"I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. . . . The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth."
~ William Butler Yeats.
~ William Butler Yeats.
Sibel Edmonds has a radio interview with Scott Horton here (Run time a little over 27 mins.). She talks about what happens when the FBI runs a FISA investigation against foreign agents who are telephoning traitorous members of Congress and making deals with them. There's also a transcript of the interview at the link.
Let me happily mention that Sibel has her very own blog now. That's right. The great lady herself will be posting her own thoughts on her own blog at 123 Real Change. The link has also been added to the Sibel Stuff list in the right margin. I suggest you bookmark it and check in often. Who knows? You might learn something about how The System works.
She's off to a good start, too, by fixing the worthless American media in her crosshairs. What accounts for the worthless American media's infinite incompetence? Here are some points she starts off with:
1. Government Agents: CIA-Media reporting as seen in Operation Mockingbird, or embedded Pentagon pawns like Judith Miller, or Hoover style censorship of the MSM.
2. Lazy Journalism on the Cheap: The publications no longer pay for, budget for, real ‘investigative journalism,’ thus, you get your typical stenographers who make their one or two calls to their ‘usual sources’ right from their desks, and write as dictated.
3. Government Pressure, Harassment, and even Blackmail: Cases like James Risen (NY Times) and Bill Conroy (an editor at the San Antonio Business Journal) are good examples.
4. Self-Censorship: Based on this theory, with just a little massaging patriotism kicks in with many of these so-called journalists (whether it’s the Cold War, or, the Post 9/11 war on terror), and that does the job for the government propagandists.
5. Americans Want Entertainment not Real News: Some suggest that after commute-work-commute-kids & household chores, basically, exhausted with day-to-day work, hassles, stress, and pressure, people don’t want serious and grim realities. They want to tune in to Brittney’s latest panties, or Brangelina’s latest baby conquest.
6. Corporate Owned Media: Powerful Corporations are becoming a major influence, and ownership concentrated as a result of mega mergers…
7. Combination of some or all of the above
8. None of the Above
If you want to join in the discussion, head on over there and post a comment.
You might also be interested in this blast against the worthless American media:
Memo to my remaining daily print colleagues and their nostalgia club: Get over it and get over yourselves. It’s not that the Internet is Mr. Wonderful. Much of it mimics the same bad qualities that drove the public away from daily newspapers. When you took the honest advocacy out of reporting you emptied it of all passion and reason to exist. It was a nice ride on your profit ledger sheet during the recent decades when You lost the public to us because - there's no nice or sugar-coated way to say it - you guys really suck at what you do. In your arrogance, you established calcified “rules” of “journalism” and false “objectivity” that neutered and spayed all of your reporters, domesticated so they would never again afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted. When you took the honest advocacy out of reporting you emptied it of all passion and reason to exist. It was a nice ride on your profit ledger sheet during the recent decades when you turned your rags into propaganda arms for the wealthy and powerful, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ATM machine: You lost the trust of your readers, half of whom have already given you the finger and pursued alternate routes to inform themselves of current events. And the rest are on the way through the same EXIT sign.
OUCH!! But such a rant couldn't happen against a more deserving bunch of losers. Note to self: The next time you read something that contains the self-serving whining of media elites to Congress, have a motion sickness bag handy.
I've also added a link to the Kurdish Herald in the Links list in the right margin. It looks like it has a variety of articles and analysis. I'd like to point out one piece that deals with DTP's recent success in the 29 March local Turkish elections:
Things did not go as planned for the AKP. The Kurds took the local elections as a referendum. The AKP’s using state and governmental resources to “buy votes” in exchange of delivering coal, small educational stipends, refrigerators or dishwashers; the opening of the official TRT 6 Kurdish TV channel, and the debates over Kurdology institutes at Turkish universities; and the promises to “pour money into the region for development” did not bring the votes the AKP had expected (Radikal, 31 March 2009). On the contrary, the DTP could not only defend its “castle” Diyarbakir and the municipalities of Tunceli, Batman, Hakkari and Sirnak, and remarkably increased its votes, but also won the elections in Igdir, Van and Siirt; the latter two being very crucial for the AKP. The prime minister himself was elected from the Siirt province in 2002, which is also the hometown of his wife who is of Arab ethnicity. The DTP increased the number of its municipalities from 56 to 98, compared with 2004, hence scoring a clear victory.
Optimistic Kurds thought that this victory would put enough pressure on the government to begin a dialogue with the DTP for a peaceful resolution for the Kurdish issues, which would mean the end of the government’s policy “not to shake hands with the DTP” since the general elections of 2007. The PKK welcomed DTP’s election success and declared not to use arms until 1 June 2009, and extend the cease-fire if the state does not increase tension, as a political move to empower the DTP in the political process. However, the series of events that started immediately after the elections gave clear hints that a dialogue between the Kurds and the Turkish state was still not within sight. Turkish police attacked harshly Kurdish who objected to what they believed was an election fraud by the AKP in the Agri province. Many were injured and many more were arrested or detained.
In this murky political atmosphere, on 14 April 2009 the police conducted simultaneous operations in 15 different cities, mostly located in the Kurdish region, and took more than seventy DTP executives and members under custody with the accusation that they had ties with the PKK. While strongly denying these accusations, the DTP announced that the number of its imprisoned executives and members had reached 222 as of 7 May 2009, including 3 vice-chairs of the party. In addition, the mayors of Diyarbakir and Batman received ten-month sentences for using the word “guerilla” to name the PKK members, instead of the word “terrorist,” and if the Court of Appeals approves the sentence, they will also lose their posts.
There's not much for me to add here because I agree with the analysis, but read the whole thing to get the big picture in a nutshell.
There's also an informative piece on income disparities in The Southeast when compared to the rest of Turkey. It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone but the biggest Turkish "equality" propagandist that the Kurdish regions are at the bottom of the list. In fact, as the author notes, the numbers placing the Kurdish regions at the bottom of the list may be skewed by the fact that The Southeast suffers from a major infestation of TSK and government types whose salaries are far above those of the regular Kurdish population:
Indeed, the pure data in and of itself does not tell the full story. It must be recognized that a large number of Turkish police officers and military and intelligence personnel who are stationed in Kurdish provinces receive much higher wages than locals. Members of the Turkish security forces who work in Kurdish areas are almost always from majority Turkish areas of the country. They are frequently housed highly fortified, protected compounds within Kurdish areas and do not live among the masses. If their incomes are considered in the calculation of the means for the regions, this data may actually overestimate income levels in Kurdish provinces and thus understate the true magnitude of the regional income disparity.
So, take a look at that one, too, and then browse the rest of the site. And let's hope they're not all a bunch of damned journalists over there.
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