Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Iran, Media.
Tags: american hikers, bilal hussein, cia prisons, Cindy Sheehan, corportate media, desmond tutu, detainee abuse, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, human rights, ibrahim jassen, Iran, iran hikers, iran hostages, joshua fattal, Media, Mohammad Ali, Noam Chomsky, propaganda, roger hollander, roxana saberi, sami al-haj, sean penn, shane bauer, solitary confinement, torture
Published on Monday, September 26, 2011 by Salon.com
by Glenn Greenwald
Two American hikers imprisoned for more than two years by Iran on extremely dubious espionage charges and in highly oppressive conditions, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released last week and spoke yesterday in Manhattan about their ordeal. Most establishment media accounts in the U.S. have predictably exploited the emotions of the drama as a means of bolstering the U.S.-is-Good/Iran-is-Evil narrative which they reflexively spout. But far more revealing is what these media accounts exclude, beginning with the important, insightful and brave remarks from the released prisoners themselves (their full press conference was broadcast this morning on Democracy Now).
Fattal began by recounting the horrible conditions of the prison in which they were held, including being kept virtually all day in a tiny cell alone and hearing other prisoners being beaten; he explained that, of everything that was done to them, “solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives.” Bauer then noted that they were imprisoned due solely to what he called the “32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran,” and said: “the irony is that [we] oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility.” After complaining that the two court sessions they attended were “total shams” and that “we’d been held in almost total isolation – stripped of our rights and freedoms,” he explained:
In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.
We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments – including the government of Iran – to act in kind.
[Indeed, as harrowing and unjust as their imprisonment was, Bauer and Fattal on some level are fortunate not to have ended up in the grips of the American War on Terror detention system, where detainees remain for many more years without even the pretense of due process -- still -- to say nothing of the torture regime to which hundreds (at least) were subjected.]
Fattal then expressed “great thanks to world leaders and individuals” who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and “elements within the Iranian government,” as well as U.S. officials.
Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference. Instead, typical is this ABC News story, which featured tearful and celebratory reactions from their family, detailed descriptions of their conditions and the pain and fear their family endured, and melodramatic narratives about how their “long, grueling imprisonment is over” after “781 days in Iran’s most notorious prison.” This ABC News article on their press conference features many sentences about Iran’s oppressiveness — “Hikers Return to the U.S.: ‘We Were Held Hostage’”; “we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten” — with hardly any mention of the criticisms Fattal and Bauer voiced regarding U.S. policy that provided the excuse for their mistreatment and similar treatment which the U.S. doles out both in War on Terror prisons around the world and even domestic prisons at home.
Their story deserves the attention it is getting, and Iran deserves the criticism. But the first duty of the American “watchdog media” should be highlighting the abuses of the U.S. Government, not those of other, already-hated regimes on the other side of the world. Instead, the abuses at home are routinely suppressed while those in the Hated Nations are endlessly touted. There have been thousands of people released after being held for years and years in U.S. detention despite having done nothing wrong. Many were tortured, and many were kept imprisoned despite U.S. government knowledge of their innocence. Have you ever seen anything close to this level of media attention being devoted to their plight, to hearing how America’s lawless detention of them for years — often on a strange island, thousands of miles away from everything they know — and its systematic denial of any legal redress, devastated their families and destroyed their lives?
This is a repeat of what happened with the obsessive American media frenzy surrounding the arrest and imprisonment by Iran of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, convicted in a sham proceeding of espionage, sentenced to eight years in prison, but then ordered released by an Iranian appeals court after four months. Saberi’s case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind — Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press’ Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters’ photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge — it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.
What we find here yet again is that government-serving American establish media outlets relish the opportunity to report negatively on enemies and other adversaries of the U.S. government (that is the same mindset that accounts for the predicable, trite condescension by the New York Times toward the Wall Street protests, the same way they constantly downplayed Iraq War protests). But to exactly the same extent that they love depicting America’s Enemies as Bad, they hate reporting facts that make the U.S. Government look the same.
That’s why Fattal and Bauer receive so much attention while victims of America’s ongoing lawless detention scheme are ignored. It’s why media stars bravely denounce the conditions of Iran’s “notorious prison” while ignoring America’s own inhumane prison regime on both foreign and U.S. soil. It’s why imprisonment via sham trials in Iran stir such outrage while due-process-free imprisonment (and assassinations) by the U.S. stir so little. And it’s why so many Americans know Roxana Saberi but so few know Sami al-Haj.
An actual watchdog press is, first and foremost, eager to expose the corruption and wrongdoing of their own government. By contrast, a propaganda establishment press is eager to suppress that, and there is no better way of doing so than by obsessing on the sins of nations on the other side of the world while ignoring the ones at home. If only establishment media outlets displayed a fraction of the bravery and integrity of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, who had a good excuse to focus exclusively on Iran’s sins but — a mere few days after being released from a horrible, unjust ordeal — chose instead to present the full picture.
Read more at Salon.com
© 2011 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy”, examines the Bush legacy. His next book is titled “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.”
Discuss
..
15 Comments so far
Hide All
Posted by Paul Revere
Sep 26 2011 – 12:25pm.
” A propaganda establishment press “. Glenn, that says it all!
.
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…
Posted by Progressive101
Sep 26 2011 – 12:27pm.
Another good article by Greenwald.
.
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…
Posted by Oikos
Sep 26 2011 – 12:30pm.
Couldn’t our hikers do more to broadcast their sentiments regarding the U.S. policies towards Iran and the U.S. practice of torture and imprisonment without process? There are Facebook and other Web venues.
.
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…
Posted by der
Sep 26 2011 – 1:02pm.
For the nth time, the New York Times’ public editor has investigated Ethan Bronner’s conficts of interest for justifying Israel’s crimes, large and small, and for the nth time has found him not guilty. Something tells me the Times’ owners are getting from Bronner exactly what they pay him to do.
.
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…
Posted by Curtis
Sep 26 2011 – 1:05pm.
Maybe a travel agency can set up a trip to recreate the hike these adventurers took in Iraq. Of course it would have to stay in Iraq, but with Google Earth that shouldn’t be too hard.
.
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Posted by Salusa Secundus
Sep 26 2011 – 1:19pm.
Excellent article by Glenn Greenwald
The economic royalist banksters who invest in endless wars for endless profits are We The People’s truest enemies.
As I see it, they have three main weapons at their disposal:
A) Infiltration and control of the government through the rigged/money based election process
B) Infiltration and control of the Pentagon and our defense system, achieved through the corruption of the political process (A), which ensures that gov’t reps and military budget overseers remain trapped in the highly lucrative game of military spending and investiture.
C) Infiltration and control of the public’s information, through full-spectrum dominance and consolidation of the media aparatus. This is perhaps the most insidious of the usurpations by the banksters, as it normalizes the criminality and deep corruption of the first two controls. Through command of the public mouthpiece, the People will *perpetually* be told the same lies, and will have no other means of checking the validity of such narratives, other than turning to ‘underground’ sources, which by definition the mainstream is loath to do.
“Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.
—George Orwell
.
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…
Posted by marcos
Sep 26 2011 – 1:30pm.
I was imprisoned for three years in New York City federal detention centers and even given a trial. Not only are the worst abuses not in Iran, but they are not even in U.S. prisons where Muslims have been held without charges. The worst abuses have happened right in front of your eyes in U.S. prisons and the lack of media coverage is the biggest contributing reason.
How can you not know about my case? How can even the alternative media ignore my case?
I was imprisoned for sending an email to ABC television online email center on May 19 and May 20, 1999. Actually, I had sent the email 9 times, on May 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,26 and 27, as well as May 19 and 20. Each copy said you have 30 days to answer and then 29, 28, 27 days, etc. — a countdown. I was seeking publicity for my story about the rigging of the U.S. presidency and the stock markets and the fact that I knew a huge terrorist attack was coming to U.S. shores.
But, the federal prosecutor withheld the longer series of sent copies because it would surely have shown that publicity was the goal of the emails. I was held for one and a half years before my trial and was put in the worst solitary confinement cell in federal prison in Manhattan for my trial, where I represented myself.
I claimed at trial, and still claim, that I had prior knowledge of 9/11 and that that information had been received by the government. I wanted to sit down with ABC television and three other corporations in order to discuss what I claimed was damage they had caused me and that terrorism was coming more powerfully than ever to New York. The email was a literary version of the current Wall Street occupation.
The U.S. government knew about 9/11 from me more than two years before it was carried out. I was rendered in Mexico, brought to New Jersey by the FBI, transferred and imprisoned in New York City for three years and had a trial about half way through about an email that was sent to ABC, the New York Times, Newsweek and Time Magazine.
But, not one word about my imprisonment, my email, my claims of prior knowledge of 9/11 or my trial has appeared in any media.
I have 11 years of university education, two degrees, have taught in high schools and universities, including recently in Beijing. I have worked for David Geffen, the William Morris Agency, Anaconda Corporation, covered three national political conventions (two in Madison Square Garden).
It’s more than something being wrong with the USA, Iran and Qaddafi, and other places of extreme injustice.
All you nice, good-intentioned people are living in darkness, absolute darkness about the real conditions of a virtually totalitarian American system
Details of my story and claims are in my http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/revolution-or-extinction/16532855
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Galenwainwright…
Sep 26 2011 – 1:31pm.
Dmitri Orlov, a Russian Ex-pat, once observed that the only difference between the USSR and the US was that in America people believed the propaganda.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Kane Jeeves
Sep 26 2011 – 1:41pm.
Studied Russian years ago. The instructor, an ex-pat, told us day one about the main newspaper in USSR and the popular saying “Pravda nyet Pravda”. (Pravda/Truth is not true)
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by sheepherder
Sep 26 2011 – 2:45pm.
I recall an old joke about Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News). It went: there is no truth in the new and no news in the truth.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Aaronica
Sep 26 2011 – 3:07pm.
I thought the joke went that you could find some news in Pravda, and some truth in Izvestia.
Either way, the Ruskies knew they were reading stories that couldn’t be trusted. The western peoples don’t. (sorry OP, the rest of us westerners seem to be believing the propaganda now too.)
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by HailCODEPINK
Sep 26 2011 – 1:45pm.
Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges and David Swanson–three treasures of humanity, shining a bright light on our present plight. We, however, must be our own saviors. Can we organize a coherent educational and political action based on their insights to resist our own destruction, and that of our planet?
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Kane Jeeves
Sep 26 2011 – 1:46pm.
Can someone point to a link that describes why the hikers were there in the first place? I find it almost impossible to believe they were “just hiking”. If that were the case, then the US has a real problem on it’s hands…what to do with all the “just hikers” around the Mexican border.
.
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…
Posted by sheepherder
Sep 26 2011 – 2:47pm.
I wonder about the same thing. Why were they in Iraq in the first place, and why were they hiking anywhere close to a national border, especially the one with Iran?
.
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…
Posted by Brian Brademeyer
Sep 26 2011 – 1:49pm.
These “hikers” look a lot healthier than any Gitmo unfortunates that I have seen pictures of. They can still walk upright, and make complex compound sentences.
.
…
What Media Coverage Omits about US Hikers Released by Iran September 26, 2011
Posted by rogerhollander in Civil Liberties, Criminal Justice, Human Rights, Iran, Media.Tags: american hikers, bilal hussein, cia prisons, Cindy Sheehan, corportate media, desmond tutu, detainee abuse, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, human rights, ibrahim jassen, Iran, iran hikers, iran hostages, joshua fattal, Media, Mohammad Ali, Noam Chomsky, propaganda, roger hollander, roxana saberi, sami al-haj, sean penn, shane bauer, solitary confinement, torture
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Published on Monday, September 26, 2011 by Salon.com
by Glenn Greenwald
Two American hikers imprisoned for more than two years by Iran on extremely dubious espionage charges and in highly oppressive conditions, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released last week and spoke yesterday in Manhattan about their ordeal. Most establishment media accounts in the U.S. have predictably exploited the emotions of the drama as a means of bolstering the U.S.-is-Good/Iran-is-Evil narrative which they reflexively spout. But far more revealing is what these media accounts exclude, beginning with the important, insightful and brave remarks from the released prisoners themselves (their full press conference was broadcast this morning on Democracy Now).
Fattal began by recounting the horrible conditions of the prison in which they were held, including being kept virtually all day in a tiny cell alone and hearing other prisoners being beaten; he explained that, of everything that was done to them, “solitary confinement was the worst experience of all of our lives.” Bauer then noted that they were imprisoned due solely to what he called the “32 years of mutual hostility between America and Iran,” and said: “the irony is that [we] oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility.” After complaining that the two court sessions they attended were “total shams” and that “we’d been held in almost total isolation – stripped of our rights and freedoms,” he explained:
In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.
We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments – including the government of Iran – to act in kind.
[Indeed, as harrowing and unjust as their imprisonment was, Bauer and Fattal on some level are fortunate not to have ended up in the grips of the American War on Terror detention system, where detainees remain for many more years without even the pretense of due process -- still -- to say nothing of the torture regime to which hundreds (at least) were subjected.]
Fattal then expressed “great thanks to world leaders and individuals” who worked for their release, including Hugo Chavez, the governments of Turkey and Brazil, Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Mohammad Ali, Cindy Sheehan, Desmond Tutu, as well as Muslims from around the world and “elements within the Iranian government,” as well as U.S. officials.
Unsurprisingly, one searches in vain for the inclusion of these facts and remarks in American media accounts of their release and subsequent press conference. Instead, typical is this ABC News story, which featured tearful and celebratory reactions from their family, detailed descriptions of their conditions and the pain and fear their family endured, and melodramatic narratives about how their “long, grueling imprisonment is over” after “781 days in Iran’s most notorious prison.” This ABC News article on their press conference features many sentences about Iran’s oppressiveness — “Hikers Return to the U.S.: ‘We Were Held Hostage’”; “we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten” — with hardly any mention of the criticisms Fattal and Bauer voiced regarding U.S. policy that provided the excuse for their mistreatment and similar treatment which the U.S. doles out both in War on Terror prisons around the world and even domestic prisons at home.
Their story deserves the attention it is getting, and Iran deserves the criticism. But the first duty of the American “watchdog media” should be highlighting the abuses of the U.S. Government, not those of other, already-hated regimes on the other side of the world. Instead, the abuses at home are routinely suppressed while those in the Hated Nations are endlessly touted. There have been thousands of people released after being held for years and years in U.S. detention despite having done nothing wrong. Many were tortured, and many were kept imprisoned despite U.S. government knowledge of their innocence. Have you ever seen anything close to this level of media attention being devoted to their plight, to hearing how America’s lawless detention of them for years — often on a strange island, thousands of miles away from everything they know — and its systematic denial of any legal redress, devastated their families and destroyed their lives?
This is a repeat of what happened with the obsessive American media frenzy surrounding the arrest and imprisonment by Iran of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, convicted in a sham proceeding of espionage, sentenced to eight years in prison, but then ordered released by an Iranian appeals court after four months. Saberi’s case became a true cause célèbre among American journalists, with large numbers of them flamboyantly denouncing Iran and demanding her release. But when their own government imprisoned numerous journalists for many years without any charges of any kind — Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in Guantanamo, Associated Press’ Bilal Hussein for more than two years in Iraq, Reuters’ photographer Ibrahim Jassan even after an Iraqi court exonerated him, and literally dozens of other journalists without charge — it was very difficult to find any mention of their cases in American media outlets.
What we find here yet again is that government-serving American establish media outlets relish the opportunity to report negatively on enemies and other adversaries of the U.S. government (that is the same mindset that accounts for the predicable, trite condescension by the New York Times toward the Wall Street protests, the same way they constantly downplayed Iraq War protests). But to exactly the same extent that they love depicting America’s Enemies as Bad, they hate reporting facts that make the U.S. Government look the same.
That’s why Fattal and Bauer receive so much attention while victims of America’s ongoing lawless detention scheme are ignored. It’s why media stars bravely denounce the conditions of Iran’s “notorious prison” while ignoring America’s own inhumane prison regime on both foreign and U.S. soil. It’s why imprisonment via sham trials in Iran stir such outrage while due-process-free imprisonment (and assassinations) by the U.S. stir so little. And it’s why so many Americans know Roxana Saberi but so few know Sami al-Haj.
An actual watchdog press is, first and foremost, eager to expose the corruption and wrongdoing of their own government. By contrast, a propaganda establishment press is eager to suppress that, and there is no better way of doing so than by obsessing on the sins of nations on the other side of the world while ignoring the ones at home. If only establishment media outlets displayed a fraction of the bravery and integrity of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, who had a good excuse to focus exclusively on Iran’s sins but — a mere few days after being released from a horrible, unjust ordeal — chose instead to present the full picture.
Read more at Salon.com
© 2011 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy”, examines the Bush legacy. His next book is titled “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.”
Discuss
..
15 Comments so far
Hide All
Posted by Paul Revere
Sep 26 2011 – 12:25pm.
” A propaganda establishment press “. Glenn, that says it all!
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Progressive101
Sep 26 2011 – 12:27pm.
Another good article by Greenwald.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Oikos
Sep 26 2011 – 12:30pm.
Couldn’t our hikers do more to broadcast their sentiments regarding the U.S. policies towards Iran and the U.S. practice of torture and imprisonment without process? There are Facebook and other Web venues.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by der
Sep 26 2011 – 1:02pm.
For the nth time, the New York Times’ public editor has investigated Ethan Bronner’s conficts of interest for justifying Israel’s crimes, large and small, and for the nth time has found him not guilty. Something tells me the Times’ owners are getting from Bronner exactly what they pay him to do.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Curtis
Sep 26 2011 – 1:05pm.
Maybe a travel agency can set up a trip to recreate the hike these adventurers took in Iraq. Of course it would have to stay in Iraq, but with Google Earth that shouldn’t be too hard.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Salusa Secundus
Sep 26 2011 – 1:19pm.
Excellent article by Glenn Greenwald
The economic royalist banksters who invest in endless wars for endless profits are We The People’s truest enemies.
As I see it, they have three main weapons at their disposal:
A) Infiltration and control of the government through the rigged/money based election process
B) Infiltration and control of the Pentagon and our defense system, achieved through the corruption of the political process (A), which ensures that gov’t reps and military budget overseers remain trapped in the highly lucrative game of military spending and investiture.
C) Infiltration and control of the public’s information, through full-spectrum dominance and consolidation of the media aparatus. This is perhaps the most insidious of the usurpations by the banksters, as it normalizes the criminality and deep corruption of the first two controls. Through command of the public mouthpiece, the People will *perpetually* be told the same lies, and will have no other means of checking the validity of such narratives, other than turning to ‘underground’ sources, which by definition the mainstream is loath to do.
“Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.
—George Orwell
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by marcos
Sep 26 2011 – 1:30pm.
I was imprisoned for three years in New York City federal detention centers and even given a trial. Not only are the worst abuses not in Iran, but they are not even in U.S. prisons where Muslims have been held without charges. The worst abuses have happened right in front of your eyes in U.S. prisons and the lack of media coverage is the biggest contributing reason.
How can you not know about my case? How can even the alternative media ignore my case?
I was imprisoned for sending an email to ABC television online email center on May 19 and May 20, 1999. Actually, I had sent the email 9 times, on May 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,26 and 27, as well as May 19 and 20. Each copy said you have 30 days to answer and then 29, 28, 27 days, etc. — a countdown. I was seeking publicity for my story about the rigging of the U.S. presidency and the stock markets and the fact that I knew a huge terrorist attack was coming to U.S. shores.
But, the federal prosecutor withheld the longer series of sent copies because it would surely have shown that publicity was the goal of the emails. I was held for one and a half years before my trial and was put in the worst solitary confinement cell in federal prison in Manhattan for my trial, where I represented myself.
I claimed at trial, and still claim, that I had prior knowledge of 9/11 and that that information had been received by the government. I wanted to sit down with ABC television and three other corporations in order to discuss what I claimed was damage they had caused me and that terrorism was coming more powerfully than ever to New York. The email was a literary version of the current Wall Street occupation.
The U.S. government knew about 9/11 from me more than two years before it was carried out. I was rendered in Mexico, brought to New Jersey by the FBI, transferred and imprisoned in New York City for three years and had a trial about half way through about an email that was sent to ABC, the New York Times, Newsweek and Time Magazine.
But, not one word about my imprisonment, my email, my claims of prior knowledge of 9/11 or my trial has appeared in any media.
I have 11 years of university education, two degrees, have taught in high schools and universities, including recently in Beijing. I have worked for David Geffen, the William Morris Agency, Anaconda Corporation, covered three national political conventions (two in Madison Square Garden).
It’s more than something being wrong with the USA, Iran and Qaddafi, and other places of extreme injustice.
All you nice, good-intentioned people are living in darkness, absolute darkness about the real conditions of a virtually totalitarian American system
Details of my story and claims are in my http://www.lulu.com/product/file-download/revolution-or-extinction/16532855
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Galenwainwright…
Sep 26 2011 – 1:31pm.
Dmitri Orlov, a Russian Ex-pat, once observed that the only difference between the USSR and the US was that in America people believed the propaganda.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Kane Jeeves
Sep 26 2011 – 1:41pm.
Studied Russian years ago. The instructor, an ex-pat, told us day one about the main newspaper in USSR and the popular saying “Pravda nyet Pravda”. (Pravda/Truth is not true)
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by sheepherder
Sep 26 2011 – 2:45pm.
I recall an old joke about Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News). It went: there is no truth in the new and no news in the truth.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Aaronica
Sep 26 2011 – 3:07pm.
I thought the joke went that you could find some news in Pravda, and some truth in Izvestia.
Either way, the Ruskies knew they were reading stories that couldn’t be trusted. The western peoples don’t. (sorry OP, the rest of us westerners seem to be believing the propaganda now too.)
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by HailCODEPINK
Sep 26 2011 – 1:45pm.
Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges and David Swanson–three treasures of humanity, shining a bright light on our present plight. We, however, must be our own saviors. Can we organize a coherent educational and political action based on their insights to resist our own destruction, and that of our planet?
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Kane Jeeves
Sep 26 2011 – 1:46pm.
Can someone point to a link that describes why the hikers were there in the first place? I find it almost impossible to believe they were “just hiking”. If that were the case, then the US has a real problem on it’s hands…what to do with all the “just hikers” around the Mexican border.
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by sheepherder
Sep 26 2011 – 2:47pm.
I wonder about the same thing. Why were they in Iraq in the first place, and why were they hiking anywhere close to a national border, especially the one with Iran?
.
Login or register to post comments
…
Posted by Brian Brademeyer
Sep 26 2011 – 1:49pm.
These “hikers” look a lot healthier than any Gitmo unfortunates that I have seen pictures of. They can still walk upright, and make complex compound sentences.
.
…