiré du Counterpunch de ce mercredi.

Il était une fois...

Barsamian: But what about these attacks? How do you respond? How can you respond?

Chomsky: You really can't. There's no way to respond. Slinging mud always works. Again, it's partly institutional, but in this case partly personal, too. In the case of the Berkeley professors, the letter came out about six weeks after I was there, and it was a letter, remember, to bookstores, saying that they should not allow this stuff to be heard. I've also been told, although I'm not certain, that there was an attempt to get them to withdraw my books from the stores. I think that's very understandable and I appreciate it. These are people who know perfectly well that they don't like what I say. They know that they don't have either the competence or the knowledge to respond, so the only thing to do is to shut it up, prevent it from being heard because you can't respond to it. Therefore you say I supported the PLO, etc. Most of them probably don't know what I said about anything. But the author of the letter, Robert Alter, knows perfectly well that I condemned the PLO for those atrocities, probably more harshly, certainly more knowledgeably than he did. But that doesn't matter. Facts are irrelevant.

Turning to Dershowitz, there's partly the same story. Again, he knows that he can't respond to what I say. He doesn't have the knowledge or the competence to deal with the issues. Therefore, the idea is to try to shut it up by throwing as much slime as you can. There's a famous story attributed to Sam Ervin, a conservative Senator, who once said that as a young lawyer he had learned that if the law is against you, concentrate on the facts. If the facts are against you, concentrate on the law. And if both the facts and the law are against you, denounce your opposing counsel. Dershowitz is not very bright, but he understands that much. If you can't answer on the facts and if you can't answer on the principles, you better throw dirt. In his case there happens to also be a personal reason.

He's been on a personal jihad for the last twenty years, ever since I exposed him for lying outright in a vicious personal attack on a leading Israeli civil libertarian. Despite pretenses, he's strongly opposed to civil liberties. Using his position as a Harvard law professor, he referred to what the Israeli courts had determined. But he was just lying flat outright. This was in the Boston Globe (April 29, 1973). I wrote a short letter refuting it (May 17). He then came back (on May 25,) accusing everybody of lying and challenging me to quote from the court records. He never believed I had them, but of course I did. I quoted the court records in response (June 5). He then tried to brazen it out again. It finally ended up with my sending the transcript of the court records to the Globe ombudsman, who didn't know what to do any more with people just taking opposite positions. I translated them for him, and suggested that he pick his own expert to check the translations. The ombudsman finally told Dershowitz they wouldn't publish any more letters of his because he had been caught flat out lying about it.

Ever since then he's been trying to get even, so there's just one hysterical outburst after another. That's not surprising, either. He's basically a clown. In that case there's a personal issue overlaying the political issue, which is much more interesting. This personal stuff is not interesting. But if you look at the Anti-Defamation League or the Berkeley professors, and there are plenty of others, it's the Sam Ervin story. You know you can't deal with the material. Either you ignore it, or if you can't ignore it, then defame the speaker. That's the only way you can deal with it if you don't have the brains or the knowledge or you just know your position can't be defended. I think that's understandable, and in a sense you can appreciate it. That's just the hallmark of the commissar.

Noam Chomsky, Chronicles of Dissent

Ignatieff

• "imperialism doesn’t stop being necessary just because it becomes politically incorrect." -Michael Ignatieff, New York Times Magazine, 28 juillet 2002



• "America’s empire is not like the empires of times past, built on colonies, conquests and the white man’s burden.... The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights, and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." -Michael Ignatieff, New York Times Magazine, 5 janvier 2003

[H]e had never ventured into "francophone Quebec" before he wrote the book [Blood and Belonging].

This must explain why he writes that Quebec's "national day" is on June 28. Or that he says he speaks "French-French" as opposed to the "heavily accented Quebecois" spoken by someone he interviews. How reassuring is that for someone who wants to lead this country?

One of his research grounds was what he calls the "Two Clowns Cafe" in Old Montreal - yes, that's the "Deux Pierrots." He chatted with some "nationalists" he refers to as "the Other," with a capital O.

After they explain what Quebec nationalism is to them, Ignatieff writes with amazing condescension: "What can you say to such a deep myth? It is a feeling, and notoriously, feelings cannot be argued with."

Equally condescending is what he writes about a francophone he met in Trois Rivieres: "Nationalism gives him hope, and in Trois Rivieres, you need all the hope you can get."

On Bill 101, Ignatieff paints a sovereign Quebec as a place where rights would be trampled and courts neutered. Without the protection of Trudeau's Charter of Rights and the Supreme Court, he writes, "individuals would lose this right of appeal, and the way would be open to majoritarian ethnic nationalism."

[...]

The essay also was made into a six-hour mini-series broadcasted on the CBC, in the United States, and on the BBC. This means millions of viewers were treated to Ignatieff's uninformed and prejudiced views on Quebec.

The final image of the section on Quebec closed in on the faces of worried anglophones, aboriginals and children of visible minorities with Ignatieff's voice asking ominously: "If a state only protects its majority, will its minorities be safe?"

Star Liberal candidate is wrong on Quebec nationalism, Josée Legault, 2 décembre 2005

Dans son livre La Révolution des droits, Ignatieff écrit que « [...] Nous avons une histoire commune et, bon gré mal gré, il nous faut partager une même vérité. »

Cette vérité, il la définit ainsi : « Et voici la vérité du Canada anglais. La conquête britannique de 1763, loin d’étouffer le fait français en Amérique du Nord, a apporté l’autonomie aux Canadiens-français pour la première fois. » C’est la Conquête, poursuit-il, qui « a assuré la survie d’un Québec démocratique en Amérique du Nord. »

La Conquête nous aurait apporté la démocratie, tout comme l’invasion de l’Irak apportera la « démocratie » au Moyen-Orient comme le proclament Michael Ignatieff et George Bush.

Les libéraux n’y iront pas avec le dos de la cuiller, Pierre Dubuc, 1^er décembre 2005

Sainte May de Lasalle-Émard^^

Une candidate bloquiste menacée de congédiement

La candidate bloquiste dans la circonscription de Lasalle-Émard soutient avoir été menacée de congédiement par son employeur à cause de son engagement politique.

May Chiu est directrice-générale du Service à la famille chinoise du Grand Montréal, un organisme communautaire. La candidate dans la circonscription de Lasalle-Émard soutient que son militantisme au sein du Bloc québécois est mal vu par des membres influents de sa communauté et par certains membres du conseil d'administration de l'organisme qui l'emploie. Ils lui auraient demandé de démissionner.

Entrevue avec May Chiu à Sans Frontières hier. Écoutez-la: cette femme est une visionnaire. ★★★★☆

Pull the strings!


Pull the strings!

parce qu'il faut le faire

Amen

Sure, it's great to be all-powerful, or "uber" in game parlance. But at what cost? I consider it cheating to buy your way in to an uber character. In order to be truly "uber," you need to earn it. Besides, it takes a lot of skill to use a high-level character's abilities to their fullest, so an inexperienced player that has purchased a high-level character will very often lose a battle or die because they don't have the experience of all that playing time.

For me, the point of playing these games is not to win -- it's to be immersed in the worlds, and to interact with fellow players. You miss out on truly experiencing the world if you don't earn your items and character abilities. -Robert Holt, de NPR.org dans Paying Real Money to Win Online Games, Robert Siegel, 30 novembre 2005 via^-1 Boing Boing

Je souligne que Holt est un joueur de World of Warcraft.